As I read this article, I thought about the insanity of the US worrying
about Iranian nuclear weapons. Iran's religious leader has actually
forbidden their development and use. Yet, our government has been hysterical
about Iran while the true danger lies elsewhere.
Miriam
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Flashpoint for the Planet
By Dilip Hiro
Posted on April 3, 2016, Printed on April 3, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176123/ ;
Once upon a time, if a war was going to destroy your world, it had to take
place in your world. The soldiers had to land, the planes had to fly
overhead, the ships had to be off the coast. No longer. Nuclear war changed
that equation forever and not just because nuclear weapons could be
delivered from a great distance by missile. To use a term that has become
commonplace in our world when discussing commerce, the prospect of nuclear
conflict has globalized war and its a nightmare of the first order.
In the post-Cold War world, Exhibit A in that process would certainly be the
unnerving potential for a nuclear war to break out between India and
Pakistan. As TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author most recently of The Age
of Aspiration: Money, Power, and Conflict in Globalizing India, makes clear
today, there is no place on the planet where a nuclear war is more
imaginable. After all, those two South Asian countries have been to war with
each other or on the verge of it again and again since they were split apart
in 1947.
Of course, a major nuclear war between them would result in an unimaginable
catastrophe in South Asia itself, with casualties estimated at up to 20
million dead from bomb blasts, fire, and the effects of radiation on the
human body. And that, unfortunately, would only be the beginning. As Alan
Robock and Owen Brian Toon wrote in Scientific American back in 2009, when
the Indian and Pakistani arsenals were significantly smaller than they are
today, any major nuclear conflagration in the region could hardly be
confined to South Asia. The smoke and particulates thrown into the
atmosphere from those weapons would undoubtedly bring on some version of a
global nuclear winter, whose effects could last for at least 10 years,
causing crop shortfalls and failures across the planet. The cooling and
diminished sunlight (along with a loss of rainfall) would shorten growing
seasons in planetary breadbaskets and produce killing frosts in summer,
triggering declines in crop yields across the planet. Robock and Toon
estimate that around one billion people worldwide who now live on marginal
food supplies would be directly threatened with starvation by a nuclear war
between India and Pakistan.
To say the least, its a daunting prospect at the very moment when the Obama
White House has just ended the president's final Nuclear Security Summit
with fears rising that Pakistan's new generation of small, front-line
tactical nuclear weapons are "highly vulnerable to theft or misuse." Hiro,
an expert on the South Asian region, suggests just why a nuclear war is all
too conceivable there and would be a catastrophe for us all. Tom
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
A Nuclear Armageddon in the Making in South Asia
By Dilip Hiro
Undoubtedly, for nearly two decades, the most dangerous place on Earth has
been the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir. Its possible that a small
spark from artillery and rocket exchanges across that border might -- given
the known military doctrines of the two nuclear-armed neighbors -- lead
inexorably to an all-out nuclear conflagration. In that case the result
would be catastrophic. Besides causing the deaths of millions of Indians and
Pakistanis, such a war might bring on nuclear winter on a planetary scale,
leading to levels of suffering and death that would be beyond our
comprehension.
Alarmingly, the nuclear competition between India and Pakistan has now
entered a spine-chilling phase. That danger stems from Islamabads decision
to deploy low-yield tactical nuclear arms at its forward operating military
bases along its entire frontier with India to deter possible aggression by
tank-led invading forces. Most ominously, the decision to fire such a
nuclear-armed missile with a range of 35 to 60 miles is to rest with local
commanders. This is a perilous departure from the universal practice of
investing such authority in the highest official of the nation. Such a
situation has no parallel in the Washington-Moscow nuclear arms race of the
Cold War era.
When it comes to Pakistans strategic nuclear weapons, their parts are
stored in different locations to be assembled only upon an order from the
countrys leader. By contrast, tactical nukes are pre-assembled at a nuclear
facility and shipped to a forward base for instant use. In addition to the
perils inherent in this policy, such weapons would be vulnerable to misuse
by a rogue base commander or theft by one of the many militant groups in the
country.
In the nuclear standoff between the two neighbors, the stakes are constantly
rising as Aizaz Chaudhry, the highest bureaucrat in Pakistans foreign
ministry, recently made clear. The deployment of tactical nukes, he
explained, was meant to act as a form of deterrence, given Indias Cold
Start military doctrine -- a reputed contingency plan aimed at punishing
Pakistan in a major way for any unacceptable provocations like a
mass-casualty terrorist strike against India.
New Delhi refuses to acknowledge the existence of Cold Start. Its denials
are hollow. As early as 2004, it was discussing this doctrine, which
involved the formation of eight division-size Integrated Battle Groups
(IBGs). These were to consist of infantry, artillery, armor, and air
support, and each would be able to operate independently on the battlefield.
In the case of major terrorist attacks by any Pakistan-based group, these
IBGs would evidently respond by rapidly penetrating Pakistani territory at
unexpected points along the border and advancing no more than 30 miles
inland, disrupting military command and control networks while endeavoring
to stay away from locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation. In other
words, India has long been planning to respond to major terror attacks with
a swift and devastating conventional military action that would inflict only
limited damage and so -- in a best-case scenario -- deny Pakistan
justification for a nuclear response.
Islamabad, in turn, has been planning ways to deter the Indians from
implementing a Cold-Start-style blitzkrieg on their territory. After much
internal debate, its top officials opted for tactical nukes. In 2011, the
Pakistanis tested one successfully. Since then, according to Rajesh
Rajagopalan, the New Delhi-based co-author of Nuclear South Asia: Keywords
and Concepts, Pakistan seems to have been assembling four to five of these
annually.
All of this has been happening in the context of populations that view each
other unfavorably. A typical survey in this period by the Pew Research
Center found that 72% of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of India, with
57% considering it as a serious threat, while on the other side 59% of
Indians saw Pakistan in an unfavorable light.
This is the background against which Indian leaders have said that a
tactical nuclear attack on their forces, even on Pakistani territory, would
be treated as a full-scale nuclear attack on India, and that they reserved
the right to respond accordingly. Since India does not have tactical nukes,
it could only retaliate with far more devastating strategic nuclear arms,
possibly targeting Pakistani cities.
According to a 2002 estimate by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
a worst-case scenario in an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war could result in eight
to 12 million fatalities initially, followed by many millions later from
radiation poisoning. More recent studies have shown that up to a billion
people worldwide might be put in danger of famine and starvation by the
smoke and soot thrown into the troposphere in a major nuclear exchange in
South Asia. The resulting nuclear winter and ensuing crop loss would
functionally add up to a slowly developing global nuclear holocaust.
Last November, to reduce the chances of such a catastrophic exchange
happening, senior Obama administration officials met in Washington with
Pakistans army chief, General Raheel Sharif, the final arbiter of that
countrys national security policies, and urged him to stop the production
of tactical nuclear arms. In return, they offered a pledge to end
Islamabads pariah status in the nuclear field by supporting its entry into
the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group to which India already belongs.
Although no formal communiqué was issued after Sharifs trip, it became
widely known that he had rejected the offer.
This failure was implicit in the testimony that DIA Director Lieutenant
General Vincent Stewart gave to the Armed Services Committee this February.
Pakistans nuclear weapons continue to grow, he said. We are concerned
that this growth, as well as the evolving doctrine associated with tactical
[nuclear] weapons, increases the risk of an incident or accident.
Strategic Nuclear Warheads
Since that DIA estimate of human fatalities in a South Asian nuclear war,
the strategic nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan have continued to grow.
In January 2016, according to a U.S. congressional report, Pakistans
arsenal probably consisted of 110 to 130 nuclear warheads. According to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India has 90 to 110 of
these. (China, the other regional actor, has approximately 260 warheads.)
As the 1990s ended, with both India and Pakistan testing their new weaponry,
their governments made public their nuclear doctrines. The National Security
Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine, for example, stated in August
1999 that India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but
will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail. Indias
foreign minister explained at the time that the minimum credible
deterrence mentioned in the doctrine was a question of adequacy, not
numbers of warheads. In subsequent years, however, that yardstick of
minimum credible deterrence has been regularly recalibrated as Indias
policymakers went on to commit themselves to upgrade the countrys nuclear
arms program with a new generation of more powerful hydrogen bombs designed
to be city-busters.
In Pakistan in February 2000, President General Pervez Musharraf, who was
also the army chief, established the Strategic Plan Division in the National
Command Authority, appointing Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai as its
director general. In October 2001, Kidwai offered an outline of the
countrys updated nuclear doctrine in relation to its far more militarily
and economically powerful neighbor, saying, It is well known that Pakistan
does not have a no-first-use policy. He then laid out the thresholds
for the use of nukes. The countrys nuclear weapons, he pointed out, were
aimed solely at India and would be available for use not just in response to
a nuclear attack from that country, but should it conquer a large part of
Pakistans territory (the space threshold), or destroy a significant part of
its land or air forces (the military threshold), or start to strangle
Pakistan economically (the economic threshold), or politically destabilize
the country through large-scale internal subversion (the domestic
destabilization threshold).
