On 20 August 2026, BASIC’s Responsibilities and Global Governance Programme (RGG) and the Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research (CSSPR) co-hosted a live webinar on BASIC’s latest report: Addressing Future Nuclear Crisis Scenarios in South Asia through a Responsibility-Based Approach.
The report draws on two Track 2/1.5 dialogues and crisis simulations run by BASIC in Bahrain in February 2026, with participants from the Indian and Pakistani nuclear policy communities, alongside a companion report on the May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis based on interviews with expert communities and former practitioners. It introduces the concept of an “escalation cascade,” where deliberate and unintended pathways to escalation reinforce each other, driven by psychological and emotional pressure rather than the intent of any single actor. It closes with six responsibility-based recommendations aimed at both preventing escalation in a live crisis and reducing the chance of one starting.
The Q&A that followed was full of interesting questions. Speakers explored whether a common strategic lexicon risks reducing the ambiguity deterrence relies on, whether the “tough” behaviour seen in the simulations reflects how participants would act in a real crisis given the absence of any real career or life risk, and whether deterrence theory itself can end up feeding the very escalation cascade it’s meant to prevent.
Speakers include:
- Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at BASIC and a Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham
- Ching Wei Sooi, Policy Fellow at BASIC
- Dr Rabia Akhtar, Non-Resident Fellow at BASIC, Dean Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lahore, and Director of the Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research (CSSPR)