How India’s BrahMos Strike On Nur Khan Airbase Brought Pakistan To The Brink | World News
New Delhi: A single missile. Thirty seconds. That is all Pakistan had when India’s BrahMos slammed into the Nur Khan Airbase – just minutes from Islamabad. No early warning. No clear warhead signature. No time to guess whether it carried a conventional payload or a nuclear one.
Rana Sanaullah Khan, special assistant to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, went public. He said that 30-second window nearly sparked a nuclear chain reaction. His words were not laced with bravado. They carried the tremor of a nation that found itself facing the unthinkable.
“The Pakistani government had just 30-45 seconds to analyse whether the missile has any atomic payload. To make such a decision in just 30 seconds is a dangerous thing,” Khan said during a televised interview.
When India launched that BrahMos – what Khan mistakenly called “Harmus” – the Pakistani high command scrambled. Inside Nur Khan, alarms rang. Pilots rushed to cockpits. Radar units lit up. In war rooms, generals debated retaliation. But the warhead was non-nuclear. Delhi was not pressing the red button yet.
Still, that moment tore open Islamabad’s biggest fear – a precise and rapid Indian strike that could knock out critical nodes before Pakistan had time to retaliate.
Nur Khan is not any airbase. It lies inside a dense military ecosystem – adjacent to VIP terminals, near Islamabad’s civilian airport and dangerously close to Pakistan’s nuclear brain – the Strategic Plans Division.
That division does not just manage warheads. It plans for survival. It monitors threats. It guards command centres. A hit this close, even with a conventional weapon, rattled nerves at the very top.
Khan, in a recent interview, said U.S. President Donald Trump helped stop it from spiraling. He credits the former him with stepping in, easing tensions and pulling the region back from the edge. India has pushed back on that narrative.
Officials say it was Pakistan’s own DGMO who reached out first desperate to avoid escalation after the BrahMos strike exposed their air defenses.
That night, Indian jets, apart from Nur Khan, targeted other airbases too. Runways were cratered. Refueling assets were disabled. By morning, Islamabad had lost air dominance over key northern sectors. And with each passing hour, Pakistan’s retaliatory options narrowed.
The Nur Khan base, once RAF Station Chaklala, has long been a high-value asset. It hosts Pakistan’s key transport squadrons, refueling aircraft and serves as the main VIP air terminal for military brass and state leaders.
More importantly, it is nestled in the shadow of Islamabad’s strategic district where the lines between civilian governance and nuclear command blur.
The base is also less than a dozen kilometers from what many believe are Pakistan’s forward nuclear storage units. According to reports by The New York Times and other Western intelligence sources, Nur Khan base is critical to Pakistan’s nuclear deployment network.
That is what made the BrahMos impact so dangerous. It was not only a hole in a tarmac. It was a message – a demonstration of India’s reach, precision and willingness to target assets deep inside enemy territory.
Pakistan, which maintains a policy of ambiguity over its nuclear doctrine, had to read between the lines. Was this a decapitation attempt? A soft warning? Or a trial run for a bigger operation?
Khan’s admission changes the narrative. For the first time, a sitting Pakistani official has acknowledged how close the country came to misreading India’s intent and launching something far more devastating in response.
This was a moment where miscalculation could have meant mushroom clouds.
India’s no-first-use doctrine remains intact. But New Delhi has redefined how conventional superiority can be used for coercive diplomacy. A strike like Nur Khan is a geopolitical signal.
As for Trump, Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir has already floated the idea of a Nobel Peace Prize for him. That may be diplomatic theatre. But it also shows how rattled Rawalpindi was and how badly they wanted to de-escalate without looking weak.
Today, Nur Khan base still stands. But its scars run deeper than concrete. They live in the brief seconds when Pakistan’s leadership stared into the nuclear abyss and waited.
