The Burden of Strategic Discrimination
Few states have been subjected to as persistent and institutionalized a form of nuclear discrimination as Pakistan. Since the 1970s, it has contended with a deeply entrenched strategic bias, one that treats nuclear capability as a civilizational privilege reserved for a select few, and undiminished security as the exclusive domain of certain powers. In its effort to secure itself against a conventionally superior and often belligerent neighbor, Pakistan has endured decades of sanctions, technology denial regimes, and diplomatic marginalization. These measures have reinforced the perception that Pakistan’s pursuit of strategic deterrence is somehow inherently illegitimate. Yet Pakistan’s nuclear program arose not from expansionist ambition, but from strategic necessity to counter India’s conventional and nuclear superiority. Despite this clear doctrinal rationale and a record marked by restraint, Pakistan continues to face disproportionate scrutiny and selective alarmism, often unsupported by evidence and shaped more by geopolitical alignments than objective assessment.
The latest example of this narrative engineering is the claim, most recently advanced by former American officials from President Joe Biden’s administration, Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi, that Pakistan is developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the continental United States. Published in the July/August 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs, this assertion is analytically weak, strategically inconsistent, and selectively framed. Its inclusion undermines the coherence of their broader thesis and raises questions about the consistency of their strategic logic.
This essay deconstructs the ICBM allegation, exposes the strategic double standards that underpin it, and reaffirms the doctrinal clarity of Pakistan’s nuclear posture. It contends that the claim is not merely a factual inaccuracy, but part of a broader narrative aimed at destabilizing deterrence in South Asia by mischaracterizing Pakistan’s intentions and capabilities, while simultaneously legitimizing India’s unchecked strategic expansion.
Whenever Pakistan’s national security has required it, Islamabad has developed the deterrent capabilities necessary to ensure its defense against India, as demonstrated by the historical trajectory of its nuclear program. Pakistan retains the sovereign right to defend itself. At the same time, it unequivocally rejects any attempt to portray it as a threat to states it does not intend to deter. As a long-standing U.S. Major Non-NATO ally, with historical security partnerships through the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), Pakistan neither has the intent or benefit, nor is developing the capabilities, to target the U.S.
In fact, it is India’s declared pursuit of strategic autonomy from the U.S., coupled with its expanding offensive capabilities, that warrants closer examination. Former Indian Army Chief General S. Padmanabhan’s 2004 book The Writing on the Wall: India Checkmates America 2017 offers a revealing glimpse into this strategic thinking and deserves greater analytical attention.
The Fiction of a Pakistani ICBM
The Foreign Affairs article offers no missile designation, no test data, no satellite imagery, no technological milestone, just an anonymous attribution to U.S. intelligence. This is not analysis; it is conjecture presented as authoritative judgment. If intelligence assessments alone constituted evidence, we would still be searching for Iraqi WMDs or explaining the Taliban’s rapid return in Kabul.
Pakistan has not tested any missile with intercontinental range, it neither has plans, and nor has this been doctrinally referenced. The infrastructure required for such systems, such as long-range telemetry and reentry vehicle testing would leave unmistakable signatures. None exists.
Assumptions that the development of large rocket motors automatically signals an ICBM program are analytically unsound. By nature, such technologies are equally applicable to inter alia improving reentry vehicle precision and supporting advanced payload configurations such as MIRVs. These technological markers, composite materials, solid propellants, are used by nearly every state pursuing space or missile modernization. To frame them as proof of an ICBM program is intellectually dishonest and strategically corrosive.
If Pakistan were indeed developing an ICBM, it would represent a seismic shift in its nuclear posture, one requiring doctrinal revision, infrastructure transformation, and public signaling. None of this has occurred. No flight tests, no declarations, no shift in stated policy. On the contrary, Pakistan’s National Command Authority and Strategic Plans Division have consistently reiterated the India-centric nature of its deterrent.
Pakistan’s modest investment in space-related capabilities has remained firmly rooted in civilian and scientific objectives, consistent with its long-standing advocacy for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS). Yet even its peaceful space efforts by Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) have not been spared from scrutiny or sanctions, often triggered by speculative claims such as those recently advanced by Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi. This pattern reflects a troubling tendency to conflate technological progress with militarization, irrespective of context or intent.
