India’s nuclear buildup is sharpening its deterrent, but Pakistan and China are turning the space below nuclear war into the real battlefield.

Last month, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that India expanded its nuclear arsenal to an estimated 190 warheads by January 2026, driven by its longstanding rivalry with Pakistan and an increased strategic emphasis on countering China.

According to SIPRI, India grew its stockpile from 180 warheads in 2025 by steadily developing and maturing a nuclear triad composed of aircraft, land-based missiles, and nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs).

This ongoing expansion is heavily driven by deep-seated regional rivalries and heightened tensions, seen in Operation Sindoor in May 2025 involving Indian conventional strikes on Pakistani bases with nuclear missions.

To build a secure second-strike capability and strengthen deterrence against China, India is investing in longer-range weapon systems while continuing to produce fissile materials. This expansion is driven by significant technological advances, such as the military’s recent deployment of MIRVs on the Agni-V intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM).

Additionally, India is shifting its peacetime posture by placing land missiles in canisters and deploying a small number of nuclear warheads on a single submarine conducting occasional deterrence patrols, signaling a move toward mating warheads with operational launchers.

But India’s maturing nuclear triad is emerging just as hybrid warfare, asymmetric capabilities and risk-taking below the nuclear threshold are weakening older assumptions about strategic deterrence.

Rose Gottemoeller, in a June 2026 Foreign Policy article, argues that recent conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran-Israel War, and Operation Sindoor show that strategic deterrence isn’t foolproof, with state and non-state actors increasingly calling out nuclear powers’ bluff.

She notes that nuclear retaliation alone did not stop conventional or hybrid wars, since nuclear assets like strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and SSBNs appear ineffective against massed cheap drone attacks, especially while nuclear states are reluctant to deploy them.

Beyond that vulnerability, Gottemoeller says that the nuclear taboo established in 1945 remains strong and that leaders contemplating the use of nuclear weapons risk severe backlash and infamy.

But despite the growing vulnerability of nuclear weapons against hybrid and conventional states, they remain a powerful psychological weapon. Patrick Cronin notes in a 2026 Hudson Institute article that nuclear-armed states have become more skilled at exploiting nuclear fears to achieve conventional goals, with some believing that even tactical nuclear use might only provoke conventional retaliation.

However, Cronin points out that coercion and conflict, along with the entanglement of conventional and nuclear domains, increase ambiguity and the risk of miscalculation.

For India, that ambiguity is no longer theoretical. Pakistan and China are testing the seams between nuclear deterrence, conventional restraint and hybrid coercion, forcing India to think less in terms of deterring war outright and more in terms of managing violence below the nuclear threshold.

From India’s perspective, Pakistan has fused gray zone warfare with nuclear deterrence. Ashok Shivane notes in a March 2026 report for the Center for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) that Pakistan’s nuclear posture provides strategic insulation for proxy warfare, lowering the nuclear threshold to deter India from exploiting its conventional military superiority.

In effect, Shivane says Pakistan seeks to fragment India’s escalation calculus while preserving room for sub-conventional coercion.

However, Siddhant Kishore argues in a November 2025 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that India strongly discounts Pakistan’s nuclear threats, in part because Islamabad lacks a credible sea-based second-strike capability.

By contrast, he notes that India’s nuclear triad improves the survivability of its arsenal, while India maintains strategic ambiguity over its No First Use (NFU) posture and promises massive retaliation to any first strike.

This gap is significant because it demonstrates that nuclear deterrence can limit escalation without stopping competition. Instead, it can push rivals into more ambiguous forms of conflict where drones, cyber operations, precision strikes, information warfare and coercive signaling become tools for fighting without formally crossing the nuclear line.

From Pakistan’s perspective, Rabia Akhtar notes in a June 2026 report for the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) that, despite the conventional escalation in May 2025, Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent did not fail, as it prevented the border clashes from escalating into a major war. However, Akhtar says that Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent left dangerous gaps for conventional exchanges, information warfare, and coercive signaling.

Muhammad Faisal and other authors write in a May 2026 War on the Rocks article that Pakistan is also developing conventional tools to manage escalation rather than relying solely on nuclear signaling.

They argue that Pakistan is prioritizing multi-domain integration, combining AI, electronic warfare, cyber capabilities and precision-strike systems with centralized command to maintain escalation discipline.

The China front presents a different but no less complex deterrence problem. Rakesh Sood argues in a February 2026 article for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) that India-China border tensions are structurally insulated from nuclear escalation by shared defensive frameworks.

Sood points out that India and China’s strict NFU policies create a more symmetrical nuclear posture, limiting nuclear rhetoric even during tense confrontations such as the 2020 Aksai Chin clash.

As a result, he says India has responded to Chinese advances primarily with conventional forces and deterrence by denial, since limited territorial disputes in remote areas such as eastern Ladakh do not pose the kind of existential threat likely to trigger nuclear escalation.

Still, China’s rapid nuclear buildup — even if not aimed primarily at India — leaves India uneasy. Rajesh Basrur notes in a June 2026 article for the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy that China views the US, not India, as its peer competitor. Yet Basrur says China’s nuclear expansion to compete with the US still creates significant concerns for India.

Highlighting the growth of China’s nuclear forces, SIPRI reported that China had 620 nuclear weapons as of January 2026, up from 600 in 2025. Mark Schneider, writing this month for the National Institute of Public Policy (NIPP), argued that China could reach parity with the US in deployed nuclear weapons in the next four or five years. SIPRI reported that the US had deployed 1,770 nuclear weapons as of January 2026.

Richa Sharma noted in a May 2026 United Service Institute of India (USI) article that China’s advances in MIRVs, SSBNs, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and counter-space systems could increase its confidence in conducting counterforce strikes against India’s retaliatory forces.

Thus, India’s nuclear expansion may strengthen deterrence at the level of national survival, but its real test will be whether it can fight, absorb and respond to hybrid, conventional and gray zone pressure without being trapped by Pakistan’s nuclear shadow or distracted by China’s larger strategic rise.

The next phase of Indian deterrence will depend less on warhead numbers alone than on calibrated escalation control: the ability to punish sub-threshold aggression, deny faits accomplis and keep every rung of conflict below the point where nuclear weapons become thinkable.