Of these, the space threshold was the most likely trigger. New Delhi as well
as Washington speculated as to where the red line for this threshold might
lie, though there was no unanimity among defense experts. Many surmised that
it would be the impending loss of Lahore, the capital of Punjab, only 15
miles from the Indian border. Others put the red line at Pakistans
sprawling Indus River basin.
Within seven months of this debate, Indian-Pakistani tensions escalated
steeply in the wake of an attack on an Indian military base in Kashmir by
Pakistani terrorists in May 2002. At that time, Musharraf reiterated that he
would not renounce his countrys right to use nuclear weapons first. The
prospect of New Delhi being hit by an atom bomb became so plausible that
U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill investigated building a hardened bunker in
the Embassy compound to survive a nuclear strike. Only when he and his staff
realized that those in the bunker would be killed by the aftereffects of the
nuclear blast did they abandon the idea.
Unsurprisingly, the leaders of the two countries found themselves staring
into the nuclear abyss because of a violent act in Kashmir, a disputed
territory which had led to three conventional wars between the South Asian
neighbors since 1947, the founding year of an independent India and
Pakistan. As a result of the first of these in 1947 and 1948, India acquired
about half of Kashmir, with Pakistan getting a third, and the rest occupied
later by China.
Kashmir, the Root Cause of Enduring Enmity
The Kashmir dispute dates back to the time when the British-ruled Indian
subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority
Pakistan, and indirectly ruled princely states were given the option of
joining either one. In October 1947, the Hindu maharaja of Muslim-majority
Kashmir signed an instrument of accession with India after Muslim tribal
raiders from Pakistan invaded his realm. The speedy arrival of Indian troops
deprived the invaders of the capital city, Srinagar. Later, they battled
regular Pakistani troops until a United Nations-brokered ceasefire on
January 1, 1949. The accession document required that Kashmiris be given an
opportunity to choose between India and Pakistan once peace was restored.
This has not happened yet, and there is no credible prospect of it taking
place.
Fearing a defeat in such a plebiscite, given the pro-Pakistani sentiments
prevalent among the territorys majority Muslims, India found several ways
of blocking U.N. attempts to hold one. New Delhi then conferred a special
status on the part of Kashmir it controlled and held elections for its
legislature, while Pakistan watched with trepidation.
In September 1965, when its verbal protests proved futile, Pakistan
attempted to change the status quo through military force. It launched a war
that once again ended in stalemate and another U.N.-sponsored truce, which
required the warring parties to return to the 1949 ceasefire line.
A third armed conflict between the two neighbors followed in December 1971,
resulting in Pakistans loss of its eastern wing, which became an
independent Bangladesh. Soon after, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
tried to convince Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to agree to
transform the 460-mile-long ceasefire line in Kashmir (renamed the Line of
Control) into an international border. Unwilling to give up his countrys
demand for a plebiscite in all of pre-1947 Kashmir, Bhutto refused. So the
stalemate continued.
During the military rule of General Zia al Haq (1977-1988), Pakistan
initiated a policy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts by sponsoring
terrorist actions both inside Indian Kashmir and elsewhere in the country.
Delhi responded by bolstering its military presence in Kashmir and brutally
repressing those of its inhabitants demanding a plebiscite or advocating
separation from India, committing in the process large-scale human rights
violations.
In order to stop infiltration by militants from Pakistani Kashmir, India
built a double barrier of fencing 12-feet high with the space between
planted with hundreds of land mines. Later, that barrier would be equipped
as well with thermal imaging devices and motion sensors to help detect
infiltrators. By the late 1990s, on one side of the Line of Control were
400,000 Indian soldiers and on the other 300,000 Pakistani troops. No wonder
President Bill Clinton called that border the most dangerous place in the
world. Today, with the addition of tactical nuclear weapons to the mix, it
is far more so.
Kashmir, the Toxic Bone of Contention
Even before Pakistans introduction of tactical nukes, tensions between the
two neighbors were perilously high. Then suddenly, at the end of 2015, a
flicker of a chance for the normalization of relations appeared. Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a cordial meeting with his Pakistani
counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, on the latters birthday, December 25th, in
Lahore. But that hope was dashed when, in the early hours of January 2nd,
four heavily armed Pakistani terrorists managed to cross the international
border in Punjab, wearing Indian Army fatigues, and attacked an air force
base in Pathankot. A daylong gun battle followed. By the time order was
restored on January 5th, all the terrorists were dead, but so were seven
Indian security personnel and one civilian. The United Jihad Council, an
umbrella organization of separatist militant groups in Kashmir, claimed
credit for the attack. The Indian government, however, insisted that the
operation had been masterminded by Masood Azhar, leader of the
Pakistan-based Jaish-e Muhammad (Army of Muhammad).