Such narrative engineering follows a consistent formula. When Western allies modernize, it is prudent restraint and foresight. When adversaries do the same, it is destabilizing ambition. When India develops ICBMs, it is strategic autonomy. When Pakistan refines its deterrent within regional boundaries, it is overreach that needs oversight. When the U.S. escalates deployments in Asia, it is strategic recalibration. When others respond, it is escalation.
Doctrine, Not Projection: Pakistan’s Strategic Logic Remains India-Centric
Since 1998, Pakistan has pursued a policy of credible minimum deterrence, refined over time into Full Spectrum Deterrence (FSD). FSD is frequently misunderstood in Western literature. It is neither about global reach, nor a shift toward warfighting or escalation dominance. In reality, it is a calibrated response to India’s operational concepts like Cold Start and missile defenses. It closes deterrence gaps that India’s evolving posture seeks to exploit. FSD offers Pakistan a flexible retaliatory spectrum, not to initiate conflict, but to deter it credibly at every rung of the escalation ladder.
At no point has Pakistan expressed a desire to deter the U.S. or other extra-regional powers. It has neither the geopolitical ambition nor the force posture for such a shift. Unlike global power projection doctrines, Pakistan’s command and control structures, nuclear deployments, and targeting logic are regionally contained and defensive in nature.
This enduring doctrinal clarity is grounded in national compulsion, not strategic ambition. From short range systems like Nasr to MIRV-capable platforms like Ababeel, Pakistan’s nuclear developments have been responsive, not expansive. The idea of Pakistan pursuing an ICBM to deter the U.S. is a fiction, unsupported by doctrine, strategy, or necessity.
India’s Global Reach and the Myth of Restraint
What makes the ICBM allegation against Pakistan particularly untenable is not just its lack of evidence, but the strategic selectivity it reveals. The Foreign Affairs article raises alarms about hypothetical intercontinental threats from Pakistan while omitting any reference to India, the only state in South Asia that has tested and is actively deploying long-range missile systems with intercontinental reach. This omission is not an analytical lapse; it is calculated alarmism, designed to pathologize Pakistan’s posture while normalizing India’s unchecked strategic expansion. In the crowded discourse of global nuclear anxiety, India remains curiously exempt despite a growing arsenal of long-range delivery systems and deepening integration with advanced military technologies.
India’s Agni-V missile, with an operational range of 8000 kilometers, and the under-development Agni-VI, reportedly capable of exceeding 10,000 kilometers and equipped with MIRV technology, are by both design and doctrine, intercontinental delivery systems. India’s sea-based deterrent further amplifies this reach through submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) such as the K-4 and the forthcoming K-5, which are intended to arm a planned fleet of six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). These capabilities enable India to conduct strategic strikes from expansive oceanic patrol areas, well beyond its immediate region. Crucially, they are not calibrated for deterrence against Pakistan only, but rather reflect ambitions to project power across the Asia-Pacific, includiung into the U.S. strategic depth.
And yet, there is remarkably little alarm over India’s expanding strategic reach. While the essay asserts that “no other country with ICBMs that can target the U.S. is considered a friend,” it fails to ask why a state professing adherence to credible minimum deterrence possesses ICBMs and is developing more vectors capable of striking the U.S. mainland. Nor does it interrogate how India’s increasingly ambiguous No-First-Use (NFU) policy, repeatedly hedged by senior officials, aligns with this trajectory. Western strategic discourse remains conspicuously silent or defensive: no op-eds speculate about Indian missiles targeting Western cities; no concern is raised about doctrinal opacity or the implications of a non-NPT state actively pursuing MIRVs and anti-satellite capabilities. This silence is not analytical, it is political. Over time, such permissiveness has developed a sense of strategic entitlement in New Delhi. India’s claims to strategic autonomy, amplified by a politically influential diaspora and convergence with Western interests, have insulated it from the scrutiny routinely applied elsewhere. The result is not merely oversight, but indulgence: a quiet complicity that enables hubris and conceals a significant, and potentially destabilizing, shift in South Asia’s deterrence equilibrium. Interestingly, Pakistan, with a history of restraint, faces suspicion for capabilities it doesn’t possess.
Selective Vision: India’s Capabilities, Pakistan’s Intentions
One of the most consequential blind spots in current strategic discourse is the asymmetric framing of intentions and capabilities between India and Pakistan. India’s expanding access to foreign missile and space technologies, from Russian propulsion, the U.S. offered navigation guidance and reentry systems to Israeli radar and French dual-use platforms, has enabled a credible intercontinental reach. Yet this technological ascent has attracted remarkably little scrutiny. Conversely, Pakistan, whose deterrent remains calibrated to India-specific thresholds, faces persistent accusations of pursuing an ICBM, an allegation untethered to its capabilities or doctrinal posture. There is no Agni-V equivalent, no SLBM fleet, no declared doctrine of extended reach. And yet, Pakistan is the one accused of developing an ICBM.
