Military historian Tom Cooper: 'Fighting ended after India hit entrance of suspected nuclear site'

Military aviation analyst and historian Tom Cooper on Thursday said that the recent India-Pakistan conflict ended only after India targeted entrances to a suspected Pakistani nuclear facility, forcing Islamabad to back down and accept a ceasefire.

"The fighting ended actually after India hit two entrances to one of Pakistan's underground facilities, suspected or assumed to be a nuclear facility,” Cooper told news agency ANI. "He (Defence Minister Rajnath Singh) now says that Pakistan's ability to handle nuclear weapons is questionable. We have heard such concerns issued even by nuclear scientists, and not just a few of them, but 20 or even more. It is also a confirmation for the dominance or freedom of operation of Indian armed forces well inside Pakistan."

The remarks come in the wake of Operation Sindoor, India's retaliatory air offensive following the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22. India launched strikes on terror infrastructure across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, while Pakistan responded with a barrage of missiles and drones targeting Indian border areas.

According to Cooper, India’s air campaign was "partly successful" in destroying terror camps but "highly successful" in weakening Pakistan's conventional defence capability. "Six out of nine targeted sites or terror camps have been hit, without doubt, and all have been targeted very precisely. But more important is that Pakistan became unable to defend itself from conventional strikes of the Indian armed forces and had no ability to strike back on India. It had no other option but to ceasefire," Cooper explained.

Commenting on Western media's coverage of the conflict, Cooper noted the bias and ignorance that keeps shaping pro-Pakistan narratives. "I'm concerned that it might take a while to figure out the new realities between India and Pakistan, which is that Pakistan cannot defend itself, not even its nuclear facilities," he said. "My biggest concern is that the West will miss an opportunity to reorganise its politics towards India and start afresh. There is a lot of ignorance, which sustains lots of bias, and even more because the West is at least as much troubled by religiously motivated terrorism as India has been."

In an interview to India Today, Cooper said that India was a clear winner in the air battle against Pakistan. He said that the more he followed the news and social media, from the evening of May 7 till May 9, it became clear that Pakistan was losing. "And when you see that Pakistani ground-based air defence system has been hit, then the Pakistani air force has been pushed away from the border to India," he added.

"This also meant that the Indian air force was able to go closer to the Pakistani airspace and launch its missiles deep inside Pakistan," he added. "And the final nail in the coffin was when India not only hit Pakistani airbases but, and I know this is contrary to the official statements, when it started hitting nuclear weapons storage facilities," Cooper said.