Rabia Akhtar (Note: This piece offers a preliminary read of the ARFC announcement and its implications, pending further

Applying game theory to understand the precarious balance of power in South Asia’s emerging stealth competition.

YouTube video by CSSPR

From Escalation to Explanation: The Fight for the Last Word https://open.substack.com/pub/rakhtar/p/who-owns-the-story-the-real-battle?r=i1g3g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=fals...

Mapping the Fall of the Reflective Mind

Marking the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, Nobel Peace Laureates and experts issued a powerful declaration urging urgent global action to reduce nuclear risks amid rising geopolitical instabili...

Strategic Fracture in the Global Nuclear Order: Why the FMCT Fails to Convince Pakistan

What if consciousness did not emerge from us, but flowed through us?

India’s reported pursuit of a missile able to carry a ‘bunker-buster’ like the US’ Massive Ordnance Penetrator presents a perilous

Tremendous progress has been made in reducing global nuclear stockpiles and nuclear risks, but we are now heading in the wrong direction. Poised at the beginning of a new, complex, and dangerous nucle...

How the U.S.-Israeli strikes empowered the Iranian regime.

In the aftermath of the May 2025 Indo-Pakistan crisis, a 4-day high-intensity, multidomain conflict, the traditional notion of strategic depth demands rethinking.

Reading 'Operation Sindoor' as India’s Most Dangerous Shift in Strategic Thinking Yet

There are books that predict the future.

Lessons from the 4-Day Indo-Pak May 2025 Crisis, the 12-Day Iran-Israel War and the Russia-Ukraine War

In May 2025, after 87 tense hours of high-intensity conflict, it was the United States once again stepping in to broker a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

This weekend, as I celebrated my son’s 21st birthday with him, he introduced me to a game he is recently been absorbed in: Metro Exodus. Now, I’ll be honest, when he first launched it, I was expecting...

Why Strategic Culture Still Matters

Naseeruddin Shah’s poignant reflection on the India he grew up in, a place of pluralism, coexistence, and quiet patriotism, resonates far beyond its borders.

If you are interested in issues of war, peace, nukes and strategy then you must have read most analysis focusing on the escalation ladder, the idea, originally from Herman Kahn of a multi-step progres...

The question of a nuclear-armed Iran is no longer hypothetical, we all know it.

We often assume that deterrence is a backchannel conversation, quiet messages passed between military planners, intelligence chiefs, and strategic elites.

For too long, South Asia has lived under a deterrence framework not entirely its own.

Key points made by Air Chief Marshal Sohail Aman (Retd), former Chief of Air Staff, Pakistan Air Force (PAF), during a post-conflict discussion on the India-Pakistan war fought between May 7 and May 1...

Ever since the outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine war, scholars have extensively analysed its effects on the global nuclear order. Some contend that this order

Pakistan’s nuclear program is India-focused; claims it seeks ICBMs to target the U.S. are speculative and ignore its regional deterrence posture

National security in a world of proliferating risks and eroding constraints.

Applying Herman Kahn’s escalation ladder to the May 2025 events between India and Pakistan demonstrates that the conflict largely occupied the middle rungs. But the question remains: is the threshold ...

Applying Herman Kahn’s escalation ladder to the May 2025 events between India and Pakistan demonstrates that the conflict largely occupied the middle rungs. But the question remains: is the threshold ...