This inversion of scrutiny is geopolitical narrative engineering. It legitimizes strategic indulgence for partners and strategic constraints for others. It rewards opacity in some states while penalizing transparency in others. And in doing so, it undermines the very fabric of global arms control.
The Foreign Affairs article’s most consequential flaw is that constructs a threat where none exists, embeds it alongside other adversaries, and urges a recalibration of U.S. nuclear posture. This is not analytical rigor; it is a form of threat inflation framed as strategic foresight. Such distortion serves a dual purpose: it justifies U.S. force modernization and reinforces a policy consensus that sees adversaries’ deterrence postures as inherently escalatory, while friends’ postures, even when more expansive, are seen as stabilizing or defensive.
Amidst the clamor of speculative accusations, Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine has remained remarkably consistent, internally coherent and externally communicated. It is India-specific, threat-contingent, and strategically bounded. Rooted in minimalism over maximalism, credibility over coercion, it represents a deliberate policy choice, not a reactive or expansive trajectory.
Even Pakistan’s most advanced capabilities, such as the MIRV-enabled Ababeel or Babur nuclear-capable cruise missile, are survivability measures, not instruments of global power projection. These systems are designed to preserve second-strike credibility, complicate preemption, and ensure crisis stability in the face of India’s evolving missile defense and limited war concepts.
Every missile in Pakistan’s inventory, from the short-range Nasr to the longest-range Shaheen-III, is aimed at deterring India. At no point has its official narrative entertained hypothetical scenarios involving extended-range targeting or distant base strikes. It is a reflection of strategic restraint, not reach; a missile that barely covers a defined threat envelope, not one that signals ambitions beyond it.
Pakistan’s NCA has repeatedly affirmed that its strategic aim is to prevent war, not to expand its strategic frontiers. Unlike India, whose strategic community frequently debates global targeting, China parity and keeping its options open towards West, Pakistan has remained focused on one adversary, one region, and one objective: stability. Pakistan’s choice to avoid detailed white papers or declaratory posture shifts is often misread as opacity. In an environment shaped more by assumptions than assessments, Pakistan’s deliberate ambiguity is not a mask for escalation, it is a safeguard against miscalculation.
The Cost of Double Standards
At the core of the ICBM accusation and its wider framing in Foreign Affairs lies a deeper structural failure: the asymmetry in how nuclear intentions, legitimacy, and responsibility are assigned in international discourse. When threat perception becomes a function of geopolitical alignment rather than material capability, strategic analysis mutates into narrative warfare.
This double standard warps the architecture of global non-proliferation. It creates incentives for opacity, rewards strategic hedging, and penalizes doctrinal consistency. Pakistan, a state that has for decades maintained a regionally confined nuclear doctrine, is now being accused, without evidence, of the very behavior it has explicitly avoided. That is the essence of the nuclear apartheid: persistent, selective, and self-reinforcing.
This differential treatment carries grave costs. India, despite staying outside the NPT, received a nuclear waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in 2008. It was admitted to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) in 2016, granting formal access to sensitive propulsion and guidance systems. Its space and missile programs have benefited from external technology and knowledge transfers. Meanwhile, Pakistan remains excluded from these regimes. It faces sanctions for dual-use procurements, even as it adheres to stricter export controls. Its indigenous missile developments; borne of necessity, not ambition; are cast as suspect by default.
In an exceptional strategic distortion, India is treated as a responsible actor despite “aided” vertical proliferation and Pakistan, with a capped missile range and defensive posture, is portrayed as a threat based on inference. It seems a deliberate attempt to compel Pakistan into a deterrence dynamic not of its choosing. Pakistan has no ambiguity in understanding this strategic bias that corrodes the very non-proliferation norms the West has claimed to uphold.
Much of this distortion stems from the geopolitical architecture of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. In casting India Net Security Provider in the Asia-Pacific region, Washington has created a narrative incentive to overlook Indian nuclear and missile expansion. India’s influential diaspora also played a visible role in shaping the advocacy that led to the nuclear deal and waiver. Indian-origin analysts and Western strategic circles aligned with New Delhi’s worldview have amplified this narrative, actively presenting Pakistan’s deterrence development in public and official engagements as an obstacle to regional order, while portraying India’s as a stabilizing force.
