What can we learn from South Asia’s most under-appreciated nuclear safeguard?

Amid geopolitical instability, climate change, and rapidly evolving threats, NTI is working to promote the security of nuclear facilities and protect peaceful applications of nuclear technology. This post builds on the author’s remarks at an NTI event on the sidelines of the 2025 Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee, “Strengthening Article IV: Nuclear Facility Resilience in Times of Crisis.”

Tensions spiked in South Asia over the last few weeks, following a deadly terror attack in late April in Pahalgam (part of Indian-administered Kashmir), which claimed 26 civilian lives. The long-standing crisis between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan briefly escalated into calibrated military exchanges, including drone and air strikes on each other’s territory. While both sides targeted military infrastructure, no nuclear facilities were harmed. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire has since been reached, halting further escalation for now.

The line between provocation and irreversible escalation has still held, not thanks to a missile defense system or satellite override, but an old, paper-thin agreement signed in 1988: the India-Pakistan Non-Attack Agreement (NAA) on nuclear facilities. It is an agreement between India and Pakistan to not turn nuclear sites into battlefield targets. It includes an annual exchange of nuclear facilities’ coordinates that has weathered not just wars, but diplomatic freezes and severe crises between the two countries.

But in the post-Pahalgam attack environment, where the Indian government has already suspended the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, a World Bank-brokered, internationally lauded agreement that governs water sharing between the two countries, what anchors their continued adherence to the NAA?

It boils down to strategic self-interest and irreversibility.

The NAA is not driven by altruism or external incentives. It is a product of mutual existential fear, an acknowledgement by both sides that breaching it could trigger catastrophic radioactive fallout, not just across borders but within their territories.

Unlike the Indus Waters Treaty, for example, which is rooted in the politics of resource distribution and has legal remedy procedures, violation of the NAA by any side offers no buffer, no window for de-escalation, no reversible outcome. There is no coming back from it.

As I have argued before, this agreement reflects not legal idealism, but strategic realism rooted in restraint. It safeguards peaceful nuclear use by building a firewall against kinetic destruction.

Today, as nuclear energy expands and as geopolitical volatility deepens, nuclear resilience, or the capacity of nuclear facilities to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, and rapidly recover from disruptive events (natural or human-made) has become even more vital. But resilience cannot be treated as a purely technical issue. It is deeply political. And nowhere is this clearer than in South Asia.

The NAA’s model of restraint—which is born from rivalry, not friendship—offers a pathway for nuclear resilience elsewhere in the world, with four key lessons:

1. Keep it simple. The NAA is only two pages long, with no elaborate verification mechanisms, just clarity and commitment from both sides. In conflict zones, such restraint clauses can be easier to agree upon than broader arms control frameworks that require deliberations to reach consensus.
2. Anchor it in mutual vulnerability. Agreements born out of mutual fear, not mutual love, are often more sustainable. If you cannot build trust, build fear of irreversible loss.
3. Detach it from normalization. India and Pakistan have had no bilateral dialogue since 2019. And yet, the NAA holds. It proves that even in the absence of normalization, nuclear safety can and must stand apart.
4. Recognize the psychological value. Resilience is not only physical, it is political and psychological. The NAA creates a red line for both countries, one that makes crossing into nuclear sites not just escalatory but unthinkable.

Even as I write under the war clouds post-Pahalgam, fragility is not a forecast in South Asia, but a lived condition. This very quiet, fragile restraint is unfortunately South Asia’s most underappreciated nuclear safeguard—demonstrating that resilience in the South Asian context is not just technical. It is political, psychological, and above all, profoundly human.