Forget Iran. Tensions between India, China, and Pakistan are the real nuclear threat.

The India-China nuclear relationship is itself relatively unstable and is now also moving into the Indian Ocean. This is because India’s land-based nuclear deterrent currently suffers from considerable geographical and technological disadvantages compared with China. China is able to deploy its nuclear missiles in sparsely populated territory close to India’s border, providing it with nuclear missile coverage of the entire subcontinent. In comparison, India fields much shorter range missiles that can barely reach major population centres in eastern China.

This gives India good reason to establish an assured second strike capability on SSBNs that could potentially be forward deployed into the western Pacific. Alternatively, India may deploy its SSBNs in a well-protected ‘bastion’ in the Bay of Bengal, although this may require further development of Indian missile technology.

There have been increasing detections of Chinese SSNs in the Indian Ocean in recent years, including the deployment of a Chinese SSN to the western Indian Ocean between last December and February, nominally as part of its anti-piracy deployment. According to Indian sources, these deployments are part of hydrographic ‘profiling’ of the region and will likely increase in frequency. But Beijing has less reason to deploy its SSBNs in the Indian Ocean; instead, they will likely be primarily deployed in the western Pacific, targeted at the US. This could create its own risks: the detection of an unusual transit of a Chinese SSBN into the Indian Ocean or an Indian SSBN into the Pacific could be seen as an escalation at times of tension.