Policy pathways for stable deterrence and AI-resilient nuclear command
Emerging weapons like hypersonic glide vehicles, loitering nuclear-powered cruise missiles, and AI-assisted command architectures are rewriting the temporal logic of deterrence. Where Cold War stability revolved around a single countdown, today’s nuclear environment is governed by overlapping clocks: one for ballistic missiles, another for hypersonic trajectories, and yet another for long-endurance cruise systems such as Russia’s Burevestnik. Each compresses or distorts the time available for verification, attribution, and political judgment.
The central challenge of the nuclear age is no longer technological inferiority or numerical imbalance, but the loss of protected decision time. As detection networks accelerate and decision chains shorten, the pressure to automate grows, risking false positives and algorithmic escalation. The way forward, therefore, is not faster reaction but temporal resilience: strengthening nuclear command, control and communication (NC3) to integrate AI without surrendering human control, modernizing attribution protocols, and re-establishing arms control norms to manage ambiguity before it becomes catastrophe.
The often-cited “18-minute” figure for ICBM time-to-target time between the United States and Russia, like in recent film The House of Dynamite , understates actual time variability and overstates available decision space. Great-circle trajectories over the Arctic typically yield 25–30 minutes of total flight, but decision time is constrained by verification and confidence, not by range. After factoring in satellite-based infrared detection, radar correlation, and leadership conferencing, analysts estimate a usable decision window of 8–12 minutes in a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture. The polar route through Alaska does not meaningfully delay detection; rather, it provides a predictable geometry for early-warning radars and satellites. What consumes the clock is human verification and institutional caution.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), particularly those on depressed trajectories from coastal waters, compress this timeline dramatically. A Trident-like launch from the Atlantic toward Washington could reach targets in 10–12 minutes, leaving perhaps five minutes or less for decision-making. The natural temptation works be to accelerate sensor fusion and skip confirmatory steps, yet authentication and attribution must never be compressed. History shows that false positives like radar anomalies, misread satellites, or software faults would often emerge in the very moments when time is most scarce. The gravest danger in a compressed environment is not failing to act, but acting on incomplete truth.
Russia’s Burevestnik program introduces a fundamentally different temporal problem. It is a low-altitude, maneuverable, nuclear-powered cruise missile, designed for endurance rather than speed. Unlike high-arc ballistic systems, it can loiter, manoeuvre unpredictably, and approach from unconventional azimuths, evading the early-warning signatures that underpin deterrence stability. It does not shorten the ICBM flight clock; it creates a parallel one.
Strategically, Burevestnik turns the linear logic of “launch, detect, decide” into a multi-modal decision environment. Leaders must now interpret multiple, asynchronous threats — some immediate, some latent. The challenge is epistemic as much as operational: what does it mean to detect and testing to hit a low-flying object whose intent is unclear and whose endurance may last hours or days? Hitting a Burevestnik would be a bigger challenge for NATO than hitting a bullet that has a predictable flight path.
Hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) and hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs) undermine predictability by manoeuvring at high speed and variable altitude, stressing both tracking and interception systems. A Burevestnik-type platform, though slower, is destabilizing through persistence and ambiguity: it can hide within maritime radar shadows, reappear from unexpected vectors, and exploit gaps in surveillance. So, the Russian claim about the Burevestnik’s invincibility seems quite accurate. It makes exciting NATO missile shields as vulnerable as spider webs. The Golden Dome aspirations buried in dust, sending everyone to the drawing board.
Each technology disrupts a different stabilizing norm—hypersonics by shrinking reaction time, nuclear-powered cruise by corroding confidence in situational awareness. Together they multiply uncertainty. Deterrence thus becomes less a function of destructive potential and more a function of temporal control: the ability to buy time for accurate perception before action.
In South Asia, geography collapses the clock entirely. India and Pakistan’s major population centres lie only a few hundred kilometers apart, giving short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) flight times of 3–7 minutes. Any addition of low-altitude or sea-based cruise capabilities would reduce warning further and increase misattribution risk, particularly in crowded maritime or border zones.
For South Asia, the policy implication are quite different than superpower dyads. Launch-on-warning may be untenable for superpowers but South Asian geography increases response dilemma. While superpowers strategic logic must shift toward ride-out postures of absorbing a strike and responding thereafter, this become very complicated between Pakistan and India. assured second-strike survivability, and redundant, civilian–military communication channels are common imperatives for all nuclear powers.
In future, deterrence stability will depend not on reciprocal speed but on resilience under surprise. The South Asian region’s challenge is to build the capacity to wait, which is a scarce virtue in compressed decision environments.
As decision windows shrink and data streams multiply, the impulse to automate grows. Artificial intelligence promises faster fusion of radar, satellite, and electronic intelligence inputs. Yet this speed introduces existential risk. AI systems trained on ballistic profiles may misclassify the erratic signatures of a manoeuvring Burevestnik or a hypersonic vehicle as an incoming strike. Correlated anomalies across sensors could yield machine-driven false positives, compressing the human decision window to seconds.
The proper role of AI in nuclear command is thus diagnostic, not decisive, as a tool for triage and anomaly explanation, never for launch authorization. Stability depends on humans exercising meaningful control rather than remaining in the loop, with institutional checks ensuring that machine recommendations remain advisory. Automation without accountability would transform ‘overlapping clocks’ into automated triggers, where errors propagate at the speed of code.
To restore stability in a multi-clock world, policy must shift from reaction speed to temporal resilience, which is the ability to preserve deliberation under stress.
Key pathways could include upgrading sensor fusion — integrate infrared, radar, maritime, and passive RF networks to close low-altitude and loitering gaps.
Likewise, strengthening attribution protocols could be useful. This would imply establishing pre-agreed, data-sharing mechanisms to verify ambiguous launches rapidly.
Limiting automation would become quintessential. This has to be achieved by codifying a ‘meaningful human control’ doctrine, as proposed by Pakistan, across all NC3 layers.
The nuclear powers must work on further enhancing their NC3 resilience by hardening communication pathways, decentralising authority chains, and building redundancy into command networks.
In times where arms control diplomacy is in back view mirrors, expanding diplomatic frameworks will be the hardest steps to take. Whenever such environment, it would include cruise propulsion categories and hypersonic systems in arms-control dialogues and test-notification regimes.
Adaptation of such pathways is hardest nut to crack for South Asia. This means having survivable forces, ride-out deterrence, and bilateral crisis-communication protocols for ambiguous incidents. India is a roadblock unto itself. New Delhi resists dialogue with Islamabad, which will only calcify fears and misunderstandings.
The Burevestnik era signals a doctrinal inflection. Deterrence is no longer just a race for speed or precision; it is a contest for cognition under pressure. The strategic problem of the future is not merely to intercept a missile, but to interpret it correctly. In the absence of comprehensive treaties like New START covering novel propulsion and delivery systems, governance gaps widen and suspicion grows.
The imperative for all nuclear powers, especially those in volatile dyads, is to modernize detection and command architectures without automating judgment. Deterrence in the twenty-first century will rest not on faster retaliation, but on safeguarded deliberation.
Technology changes the shape of the clock; strategy must protect the time to think.
Author: Dr Zahir Kazmi is an Arms Control Advisor to the Strategic Plans Division, National Command Authority, Pakistan, and a former brigadier. The views expressed are his own.
