New Delhi, July 19, 2026
Pakistan has no response to India’s nuclear capability, as New Delhi quietly crossed a threshold where India may have nuclear warheads at sea while Pakistan does not have a submarine capable of carrying them and not even a realistic timeline for acquiring one, a report stated.
According to a report in Modern Diplomacy, “the gap is widening in a way that is restructuring the entire deterrence architecture of the subcontinent.”
“Pakistan has not, and maybe cannot. And the gap between those two sentences is the most important strategic development on the subcontinent since Islamabad tested its first bomb in 1998. The opacity surrounding India’s submarine operations is deliberate. A submarine whose location, weapons load, and authorisation status are unknown to the adversary is a submarine that cannot be targeted in a first strike. India has spent a decade building toward exactly that, while the rest of the world was watching something else,” highlighted the report.
With the INS Arihant commissioned over a decade ago, INS Arighaat being equipped with the K-4 missile that has a range of 3,500 kilometres, and the INS Aridhaman joining the fleet earlier this year, the INS Arisudan is also anticipated to arrive in 2027, making four “on the water” Submersible Ship Ballistic Nuclear (SSBNs).
“There’s always one at sea, one in transit, one in maintenance and one in training, the minimum rotation needed to maintain a year-round patrolling submarine force. India has also hardened its pre-emptive attack submarine base on its eastern coast, except for the name INS Varsha, and has an operational jetty in Agalega Island in the western Indian Ocean, where they can receive top-up without returning to the Indian coast, a much larger area,” noted the report.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) 2026 yearbook implies something India did not announce: that India has shifted from storing nuclear warheads ashore to deploying them on submarines at sea.
“A submarine on continuous patrol, armed with nuclear-tipped missiles, somewhere in the Indian Ocean is not targetable by definition. Its location is unknown. Its warheads are already mated to its missiles. Its patrol area can extend from the Bay of Bengal to the waters near Agalega Island, covering millions of square kilometres. The geometry of a disarming first strike against such a force does not work regardless of how many missiles the adversary is willing to commit to the attempt,” the report highlighted.
According to the report, the sea-based nuclear capability of Pakistan is comprised of the Babur-3 cruise missile, which is believed to have potential nuclear capabilities and might be deployed on an Agosta-class submarine (a French diesel-electric attack submarine) in 2027.
“But a nuclear-tipped cruise missile on a diesel-electric sub is different in kind from a ballistic missile on a nuclear-powered SSBN… The conventional submarines have to surface or snorkel frequently to recharge their batteries, and are thus detectable. They last for weeks, not months. They cannot maintain continuous long-range patrols with the necessary second-strike survivability. An opponent patrolling an existing submarine has some tools at his disposal, such as surface ships, fixed underwater sensors, and patrol aircraft, but none is of much use against a submarine powered by a reactor that can stay submerged for months,” the report emphasised.(Agency)
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