Moeed Yusuf and Rizwan Zeb
The May 2025 crisis between India and Pakistan was their sixth militarized crisis since the two countries tested nuclear weapons in 1998.1 It both affirmed and debunked cliches about South Asia being the world’s most dangerous nuclear flashpoint. ‘We stopped a nuclear conflict. I think it could have been a bad nuclear war’, U.S. President Donald Trump trumpeted as he celebrated the ceasefire his administration helped broker at the end of the recent crisis.2 While the sense that South Asia is always at the brink of a major catastrophe has lingered among many observers of the India-Pakistan rivalry, these neighbours have escaped escalation to a major war since they acquired nuclear weapons capability. This paper examines nuclear signalling between these two rivals during the most prominent crises since the turn of the century, focusing primarily on Pakistan’s crisis behaviour. ‘Signalling’ encompasses allusions to the potential for nuclear war and gestures like sabre-rattling that are intended to motivate the antagonist and, in South Asia’s case, third parties to de-escalate the crisis on terms acceptable to the signaller. While nuclear signals typically refer to actions or statements that directly involve the manipulation of nuclear fear and risk, we cast the net wider by situating Pakistan’s nuclear signalling within its overall crisis management posture, focusing both on threatening messages as well as passive ones where leaders reassure audiences that they want to de-escalate or terminate a crisis. This is because signals transmitted in the examined crises do not follow the pattern of bilateral nuclear brinkmanship the world was accustomed to during the Cold War. South Asia’s crisis signalling must be seen as a tool of broader crisis diplomacy and can often be characterized more aptly as ‘communications’.