Operation Sindoor was launched by India on May 7 in response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack. Nine terror-related targets in Pakistan were identified and precision strikes were carried out by the Indian military. Pakistan responded with strikes on Indian military assets and an escalation dynamic was at play between the two nuclear-weapon capable neighbours.
While India asserted that it was only targeting the jihadi terror ecosystem in Pakistan and had no intention whatsoever of degrading the latter’s nuclear assets, the anxiety was palpable. The US, which had distanced itself from the conflict in the early phase, soon did a U-turn.
In an unexpected development, a ceasefire between India and Pakistan was announced by US President Donald Trump on social media on May 10. He added that thanks to his intervention, a nuclear war had been averted. On May 12, Trump asserted in response to a reporter’s question at the White House that “the US didn’t just ‘broker’ the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, it averted a ‘nuclear conflict’”.
Was there a nuclear scare during Op Sindoor that Washington was aware of that led to the US’s U-turn and the dramatic Trump announcement? From May 7 to 10, there were rumours about radiation leaks that caused considerable alarm. The gist was that India had targeted the Kirana Hills near Rawalpindi, reported to be the underground storage facility for Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The swirl of messages that ricocheted across the Subcontinent added that due to the Indian strikes, radiation leakage had occurred and this was picked up by a specially designed US surveillance aircraft. Hence the dramatic Trump intervention.
Social media and some sections of the Indian media went into overdrive, and this was held up as the ultimate Indian triumph — calling Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and denting its strategic assets in a resolute yet restrained and righteous manner. However, to assuage growing concern and provide a more accurate and informed assessment, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the global nuclear watchdog, stepped in and confirmed on May 15 that “no radiation leak or release has occurred from any nuclear facility in Pakistan”. What led to the Trump assertion that an India-Pakistan nuclear conflict had been averted? Very little detail is available in the public domain currently, and hence, recent history and conjecture have to be invoked.
In the early 1990s, it was dramatically revealed in Western media that India and Pakistan were on the brink of a nuclear war in May 1990 and that the US President at the time, George H W Bush, sent a special emissary, Robert Gates, to both nations to contain the apocalyptic escalation. Is May 2025 a case of déjà vu?
There are many distinctive aspects of May 1990 that link Pakistan, nuclear weapons and jihadi terrorism. Noted American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote the first exhaustive account of the crisis almost three years after the event in The New Yorker in 1993. Hersh elucidated with characteristic flourish: “The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by May (1990) that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as 10 nuclear weapons, and several senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan’s American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of or had chosen to remove herself from the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation’s avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.”
The Gates mission took the US emissary first to Pakistan and then to India, where he met senior Indian officials and then Prime Minister V P Singh. Gates had meant to reassure his Indian hosts that his visit to Pakistan enabled a dimming of the nuclear amber lights — but the paradox was that Delhi had not perceived any such imminent nuclear threat!
High secrecy enveloped the May 1990 crisis and as a researcher working on the linkage between nuclear weapons and terrorism, I recall being stonewalled by US interlocutors who were aware of the details of what had triggered the Gates emergency. May 1990 was a black hole in the US nuclear discourse and a contrast to the zealotry that the US otherwise exuded over nuclear non-proliferation. Hersh offered a reason, where he noted: “An obvious explanation for the high-level quiet revolves around the fact, haunting to some in the intelligence community, that the Reagan administration had dramatically aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the (nuclear) bomb.”
Pakistan had honed the art of NWET (nuclear weapon-enabled terror), which was directed against India since the early 1990s, and Washington turned a blind eye to this devious transgression, wherein nuclear weapons were removed from the high pedestal of pristine deterrence and used covertly to abet terrorism.
After the enormity of 9/11 in September 2001, President George W Bush introduced the phrase “Axis of Evil” in his January 2002 address to classify a group of nations the US believed were backing terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction to further their agenda. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were part of this axis.
The manner in which Rawalpindi engaged in NWET was not acknowledged by the US and its allies in May 1990, and resolute opacity was resorted to. Much the same template can be discerned in May 2025, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s query about placing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability under scrutiny is not invalid. On the other hand, perhaps the mercurial Trump, who is to be commended for his abhorrence of nuclear war, may share more about the murky NWET iceberg. Wait for his tweets?
The writer is director, Society for Policy Studies