This inversion of logic has created a strategic paradox: the more India expands, the more it is normalized; the more Pakistan stabilizes, the more it is scrutinized. Besides distorting threat assessments, such policy input and narrative create the very instability it claims to prevent. Consequently, Pakistan walks a fine line as the Regional Security Stabilizer, taking minimal necessary measures to deter India and restore regional balance without expanding its threat matrix.
Misreading Intent: The Dangers of Doctrinal Flattening
The idea that Pakistan might seek intercontinental capabilities to preempt external intervention is not only speculative, it is strategically flawed. Pakistan is a declared nuclear-weapon state with a secure command and control structure, a credible second-strike capability, and a doctrinal focus strictly confined to South Asia. Its posture has always emphasized regional deterrence, not power projection. Equating survivability measures, such as MIRVs or mobility enhancements, with strategic overreach is not only inaccurate, it is part of a broader narrative conditioning that misrepresents doctrinal clarity as strategic anxiety.
This narrative framing becomes especially dangerous when it legitimizes the logic of preventive strikes while pathologizing the logic of deterrence. Such distortion threatens to import destabilizing strategic templates into South Asia, undermining regional stability and mischaracterizing Pakistan’s restrained deterrent posture.
The article’s approach reflects a broader analytical trend: the conflation of capability with intent. By grouping together states with vastly different doctrines—Pakistan, China, and others—under a singular threat label, it erases critical distinctions in posture, policy, and strategic intent. Pakistan’s India-specific deterrent has clearly articulated doctrinal boundaries. Lumping it into a “Category 5” threat to the U.S. alongside other states only misrepresents the facts, and risks triggering disproportionate policy responses.
Such flattening of threat perception enables a singular policy outcome: expanding U.S. nuclear modernization under the guise of countering a broad and undifferentiated adversarial bloc. In doing so, it distorts regional balances and undermines the credibility of differentiated deterrence analysis.
Reclaiming Balance in the Nuclear Discourse
Since Pakistan is not developing an ICBM, the claim advanced by two former U.S. government officials is politically motivated, strategically dangerous, and intellectually irresponsible. The real concern is not what Pakistan is building, but what analysts are choosing to see, what they are choosing to ignore and what they are pushing in American policy discourse once out of government.
Such assessments in past have created space for India to develop intercontinental and outer space targeting capabilities that face no commensurate scrutiny because the gates of narrative are regulated. India has milked both West and Russia for technology transfers. Financial and strategic benefits have created excuses for doctrinal ambiguity and power projection ambitions.
Pakistan, meanwhile, is expected to explain itself for a capability it does not possess. This bias and distortion have corroded the credibility of the global non-proliferation order, one increasingly structured by a form of strategic apartheid. It incentivizes opacity, hedging, and doctrinal hardening. It undermines deterrence stability in South Asia by rewarding expansionism and penalizing restraint. If the objective is to prevent a new era of nuclear instability, then honesty must come before posture. The rules of deterrence must apply equally, or they apply to no one.
The Imperatives for Strategic Stability
To restore strategic equilibrium and credibility in South Asia’s nuclear discourse, the four imperatives must guide analysis and policy. First, reject attribution without evidence. Intelligence assessments without verifiable data cannot substitute for factual analysis. Second, apply criteria equally. If ICBMs are a concern, then India’s tested systems, not Pakistan’s absent ones, must be central to any honest discussion. Third, respect doctrinal continuity. Pakistan’s nuclear posture has been regionally focused, consistently stated, and strategically restrained for over two decades. Lastly, challenge narrative asymmetry. Stability is impossible if the global debate continues to excuse one state’s ambition while demonizing another’s necessity.
In the end, what Pakistan faces is not a missile accusation; it is the burden of surviving a nuclear apartheid that never truly ended. Its real test lies not in rebutting every false claim, but in maintaining the doctrinal clarity and strategic discipline that have kept the subcontinent from the brink of a nuclear war. To survive a new nuclear age, strategic honesty must return to the center of global discourse. That begins with seeing threats not through alliance lenses or inherited assumptions, but as they truly are measured, doctrinally grounded, and subject to the same standards for all. Only then can the world begin to dismantle the enduring architecture of nuclear apartheid.
The author is Arms Control Advisor at SPD.
