It is one of the enduring paradoxes of Pakistan’s history that the country has repeatedly demonstrated remarkable tactical ability while struggling to translate that ability into sustained strategic advantage. I have witnessed this contradiction at close quarters.
In 1998, the challenge was to distinguish physical reality from political theatre. India’s nuclear preparations were unfolding under an extraordinary degree of secrecy, while the political environment was saturated with speculation, signalling and deliberate ambiguity. Our task was therefore not simply to collect information. It was to determine what the available evidence actually meant.
The satellite picture presented us with one set of problems. In those days, we were working with imagery that could be refreshed only after roughly twenty-four hours. Commercial platforms such as French SPOT gave us valuable information, but they also imposed a structural delay. An adversary aware of satellite schedules could exploit that limitation. Engineering activity could be timed to take place after a satellite pass, allowing the visible signs of that activity to be concealed before the next image was obtained.
We therefore had to learn to read what was not immediately visible.
Without the automated change-detection systems that are available today, we manually superimposed sequential images collected over a period of weeks. Small differences became important: a change in the alignment of tracks, a variation in the colour of disturbed earth, an altered shadow, or the appearance and subsequent disappearance of material around a shaft. Individually, these details could be dismissed as insignificant. Taken together, they began to reveal a pattern.
The intelligence problem was consequently never confined to satellite imagery. We had to construct a broader picture by bringing together photography, diplomatic reporting, signals intelligence and established seismic baselines. The object was to compensate for the physical delay in our imagery by developing an understanding of what was happening in real time.
That process eventually enabled us to look beyond what the latest photograph showed and towards what the sequence of photographs was telling us.
The deeper question was what India was preparing to test.
Our technical analysis led us to anticipate three broad possibilities: a conventional fission device, a plutonium-based boosted design, and a two-stage thermonuclear device. The significance of this assessment was not that we could see inside the weapons themselves. It was that the engineering constraints of nuclear weapons development placed limits on what was technically possible. Operational secrecy could obscure intentions, but it could not entirely erase the physical requirements imposed by science and engineering.
There was another extraordinary dimension to the crisis. Correspondence from former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, written while she was in self-exile, contained technical thinking that closely paralleled the assessments being developed within Pakistan’s strategic establishment. The handwritten letter, in turquoise ink, remains an unusual historical document from that period. It illustrated how, despite the political divisions of the time, certain strategic concerns had independently converged.
Then came May 1998.
When the Indian detonations took place, our seismic monitoring teams were able to examine the physical signatures produced by the tests. Seismology does not respond to political declarations. It records what the ground has experienced.
One feature of the seismic data was particularly significant to our assessment of the thermonuclear claim. Where we would have expected a pronounced secondary ignition signature, the wave envelope instead appeared to flatten. The significance of that observation lay precisely in its independence from the political narrative surrounding the tests. Whatever governments claimed publicly, the ground had recorded its own account.
For us, this was the essential distinction between intelligence and assumption. Intelligence had to begin with evidence and remain answerable to it.
The developments of 1998 also reinforced another lesson: deterrence cannot exist in isolation from national power. Pakistan’s nuclear capability fundamentally altered the strategic balance in South Asia and provided an answer to a conventional military asymmetry that could otherwise have created unacceptable vulnerabilities. But a deterrent is ultimately sustained by more than weapons. It requires political coherence, economic resilience, institutional capacity and the ability to make sovereign decisions under pressure.
Over time, I came to understand this as the broader problem of defensive deterrence.
The original logic of defensive deterrence, including the doctrine of first use, was rooted in the need to offset India’s conventional superiority and establish unmistakable red lines. But the strategic environment did not remain frozen in 1998. India’s development of a nuclear triad, the growing importance of uncrewed systems, increasingly sophisticated surveillance capabilities and the emergence of contested cyberspace have transformed the character of strategic competition.
Deterrence therefore cannot simply be a doctrine written once and preserved unchanged. It has to respond to the changing character of warfare while retaining its central purpose: preventing an adversary from believing that escalation can be undertaken without unacceptable consequences.
Yet there is a limit to what military capability can achieve.
Pakistan’s soldiers, scientists, engineers and strategic planners have repeatedly demonstrated that they can perform under extraordinary pressure. They can extract meaning from incomplete information, solve problems under severe constraints and deliver results when the stakes are existential.
The greater difficulty has often existed elsewhere.
A state may possess exceptional tactical competence and still weaken its strategic position through economic dependence, political instability or decisions that exchange long-term sovereignty for short-term relief. Military strength cannot permanently compensate for structural weakness in the economic and political foundations of a country.
That, perhaps more than anything else, is the lesson I took from 1998.
The seismic record taught us to distinguish the physical truth from the political claim. The satellite record taught us to see beyond the limitations of a single image. The strategic crisis taught us that deterrence is not merely a matter of possessing capability, but of possessing the national strength and institutional coherence necessary to sustain it.
The ground beneath Pokhran could tell us what had happened.
Our responsibility was to understand what it meant.
And the responsibility of the state, ultimately, was to ensure that the strategic advantage won through the work of its soldiers and scientists was not surrendered through failures elsewhere.