India’s lightning-quick Operation Sindoor, executed on the night of 9 May 2025, was proclaimed a limited counter-terror operation. Two months later, newly released Google Earth imagery analysed by open-source sleuth Damien Symon places an unmistakable missile scar on Pakistan’s nuclear-linked Kirana Hills and exposes freshly patched runways at nearby Mushaf (Sargodha) airbase. The pixels contradict official Indian and Pakistani denials, spotlighting a clandestine episode that has already reshaped regional deterrence calculus.


Background: From Pahalgam To Precision Retaliation

The immediate catalyst for Operation Sindoor was the 22 April 2025 massacre of twenty-six tourists in Pahalgam, claimed by The Resistance Front (TRF), a Lashkar-e-Taiba proxy. Domestic outrage galvanised New Delhi to authorise a tri-service response framed as “equal intensity in the same domain,” emphasising terror infrastructure rather than Pakistani state assets.

Yet the geography of the strikes quickly told a different story. Within 23 minutes, at least fifteen BrahMos cruise missiles and multiple SCALP/HAMMER precision munitions detonated across Punjab and Sindh, damaging eleven of thirteen major Pakistani airbases, including Nur Khan, Rahim Yar Khan, Sukkur, and Mushaf.

Anatomy of Operation Sindoor

India’s integrated air campaign unfolded in three tightly sequenced waves:

1. Suppression of Pakistani air-defence radars with loitering munitions and SEAD Rafales.

Cruise-missile salvos against runways, hardened shelters, command-and-control nodes, and fuel farms.

2. Contingency air-patrols by Su-30MKI and S-400 batteries to blunt any counter-strike—capabilities vindicated when Pakistan’s retaliatory drones were intercepted over Jammu and Rajasthan.

3. Official briefings in New Delhi emphasised that strikes were confined to militant camps; however, the target set quietly expanded once Pakistan launched what Indian planners deemed escalatory missile raids on 8 May.

Kirana Hills: Pakistan’s Shadowy Nuclear Nerve Centre

Kirana’s black-granite ridge lies 8 kilometres south-east of Mushaf airbase in Sargodha district. Since the late 1970s, Islamabad has carved more than forty-six tunnels into its flanks to store warheads, house transporter-erector-launchers, and conduct sub-critical “cold tests” (codenamed Kirana-I) between 1983 and 1990. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists flagged the site in 2023 as Pakistan’s most probable underground stockpile, complete with redundant blast doors and environmental controls to preserve fissile cores.

Why Mountainous Bunkers?

Mountains like Kirana offer natural overburden, stable humidity, and insulation from satellite-borne synthetic-aperture radars. They complicate earth-penetrator trajectories and enable rapid dispersal of nuclear assets through multiple adits. For India, even a symbolic strike near such a facility telegraphs political resolve without triggering radioactive fallout.

Satellite Imagery Findings: What the Pixels Reveal

Impact Scar

Symon’s comparative analysis of Google Earth tiles dated 30 April 2025 (pre-strike) and 18 June 2025 (post-strike) reveals a roughly 6-metre-wide blast crater on Kirana’s southwestern face, accompanied by radial scorch marks. The absence of breaching around known tunnel mouths indicates a surface-level detonation consistent with a low-yield, unitary conventional warhead—likely a BrahMos derived from the Block-I series with fragmentation rather than penetrator settings.

Repaired Runways

At Mushaf, two intersecting runways show rectangular patches of lighter asphalt, each about 70 × 15 metres, aligning with night-time strike coordinates publicised by Indian journalists on 13 May. Patchwork repairs, completed within nine hours according to Pakistani NOTAM filings, still cause detectable vibration during F-16 taxi runs.

Multi-Source Corroboration

Maxar and PlanetScope imagery, analysed independently by NDTV and India Today, confirm twin craters of 8–9 metres on runways 06/24 and 14/32. A Moneycontrol investigation calculates Rahim Yar Khan’s primary runway crater at 19 feet radius, leaving the airfield “in ICU” for over forty days.

Evidence TierData SourceKey ObservationDate Stamp
OpticalGoogle Earth6-metre impact scar on Kirana’s SW slope18 Jun 2025
Synthetic-Aperture RadarCapella Space via India TodayRunway subsidence at Mushaf sectors A-3 and C-111 May 2025
ThermalSentinel-2 SWIR band processed by Intel LabAnomalous heat plume over Kirana at 02:14 IST10 May 2025
Human IntelligenceResident VHF logsEmergency NOTAM: Mushaf closed 00:30-08:15 PKT10 May 2025

Contradictory Official Narratives And The Viral Smirk

At a 12 May press conference, Air Marshal A.K. Bharti thanked a journalist “for telling us” about Kirana’s nuclear tunnels, insisting no strike occurred—a statement delivered with a fleeting half-smile that ignited speculation across social media. Islamabad’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) similarly denied any hit but issued contradictory communiqués on runway closures.

The dissonance illustrates a classic “strategic ambiguity” manoeuvre: both capitals seek deterrent advantage without public escalation. Yet the digital era’s ubiquitous satellites have eroded such plausible deniability.

Strategic Significance of A ‘Warning Strike’

Hitting the hillside rather than tunnel mouths served four overlapping objectives:

Demonstrative Deterrence: Signals India’s surveillance reach and precision capacity without provoking nuclear retaliation.

Escalation Control: By avoiding underground penetration, New Delhi kept combat thresholds beneath Islamabad’s declared red-lines.

Psychological Warfare: Reminder to Pakistan’s strategic corps that sanctuaries are observable and vulnerable, shaping crisis bargaining behaviour.

Domestic Assurance: Visual proof for Indian audiences that terror fatalities would be avenged decisively.

Sargodha/Mushaf Airbase: Collateral Or Co-Equal Target?

While Kirana captured headlines, Mushaf’s crippling mattered operationally. The base hosts No.9 “Griffins” F-16 squadron, JF-17 Block-III jets, and Pakistan’s main AEW&C detachment. Two runway cuts temporarily grounded quick-reaction alerts, compelling the PAF to disperse fighters to outlying strips like Mianwali.

Repair tenders valued at 100 million PKR for Bahawalpur and unspecified sums for Mushaf and Rahim Yar Khan were floated on 6 June, indirectly validating damage severity.

Repair Efforts And Lessons In Runway Resilience

Pakistan’s rapid-patch doctrine relies on aluminium AM-2 mats and quick-setting concrete. Satellite change-detection timelines, however, expose variances:

AirbaseFirst Patch CompleteFull Operational ReadinessRepair Lag
Mushaf (Sargodha)9 h96 h87 h
Rahim Yar Khan14 d44 d (estimated)30 d
Sukkur48 h10 d8 d
Nur Khan72 h8 d5 d

Longer lags correlate with crater diameter, asphalt quality, and logistical depth, providing Indian planners future target-selection heuristics.

Open-Source Intelligence Versus State Secrecy

Operation Sindoor marks the first South-Asian conflict in which civilian imagery drove the narrative more forcefully than official briefings. OSINT actors such as Symon (@detresfa_), Goodhind, and Foxtrot crowdsourced geolocation, BDA (battle-damage assessment), and repair-progress tracking within hours.

Governments face a shrinking window for narrative control, underscoring the need for proactive transparency or more sophisticated deception tactics.

Risk of Escalation And Back-Channel Diplomacy

Despite severe damage, Islamabad refrained from large-scale kinetic retaliation, choosing DGMO-level talks by 15 May. Analysts attribute restraint to:

Pakistan’s reduced sortie rate amid runway outages.
Diplomatic pressure from Washington and Riyadh to forestall nuclear brinkmanship.
India’s calibrated messaging that “next rounds would go deeper” if cross-border terror persisted.

Legal and Ethical Considerations Under International Law

India framed Sindoor within Article 51 self-defence, citing an “impending threat” of further terror attacks. Striking near (but not within) a nuclear storage complex skirts the Additional Protocol I prohibition on attacks endangering civilian populations via nuclear risk, though critics argue the potential for collateral radiation still raises proportionality concerns.

Nuclear Stability Implications

The strike sets a precedent that conventional precision weapons can be brandished against nuclear-related sites as messaging tools. That norm blurs the deterrence boundary and may incentivise Pakistan to harden, disperse, or pre-delegate launch authority—steps that could increase crisis instability.

Conversely, Pakistan’s muted response suggests a recognition that limited conventional strikes, carefully bounded, need not spiral—a dynamic akin to the “stability–instability paradox” playing out in real time.

Conclusion: Silence Speaks Volumes

The Kirana Hills crater, though tactically minor, casts a strategic shadow. It exposes the narrowing gap between battlefield action and public verification, complicates nuclear risk calculus, and reaffirms that even the most fortified secrets can now be mapped by crowdsourced constellations. As both governments maintain polite fictions, the world’s satellites continue their silent testimony—reminding South Asia that in the 21st-century battlespace, the truth is literally written on the ground.

IDN (With Inputs From A ET News Report)