Asia's nuclear scope fires apocalyptic vision

By John Chalmers

NEW DELHI (Reuters): It's 2007, and a three-sided war pitting India against China and Pakistan ends with Bombay and New Delhi vaporized in nuclear strikes ordered by Beijing.

It's fiction, a gripping but terrifying tale of escalating conflict told by former BBC staffer Humphrey Hawksley in his new book Dragonfire.

But the story is set against a historical backdrop: the dispute over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, which have already fought three wars since 1947, and the distrust that has dogged India and China since their frontier conflict of 1962.

"We are facing a scenario which only our doomsday soothsayers would have forecast," frets the Indian prime minister of Hawksley's imagination, five days before the elegant sandstone buildings housing his government collapse in molten rubble.

"A military strongman has taken power in Pakistan on an Islamic Kashmir ticket and China is pouring troops towards our border in a way that is reminiscent of our humiliating war in 1962."

George Fernandes -- the real-life Indian defense minister who famously declared a few days before New Delhi's nuclear tests in 1998 that Beijing was his country's "potential threat number one" -- reportedly had this to say of Hawksley's book: "I hope nobody dismisses it as one more work of fiction".

India's decision to go openly nuclear and Pakistan's answer with blasts of its own within the same month were wake-up calls for Western governments whose Asia strategists had long been focused on the Koreas, Taiwan and the Far East in general.

When U.S. President Bill Clinton earlier this year described South Asia as perhaps "the most dangerous place in the world today", he was voicing one of the biggest post-Cold War preoccupations of the Western world.

"People who look ahead do take into account the various scenarios," says a Western military attache in New Delhi.

"We have been concerned for several years about the testing and development that is going on in a region with two neighbors in a state of near-conflict with nuclear arms."

Indian weekly magazine Outlook says a study conducted for the U.S. Defense Department by a group of Asia watchers last year suggested various scenarios which could have been dreamed up by Hawksley himself.

Scenario One, Outlook says, unfolds from the beginning of the next decade as Pakistan teeters on the brink of disintegration.

By 2012, Islamic extremists take control of the country and pour into Indian-administered Kashmir. New Delhi responds by taking control of the Pakistani side of the Himalayan territory, and Pakistan issues a nuclear ultimatum for Indian withdrawal.

China, which New Delhi has long accused of helping Islamabad's nuclear and missile programs, echoes the ultimatum and begins mobilizing forces along India's eastern flank.

The United States urges restraint, sends naval forces to the Bay of Bengal and warns China to stay out.

India launches an unsuccessful strike on Pakistan's nuclear facilities, and Islamabad responds with a nuclear attack against Indian soldiers on their common border.

The United States finishes off Pakistan's nuclear sites with B-2 bombers, the country descends into anarchy, New Delhi's troops move in and by 2020 a new Indian superstate allied to Washington has emerged.

In scenario two India and China gradually forge a strategic understanding to force the United States out of the region.

Jasjit Singh, director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, says Indian think-tanks have not yet gone in for such wargaming.

"If anybody was going to do it outside the government it would probably be my outfit," he says. "Having read Hawksley's book I'm planning to say, 'OK, why don't we do it?' I think ... the outcome would be quite different."

Singh says that in a nuclear-armed environment it is useful to speculate on the consequences of a fresh war with Pakistan, but it is also important to consider the circumstances that would trigger a full-blown conflict.

He argues that there is a "tolerance level" which has so far kept tension from spilling over.

For instance, he says, there are up to 300,000 trained jehadis(holy warriors) who could be brought in to fight Indian rule in Kashmir but there are never more than 4,000 there.

And when the two countries clashed in Kashmir last year over an incursion into Kargil on the Indian side, New Delhi chose not to cross the military Line of Control dividing the territory even though such a move could have cut off enemy supply lines.

Singh also questions how far China would go in supporting Pakistan against India.

"The Chinese at all levels seem to be saying ... that you must solve this problem bilaterally through peaceful means," he says.

"So I'm unable to believe that if there is an escalation of any form of conflict between India and Pakistan the Chinese will come in."

Mark W. Frazier, a senior advisor to the Washington-based National Bureau of Research, points out in a recent paper that since 1998 Beijing and New Delhi have become increasingly aware of each other "as a potential partner or adversary in their long- term strategic projections".

He remarks on China's restrained response to India's nuclear tests, its studied neutrality during the Kargil conflict and a thawing of New Delhi-Beijing relations with the first-ever security dialogue between the two in March of this year.

"It remains to be seen if China's neutrality in the Kargil crisis signals a major shift away from its historic support for Pakistan," he wrote.

"...there is reason to believe that China is no longer willing to brook reckless behavior on the part of Pakistan."