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What China learns from India-Pakistan clash: The swift resolution of the recent military clash between India and Pakistan offers China yet another reason to expand its nuclear arsenal, writes Zhou Bo, a prominent security expert, in a guest opinion piece for the South China Morning Post. Zhou, a retired senior colonel of the People’s Liberation Army and now a scholar at Tsinghua University, is a frequent speaker at international security forums. Zhou writes that one key lesson China has drawn from the Ukraine war is that Russia’s nuclear stockpile deterred NATO from direct intervention. The lesson, he said, was reinforced by the India-Pakistan conflict: both sides sought a quick ceasefire because the two nuclear powers are evenly matched in terms of warheads. Zhou argued that if China maintains its nuclear stockpile of 600 warheads – one-tenth the size of the US arsenal – Washington might feel emboldened to use nuclear bombs first in a Taiwan Straits crisis.