Ten Years of The Bomb by Zia Mian(
The Economic and Political Weekly, May 10, 2008)
It
is 10 years since India and Pakistan went openly nuclear. The
dangers of a nuclear south Asia are becoming more and more apparent,
yet the governments of the two countries continue to build their
arsenals. Both countries continue to produce plutonium for more and
more bombs, both countries have been testing new kinds of delivery
vehicles and both countries have conducted war games assuming the use
of nuclear weapons. The pursuit of nuclear weapons is beginning to
take, as elsewhere in the world, a logic of its own. South Asia
awaits a strong peace movement that will make the governments of India
and Pakistan see reason.
In the 10 years since the May
1998 nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan, the bomb has
largely faded from view in south Asia. But the bomb is not gone. The
nuclear logic continues to unfold relentlessly.
In both India
and Pakistan, the nuclear tests were sold to the public as guaranteeing
national security. It did not take long for both countries to discover
that the bomb was no defence. The Kargil war followed barely a year
after the nuclear tests. The war proved that the bomb would not
defend India from attack and was no guarantee of victory for Pakistan.
It only showed that two nuclear armed countries can fight a war and
that in such a situation leaders in both countries will threaten to use
nuclear weapons.
But Kargil was not enough to teach caution
and restraint. A little over two years later, India and Pakistan
prepared to fight again. An estimated half a million troops were rushed
to the border, and nuclear threats were made with abandon. What
lessons have been learned? None, other than that they need to be better
prepared to fight a war. Both countries have carried out major war
games that assumed the possible use of nuclear weapons. effects
of a Nuclear War Political leaders and military planners seem
impervious to the fact that a war between Pakistan and India in which
each used only five of their nuclear weapons on the other's cities
could kill several million people and injure many more. The
effects of a nuclear war could be much worse if India and Pakistan use
about 50 weapons each. They have made more than enough nuclear weapons
material to do this. Recent studies using modern climate models
suggest that the use of 50 weapons each by the two countries could
throw up enough smoke from burning cities to trigger significant
cooling of the atmosphere and land surface and a decrease in rainfall
that could last for years. This could, in turn, lead to a catastrophic
drop in agricultural production, and widespread famine that might last
a decade. The casualties would be beyond imagination. India and
Pakistan are still producing the plutonium and highly enriched uranium
that are the key ingredients in nuclear weapons. Nuclear policymakers
in both countries obviously do not think they have enough weapons. They
have never explained how they will decide how many weapons are enough.
For
the past decade the two countries have also been waging a nuclear
missile race. Both India and Pakistan have tested various kinds
of missiles, including ones that would take as little as five minutes
to reach key cities in the other country. Some of the tests are
now carried out by the military, not scientists and engineers.
These are user trials and field exercises. They are practising for
fighting a nuclear war.
There is more to come. Pakistan has
been testing a cruise missile that could carry a nuclear warhead. India
has tested a ballistic missile that can be fired from a submarine. It
is reported that the plan is eventually to have a fleet of five
submarines, with three deployed at any time, each armed with 12
missiles (perhaps with multiple warheads on each missile) with a range
of 5000 km. Pakistan already has a naval strategic command and has
talked also of putting nuclear weapons on submarines. It is a
familiar logic that south Asia has still not learnt. The search for
nuclear security is a costly and dangerous pursuit that will take on a
life of its own and knows no end. It took almost 20 years to go from an
American president declaring the bomb to be the "greatest thing in
history", to a successor recognising that nuclear weapons had turned
the world into a prison in which man awaits his execution. This
hard-won recognition has still not come to south Asia.
Only
when an active and sustained peace movement is able to awaken
people and leaders to this terrible truth can we move to the next stage
in resisting and eliminating the bomb and all that it represents.
Zia
Mian <zia (at) Princeton (dot) edu> is at the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA.