This report was written by Dr Nicholas J. Wheeler, Ching Wei Sooi, Mhairi McClafferty, Dr Chiara Cervasio, and Eva-Nour Repussard.
Addressing Future Nuclear Crisis Scenarios in South Asia through a Responsibility-Based Approach is a product of two Track 2/1.5 dialogues involving two crisis simulations that were facilitated by BASIC’s Responsibilities and Global Governance Programme with participants from Indian and Pakistani nuclear policy communities in Bahrain in February 2026.
Complementing Mhairi McClafferty’s companion report, Unpacking the May 2025 India-Pakistan Crisis: Mutual Perceptions, Nuclear Escalation Risks, and De-escalation Pathways, this report uses simulations of a nuclear crisis scenario as a methodological tool to examine how escalation and de-escalation dynamics may unfold in future India-Pakistan nuclear crises.
The report introduces the concept of an “escalation cascade”, in which deliberate and inadvertent escalation pathways operate simultaneously and interactively, creating a self-reinforcing spiral of escalation that is unintended by those making the decisions that drive it. Such escalation cascades are fuelled by psychological and emotional dynamics. Participants during the simulations operated under two cognitive biases (peaceful/defensive self-images and bad faith models) which shaped interpretations of intent, reinforced adversarial assumptions, limited empathic understanding, and constrained opportunities for de-escalation.
The report also outlines six responsibility-based policy recommendations, which are aimed not only at preventing escalation from occurring in a crisis but also at contributing to crisis prevention in the first place. A central theme underpinning these recommendations is the importance of cultivating empathic understanding and of addressing the cognitive and emotional dynamics that drive escalation.
Ultimately, the report highlights the urgent need for India and Pakistan to recognise, both normatively and in policy-making, that nuclear crises must be framed not, as Thomas Schelling once put it, as “competition[s] in risk-taking”, but as opportunities for “cooperative de-escalation”. Without this, the danger is that future crises will escalate in ways that are difficult to control and reverse.
Read the report below:
