IN September 2016, India announced that it had carried out a surgical strike against Pakistan. The strike had not happened in reality, and, at that point, most analysts concluded that India was essentially testing the waters for a ‘new normal’ in bilateral relations, whereby it could strike Pakistan without provoking a nuclear response.
A few years later, in February 2019, India did carry out a surgical strike in Balakot on the grounds that it was targeting a militant training camp. Although there was no such camp there and the only some trees were hit, such strikes by one nuclear state against another represented a precarious situation unique to South Asia. All other nuclear weapon states have avoided direct military confrontation and relied more on diplomacy to avert conflict escalation.