As before, Kashmir was the motivating drive for the anti-India militants.
Mercifully, the attack in Pathankot turned out to be a minor event,
insufficient to heighten the prospect of war, though it dissipated any
goodwill generated by the Modi-Sharif meeting.
There is little doubt, however, that a repeat of the atrocity committed by
Pakistani infiltrators in Mumbai in November 2008, leading to the death of
166 people and the burning of that citys landmark Taj Mahal Hotel, could
have consequences that would be dire indeed. The Indian doctrine calling for
massive retaliation in response to a successful terrorist strike on that
scale could mean the almost instantaneous implementation of its Cold Start
strategy. That, in turn, would likely lead to Pakistans use of tactical
nuclear weapons, thus opening up the real possibility of a full-blown
nuclear holocaust with global consequences.
Beyond the long-running Kashmiri conundrum lies Pakistans primal fear of
the much larger and more powerful India, and its loathing of Indias
ambition to become the hegemonic power in South Asia. Irrespective of party
labels, governments in New Delhi have pursued a muscular path on national
security aimed at bolstering the countrys defense profile.
Overall, Indian leaders are resolved to prove that their country is entering
what they fondly call the age of aspiration. When, in July 2009, Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh officially launched a domestically built
nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, the INS Arihant, it was hailed
as a dramatic step in that direction. According to defense experts, that
vessel was the first of its kind not to be built by one of the five
recognized nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, China, France, and
Russia.
Indias Two Secret Nuclear Sites
On the nuclear front in India, there was more to come. Last December, an
investigation by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity revealed
that the Indian government was investing $100 million to build a top secret
nuclear city spread over 13 square miles near the village of Challakere, 160
miles north of the southern city of Mysore. When completed, possibly as
early as 2017, it will be the subcontinents largest military-run complex
of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and
aircraft-testing facilities. Among the projects aims is to expand the
governments nuclear research, to produce fuel for the countrys nuclear
reactors, and to help power its expanding fleet of nuclear submarines. It
will be protected by a ring of garrisons, making the site a virtual military
facility.
Another secret project, the Indian Rare Materials Plant, near Mysore is
already in operation. It is a new nuclear enrichment complex that is feeding
the countrys nuclear weapons programs, while laying the foundation for an
ambitious project to create an arsenal of hydrogen (thermonuclear) bombs.
The overarching aim of these projects is to give India an extra stockpile of
enriched uranium fuel that could be used in such future bombs. As a military
site, the project at Challakere will not be open to inspection by the
International Atomic Energy Agency or by Washington, since Indias 2008
nuclear agreement with the U.S. excludes access to military-related
facilities. These enterprises are directed by the office of the prime
minister, who is charged with overseeing all atomic energy projects. Indias
Atomic Energy Act and its Official Secrets Act place everything connected to
the countrys nuclear program under wraps. In the past, those who tried to
obtain a fuller picture of the Indian arsenal and the facilities that feed
it have been bludgeoned to silence.
Little wonder then that a senior White House official was recently quoted as
saying, Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy and
hard facts thin on the ground. He added, Mysore is being constantly
monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress in Challakere.
However, according to Gary Samore, a former Obama administration coordinator
for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, India intends to build
thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China. It
is unclear, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful
arsenal, but they will.
Once manufactured, there is nothing to stop India from deploying such
weapons against Pakistan. India is now developing very big bombs, hydrogen
bombs that are city-busters, said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading Pakistani
nuclear and national security analyst. It is not interested in
nuclear
weapons for use on the battlefield; it is developing nuclear weapons for
eliminating population centers.
In other words, as the Kashmir dispute continues to fester, inducing
periodic terrorist attacks on India and fueling the competition between New
Delhi and Islamabad to outpace each other in the variety and size of their
nuclear arsenals, the peril to South Asia in particular and the world at
large only grows.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, among many other works, of
The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry between India and Pakistan
(Nation Books). His 36th and latest book is The Age of Aspiration: Money,
Power, and Conflict in Globalizing India (The New Press).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Dilip Hiro
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176123
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Flashpoint for the Planet
By Dilip Hiro
Posted on April 3, 2016, Printed on April 3, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176123/ ;
Once upon a time, if a war was going to destroy your world, it had to take
place in your world. The soldiers had to land, the planes had to fly
overhead, the ships had to be off the coast. No longer. Nuclear war changed
that equation forever and not just because nuclear weapons could be
delivered from a great distance by missile. To use a term that has become
commonplace in our world when discussing commerce, the prospect of nuclear
conflict has globalized war and its a nightmare of the first order.
In the post-Cold War world, Exhibit A in that process would certainly be the
unnerving potential for a nuclear war to break out between India and
Pakistan. As TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author most recently of The Age
of Aspiration: Money, Power, and Conflict in Globalizing India, makes clear
today, there is no place on the planet where a nuclear war is more
imaginable. After all, those two South Asian countries have been to war with
each other or on the verge of it again and again since they were split apart
in 1947.
Of course, a major nuclear war between them would result in an unimaginable
catastrophe in South Asia itself, with casualties estimated at up to 20
million dead from bomb blasts, fire, and the effects of radiation on the
human body. And that, unfortunately, would only be the beginning. As Alan
Robock and Owen Brian Toon wrote in Scientific American back in 2009, when
the Indian and Pakistani arsenals were significantly smaller than they are
today, any major nuclear conflagration in the region could hardly be
confined to South Asia. The smoke and particulates thrown into the
atmosphere from those weapons would undoubtedly bring on some version of a
global nuclear winter, whose effects could last for at least 10 years,
causing crop shortfalls and failures across the planet. The cooling and
diminished sunlight (along with a loss of rainfall) would shorten growing
seasons in planetary breadbaskets and produce killing frosts in summer,
triggering declines in crop yields across the planet. Robock and Toon
estimate that around one billion people worldwide who now live on marginal
food supplies would be directly threatened with starvation by a nuclear war
between India and Pakistan.
To say the least, its a daunting prospect at the very moment when the Obama
White House has just ended the president's final Nuclear Security Summit
with fears rising that Pakistan's new generation of small, front-line
tactical nuclear weapons are "highly vulnerable to theft or misuse." Hiro,
an expert on the South Asian region, suggests just why a nuclear war is all
too conceivable there and would be a catastrophe for us all. Tom
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
A Nuclear Armageddon in the Making in South Asia
By Dilip Hiro
Undoubtedly, for nearly two decades, the most dangerous place on Earth has
been the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir. Its possible that a small
spark from artillery and rocket exchanges across that border might -- given
the known military doctrines of the two nuclear-armed neighbors -- lead
inexorably to an all-out nuclear conflagration. In that case the result
would be catastrophic. Besides causing the deaths of millions of Indians and
Pakistanis, such a war might bring on nuclear winter on a planetary scale,
leading to levels of suffering and death that would be beyond our
comprehension.
Alarmingly, the nuclear competition between India and Pakistan has now
entered a spine-chilling phase. That danger stems from Islamabads decision
to deploy low-yield tactical nuclear arms at its forward operating military
bases along its entire frontier with India to deter possible aggression by
tank-led invading forces. Most ominously, the decision to fire such a
nuclear-armed missile with a range of 35 to 60 miles is to rest with local
commanders. This is a perilous departure from the universal practice of
investing such authority in the highest official of the nation. Such a
situation has no parallel in the Washington-Moscow nuclear arms race of the
Cold War era.
When it comes to Pakistans strategic nuclear weapons, their parts are
stored in different locations to be assembled only upon an order from the
countrys leader. By contrast, tactical nukes are pre-assembled at a nuclear
facility and shipped to a forward base for instant use. In addition to the
perils inherent in this policy, such weapons would be vulnerable to misuse
by a rogue base commander or theft by one of the many militant groups in the
country.
In the nuclear standoff between the two neighbors, the stakes are constantly
rising as Aizaz Chaudhry, the highest bureaucrat in Pakistans foreign
ministry, recently made clear. The deployment of tactical nukes, he
explained, was meant to act as a form of deterrence, given Indias Cold
Start military doctrine -- a reputed contingency plan aimed at punishing
Pakistan in a major way for any unacceptable provocations like a
mass-casualty terrorist strike against India.
New Delhi refuses to acknowledge the existence of Cold Start. Its denials
are hollow. As early as 2004, it was discussing this doctrine, which
involved the formation of eight division-size Integrated Battle Groups
(IBGs). These were to consist of infantry, artillery, armor, and air
support, and each would be able to operate independently on the battlefield.
In the case of major terrorist attacks by any Pakistan-based group, these
IBGs would evidently respond by rapidly penetrating Pakistani territory at
unexpected points along the border and advancing no more than 30 miles
inland, disrupting military command and control networks while endeavoring
to stay away from locations likely to trigger nuclear retaliation. In other
words, India has long been planning to respond to major terror attacks with
a swift and devastating conventional military action that would inflict only
limited damage and so -- in a best-case scenario -- deny Pakistan
justification for a nuclear response.
Islamabad, in turn, has been planning ways to deter the Indians from
implementing a Cold-Start-style blitzkrieg on their territory. After much
internal debate, its top officials opted for tactical nukes. In 2011, the
Pakistanis tested one successfully. Since then, according to Rajesh
Rajagopalan, the New Delhi-based co-author of Nuclear South Asia: Keywords
and Concepts, Pakistan seems to have been assembling four to five of these
annually.
All of this has been happening in the context of populations that view each
other unfavorably. A typical survey in this period by the Pew Research
Center found that 72% of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of India, with
57% considering it as a serious threat, while on the other side 59% of
Indians saw Pakistan in an unfavorable light.
This is the background against which Indian leaders have said that a
tactical nuclear attack on their forces, even on Pakistani territory, would
be treated as a full-scale nuclear attack on India, and that they reserved
the right to respond accordingly. Since India does not have tactical nukes,
it could only retaliate with far more devastating strategic nuclear arms,
possibly targeting Pakistani cities.
According to a 2002 estimate by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
a worst-case scenario in an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war could result in eight
to 12 million fatalities initially, followed by many millions later from
radiation poisoning. More recent studies have shown that up to a billion
people worldwide might be put in danger of famine and starvation by the
smoke and soot thrown into the troposphere in a major nuclear exchange in
South Asia. The resulting nuclear winter and ensuing crop loss would
functionally add up to a slowly developing global nuclear holocaust.
Last November, to reduce the chances of such a catastrophic exchange
happening, senior Obama administration officials met in Washington with
Pakistans army chief, General Raheel Sharif, the final arbiter of that
countrys national security policies, and urged him to stop the production
of tactical nuclear arms. In return, they offered a pledge to end
Islamabads pariah status in the nuclear field by supporting its entry into
the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group to which India already belongs.
Although no formal communiqué was issued after Sharifs trip, it became
widely known that he had rejected the offer.
This failure was implicit in the testimony that DIA Director Lieutenant
General Vincent Stewart gave to the Armed Services Committee this February.
Pakistans nuclear weapons continue to grow, he said. We are concerned
that this growth, as well as the evolving doctrine associated with tactical
[nuclear] weapons, increases the risk of an incident or accident.
Strategic Nuclear Warheads
Since that DIA estimate of human fatalities in a South Asian nuclear war,
the strategic nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan have continued to grow.
In January 2016, according to a U.S. congressional report, Pakistans
arsenal probably consisted of 110 to 130 nuclear warheads. According to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India has 90 to 110 of
these. (China, the other regional actor, has approximately 260 warheads.)
As the 1990s ended, with both India and Pakistan testing their new weaponry,
their governments made public their nuclear doctrines. The National Security
Advisory Board on Indian Nuclear Doctrine, for example, stated in August
1999 that India will not be the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but
will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail. Indias
foreign minister explained at the time that the minimum credible
deterrence mentioned in the doctrine was a question of adequacy, not
numbers of warheads. In subsequent years, however, that yardstick of
minimum credible deterrence has been regularly recalibrated as Indias
policymakers went on to commit themselves to upgrade the countrys nuclear
arms program with a new generation of more powerful hydrogen bombs designed
to be city-busters.
In Pakistan in February 2000, President General Pervez Musharraf, who was
also the army chief, established the Strategic Plan Division in the National
Command Authority, appointing Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai as its
director general. In October 2001, Kidwai offered an outline of the
countrys updated nuclear doctrine in relation to its far more militarily
and economically powerful neighbor, saying, It is well known that Pakistan
does not have a no-first-use policy. He then laid out the thresholds
for the use of nukes. The countrys nuclear weapons, he pointed out, were
aimed solely at India and would be available for use not just in response to
a nuclear attack from that country, but should it conquer a large part of
Pakistans territory (the space threshold), or destroy a significant part of
its land or air forces (the military threshold), or start to strangle
Pakistan economically (the economic threshold), or politically destabilize
the country through large-scale internal subversion (the domestic
destabilization threshold).
Of these, the space threshold was the most likely trigger. New Delhi as well
as Washington speculated as to where the red line for this threshold might
lie, though there was no unanimity among defense experts. Many surmised that
it would be the impending loss of Lahore, the capital of Punjab, only 15
miles from the Indian border. Others put the red line at Pakistans
sprawling Indus River basin.
Within seven months of this debate, Indian-Pakistani tensions escalated
steeply in the wake of an attack on an Indian military base in Kashmir by
Pakistani terrorists in May 2002. At that time, Musharraf reiterated that he
would not renounce his countrys right to use nuclear weapons first. The
prospect of New Delhi being hit by an atom bomb became so plausible that
U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill investigated building a hardened bunker in
the Embassy compound to survive a nuclear strike. Only when he and his staff
realized that those in the bunker would be killed by the aftereffects of the
nuclear blast did they abandon the idea.
Unsurprisingly, the leaders of the two countries found themselves staring
into the nuclear abyss because of a violent act in Kashmir, a disputed
territory which had led to three conventional wars between the South Asian
neighbors since 1947, the founding year of an independent India and
Pakistan. As a result of the first of these in 1947 and 1948, India acquired
about half of Kashmir, with Pakistan getting a third, and the rest occupied
later by China.
Kashmir, the Root Cause of Enduring Enmity
The Kashmir dispute dates back to the time when the British-ruled Indian
subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority
Pakistan, and indirectly ruled princely states were given the option of
joining either one. In October 1947, the Hindu maharaja of Muslim-majority
Kashmir signed an instrument of accession with India after Muslim tribal
raiders from Pakistan invaded his realm. The speedy arrival of Indian troops
deprived the invaders of the capital city, Srinagar. Later, they battled
regular Pakistani troops until a United Nations-brokered ceasefire on
January 1, 1949. The accession document required that Kashmiris be given an
opportunity to choose between India and Pakistan once peace was restored.
This has not happened yet, and there is no credible prospect of it taking
place.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1620971305/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1620971305/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Fearing a
defeat in such a plebiscite, given the pro-Pakistani sentiments prevalent
among the territorys majority Muslims, India found several ways of blocking
U.N. attempts to hold one. New Delhi then conferred a special status on the
part of Kashmir it controlled and held elections for its legislature, while
Pakistan watched with trepidation.
In September 1965, when its verbal protests proved futile, Pakistan
attempted to change the status quo through military force. It launched a war
that once again ended in stalemate and another U.N.-sponsored truce, which
required the warring parties to return to the 1949 ceasefire line.
A third armed conflict between the two neighbors followed in December 1971,
resulting in Pakistans loss of its eastern wing, which became an
independent Bangladesh. Soon after, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
tried to convince Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to agree to
transform the 460-mile-long ceasefire line in Kashmir (renamed the Line of
Control) into an international border. Unwilling to give up his countrys
demand for a plebiscite in all of pre-1947 Kashmir, Bhutto refused. So the
stalemate continued.
During the military rule of General Zia al Haq (1977-1988), Pakistan
initiated a policy of bleeding India with a thousand cuts by sponsoring
terrorist actions both inside Indian Kashmir and elsewhere in the country.
Delhi responded by bolstering its military presence in Kashmir and brutally
repressing those of its inhabitants demanding a plebiscite or advocating
separation from India, committing in the process large-scale human rights
violations.
In order to stop infiltration by militants from Pakistani Kashmir, India
built a double barrier of fencing 12-feet high with the space between
planted with hundreds of land mines. Later, that barrier would be equipped
as well with thermal imaging devices and motion sensors to help detect
infiltrators. By the late 1990s, on one side of the Line of Control were
400,000 Indian soldiers and on the other 300,000 Pakistani troops. No wonder
President Bill Clinton called that border the most dangerous place in the
world. Today, with the addition of tactical nuclear weapons to the mix, it
is far more so.
Kashmir, the Toxic Bone of Contention
Even before Pakistans introduction of tactical nukes, tensions between the
two neighbors were perilously high. Then suddenly, at the end of 2015, a
flicker of a chance for the normalization of relations appeared. Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a cordial meeting with his Pakistani
counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, on the latters birthday, December 25th, in
Lahore. But that hope was dashed when, in the early hours of January 2nd,
four heavily armed Pakistani terrorists managed to cross the international
border in Punjab, wearing Indian Army fatigues, and attacked an air force
base in Pathankot. A daylong gun battle followed. By the time order was
restored on January 5th, all the terrorists were dead, but so were seven
Indian security personnel and one civilian. The United Jihad Council, an
umbrella organization of separatist militant groups in Kashmir, claimed
credit for the attack. The Indian government, however, insisted that the
operation had been masterminded by Masood Azhar, leader of the
Pakistan-based Jaish-e Muhammad (Army of Muhammad).
As before, Kashmir was the motivating drive for the anti-India militants.
Mercifully, the attack in Pathankot turned out to be a minor event,
insufficient to heighten the prospect of war, though it dissipated any
goodwill generated by the Modi-Sharif meeting.
There is little doubt, however, that a repeat of the atrocity committed by
Pakistani infiltrators in Mumbai in November 2008, leading to the death of
166 people and the burning of that citys landmark Taj Mahal Hotel, could
have consequences that would be dire indeed. The Indian doctrine calling for
massive retaliation in response to a successful terrorist strike on that
scale could mean the almost instantaneous implementation of its Cold Start
strategy. That, in turn, would likely lead to Pakistans use of tactical
nuclear weapons, thus opening up the real possibility of a full-blown
nuclear holocaust with global consequences.
Beyond the long-running Kashmiri conundrum lies Pakistans primal fear of
the much larger and more powerful India, and its loathing of Indias
ambition to become the hegemonic power in South Asia. Irrespective of party
labels, governments in New Delhi have pursued a muscular path on national
security aimed at bolstering the countrys defense profile.
Overall, Indian leaders are resolved to prove that their country is entering
what they fondly call the age of aspiration. When, in July 2009, Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh officially launched a domestically built
nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, the INS Arihant, it was hailed
as a dramatic step in that direction. According to defense experts, that
vessel was the first of its kind not to be built by one of the five
recognized nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, China, France, and
Russia.
Indias Two Secret Nuclear Sites
On the nuclear front in India, there was more to come. Last December, an
investigation by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity revealed
that the Indian government was investing $100 million to build a top secret
nuclear city spread over 13 square miles near the village of Challakere, 160
miles north of the southern city of Mysore. When completed, possibly as
early as 2017, it will be the subcontinents largest military-run complex
of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and
aircraft-testing facilities. Among the projects aims is to expand the
governments nuclear research, to produce fuel for the countrys nuclear
reactors, and to help power its expanding fleet of nuclear submarines. It
will be protected by a ring of garrisons, making the site a virtual military
facility.
Another secret project, the Indian Rare Materials Plant, near Mysore is
already in operation. It is a new nuclear enrichment complex that is feeding
the countrys nuclear weapons programs, while laying the foundation for an
ambitious project to create an arsenal of hydrogen (thermonuclear) bombs.
The overarching aim of these projects is to give India an extra stockpile of
enriched uranium fuel that could be used in such future bombs. As a military
site, the project at Challakere will not be open to inspection by the
International Atomic Energy Agency or by Washington, since Indias 2008
nuclear agreement with the U.S. excludes access to military-related
facilities. These enterprises are directed by the office of the prime
minister, who is charged with overseeing all atomic energy projects. Indias
Atomic Energy Act and its Official Secrets Act place everything connected to
the countrys nuclear program under wraps. In the past, those who tried to
obtain a fuller picture of the Indian arsenal and the facilities that feed
it have been bludgeoned to silence.
Little wonder then that a senior White House official was recently quoted as
saying, Even for us, details of the Indian program are always sketchy and
hard facts thin on the ground. He added, Mysore is being constantly
monitored, and we are constantly monitoring progress in Challakere.
However, according to Gary Samore, a former Obama administration coordinator
for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, India intends to build
thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China. It
is unclear, when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful
arsenal, but they will.
Once manufactured, there is nothing to stop India from deploying such
weapons against Pakistan. India is now developing very big bombs, hydrogen
bombs that are city-busters, said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading Pakistani
nuclear and national security analyst. It is not interested in
nuclear
weapons for use on the battlefield; it is developing nuclear weapons for
eliminating population centers.
In other words, as the Kashmir dispute continues to fester, inducing
periodic terrorist attacks on India and fueling the competition between New
Delhi and Islamabad to outpace each other in the variety and size of their
nuclear arsenals, the peril to South Asia in particular and the world at
large only grows.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, among many other works, of
The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry between India and Pakistan
(Nation Books). His 36th and latest book is The Age of Aspiration: Money,
Power, and Conflict in Globalizing India (The New Press).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Dilip Hiro
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176123
