Samar Mubarakmand is a former chairman of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and the head of a team of the scientists that conducted six “successful” nuclear tests in remote Chaghi district of southwestern Balochistan province on May 28, 1998. He recently said, “I won’t say a zero chance but there are very dim chances of a war between the two neighbors involving nuclear arsenal despite escalating tensions.”
     The Pakistani nuclear tests came only two weeks after India had conducted five nuclear tests from May 11-13 in the Pokhran mountain range of Rajasthan state which sits on the border of Pakistan’s southern Sindh province.            These nuclear tests triggered a new arms race between India and Pakistan which had already had three all out wars between 1948 and 1971. Mubarakmand said, “Pakistan had no other choice but to pay India back in the same coin after its nuclear tests to maintain strategic balance in the region.”
     The two hostile neighbors have had a long-standing dispute over the Jammu and Kashmir regions which flared into air combat between the two air forces in February of 2019. In August of 2019, India dropped the longstanding special status of the disputed regions.
    Since then, the border forces of the two countries have been involved in almost daily confrontations at the Line of Control (LoC). The LoC is a de facto border that splits the Kashmir valley between the two neighbors. Beyond the dispute in Kashmir, India and Pakistan have also had confrontations on sea and land over the past few decades.
    Mubarakmand served in the PAEC between 1962 and 2007, He was instrumental in the development of the Pakistani nuclear program. He believes that although conventional provocations will continue between India and Pakistan, neither side will invoke the nuclear option against their enemy. He said, “Both countries have long been reeling from poverty, illiteracy, and other health and economic issues. Wars or undue competition in arms race are not in the interest of the two nations.”
     India has the third largest army in the world. Only the U.S. and China have bigger armies. There are over one million three hundred thousand active troops in India. Pakistan has the eight largest army in world at six hundred thousand men. India is the second biggest importer of weapons in the world over the past five years. Pakistan is only the eleventh biggest arms importer.
     There are only nine countries in the world that have arsenals of nuclear weapons. Pakistan and India are members of this exclusive club. India obtained nuclear weapons in 1974 which motivated Pakistan to begin its own nuclear weapons program. It developed its nuclear capability secretly during the 1980s. At the time, it was an ally of the U.S. in the first Afghan war against the failing Soviet Union.
     According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India currently has between eighty and one hundred nuclear warheads and Pakistan has between ninety and one hundred and ten nuclear warheads. A number of international think tanks say that China assisted Pakistan in the development of nuclear weapons. Analysts believe that Pakistan may have as many as two hundred nuclear warheads by 2025.
     Mubarakmand believes that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have served as a “deterrent” which has prevented further wars between the two neighbors.
Since 1998, there have been at least three occasions when India and Pakistan were on the brink of a full-scale war. He made specific reference to the 1999 Kargil skirmish, the 2002 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament and the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
      Mubarakmand said, “It was Pakistan’s nuclear capability only that deterred India from going for another war. It (nuclear capability) has brought peace to the region in a way. India’s conventional military capability is four time higher than that of Pakistan. But, their parity in terms of nuclear arsenal, has neutralized India’s superiority.”