India launches attack on 9 sites in Pakistan and Pakistani Jammu and Kashmir

Srinagar is fine for now. Schools and colleges have been ordered closed.

I will go and check the market in a bit, its still early (08:09) so things are pretty slow anyway.

> India and Pakistan can normalize relations, and sincere attempts have been made by both sides, but inter-factional competition amongst Pakistan's elite has undermined it

India has less motivation for war. But it’s also done nothing to negotiate a peace.

While I personally doubt this particular instance will escalate to nuclear war, or even a major conventional war for that matter, the situation is clearly very dangerous. Doctrine is a terrible indicator of what a country will actually do.

For Russia and North Korea, even though their doctrines may be hazy, their geopolitical positions indicate they are unlikely to start a nuclear engagement. Russia has a very large conventional military which, despite it's significantly worse than expected performance, is slowly but steadily making progress in a war that other great powers are not willing to directly join. Conversely, half the world's nukes are pointed squarely at Russia. Their strategy pretty much the entire time under Putin has been slowly normalizing their military actions, use of nuclear weapons in even the most minimal capacity would be very likely to provoke exactly the military response they don't want and would gain them nothing. Their nukes exist specifically to deter that response.

North Korea is even more clearly disadvantaged by a potential nuclear exchange. Sure they have enough nukes to cause serious damage to South Korea, but they already had the conventional forces to do that long before they got nukes. They could strike America, and do quite a bit of damage, but they have no hope of doing enough damage to prevent a retaliatory strike that would kill the regime. They are caught between two major nuclear powers, the US and China, and their nukes are clearly to prevent one from attempting a regime change without relying too heavily on the other.

Both of these states would probably have ceased to exist by now if they did not have nukes, and both will stop existing if they ever use nukes. They are more or less stable.

India and Pakistan are a totally different story. Both need nukes to deter not only eachother but other neighbors, which produces a heavily destabilizing effect (eg if India builds more nukes to counter a buildup in China, Pakistan needs more nukes, which means India needs even more nukes, and so on). Further, neither nation is staring down the barrel of a true clusterfuck arsenal like those possessed by the US and Russia - while it would no doubt be catasrophic beyond anything the world has seen before, a nuclear exchange between the two nations is potentially survivable. Finally you have not just two governments but two populations with a deep seated enmity rooted in religious conflict, it is easily possible for the entire chain of command to be willing to go against their personal self interest with no one in a position to pump the brakes. It's a situation that could become very bad, very quickly, without anyone doing anything too absurd.