Meh, the nuclear bluff of Pakistan is nothing but a red herring that is used to scare Indian citizens away from supporting an escalation. During Kargil, time was ripe for an escalation, the whole world was with us. We lost a valuable opportunity that we might not get again in the future. Whatever problems that the Indian economy suffered from we were doing better than Pakis. Even without considering the bombing of their bases, we lost a lot of military lives because the government didn't let the Army use approaches that would have involved intrusions into Paki territory.
Don't disagree with you. Our forces were unnecessarily restrained at that time.
Regarding the nuclear bluff, it was only recently that it came to light that
Napakis had failed to mate the nuke warhead with Ding Dong missiles and in principle were nuke nude. But thanks to Gujral saa'b in 1997 we had no assets on the ground to know. We had no sat coverage of the region and had to buy them from Americans and Israelis who provided very average resolution pics. It was hyped up that
Napaki nukes were ready to fly.
Our forces had been crippled by years and years of soft defence budgets. Sukhois were no more than airshow toys, MKIsation was in its infancy, our weapons stocks were low. MiGs and Jaguars had proved not very effective in high mountains, Mirages were all that we had and that too we had to
jugaad to get them to carry LGBs.
The pressure on India not to cross the LoC was immense, Bill Clinton was no friend of India and a weakish caretaker Govt. at the centre who had lost a confidence vote and was still reeling from the antics of Samta, Mamata and Jayalalitha found itself faced with a conflict, the likes of which India had not witnessed since 1971.
All in all, it led the then GoI to err on the side of caution.
