HYPERSONIC WEAPONS AND ESCALATION CONTROL BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN: A STUDY OF THE RISKS AND CHALLENGES FOR DETERRENCE

South Asia’s deterrence environment is increasingly strained as India accelerates its development of hypersonic weapons, raising concerns about rapid, inadvertent, or misinterpreted escalation during crises with Pakistan. This paper examines how the introduction of hypersonic weapons reshapes the dynamics of escalation control within a nuclear dyad characterised by close geographic proximity, limited crisis communication mechanisms, and persistent doctrinal opacity. Escalation Control Theory’s assumptions are operationalised across four variables, signalling clarity, decision-time compression, ambiguity of intent, and threshold permeability, enabling a structured evaluation of how hypersonic capabilities disrupt the processes through which India and Pakistan attempt to manage escalation. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative process-tracing, drawing on open-source reporting, doctrinal statements, technical assessments, and two empirical episodes: the 2022 BrahMos accidental launch and the May 2025 India–Pakistan war. The findings demonstrate that hypersonic weapons magnify pre-existing weaknesses in South Asian crisis management by collapsing decision cycles, obscuring the interpretation of military signals, and increasing fears of counterforce vulnerability, thereby reducing the practical space for calibrated escalation control. The analysis concludes that without new communication protocols and transparency measures, the introduction of hypersonic systems will compress the escalation ladder to a degree that undermines regional deterrence stability.