Indo-Pak summit a chance to cut nuclear risk

Indo-Pak summit a chance to cut nuclear risk

By Sanjeev Miglani

NEW DELHI (Reuters): When former U.S. President Bill Clinton
declared that South Asia was perhaps one of "the most dangerous
places in the world today" few begged to differ.

Experts say that India and Pakistan, bristling with crude
nuclear weapons, have been living on the edge for far too long
and must address themselves to the nuclear risk above everything
else in next week's summit.

Since they carried out tit-for-tat nuclear tests and declared
themselves nuclear powers three years ago, the perennially
hostile neighbors have been groping in the dark.

Neither side knows the other's nuclear capabilities, whether
its secrecy-shrouded weapons are on hair-trigger alert or even
who controls them.

"It is all very, very dangerous. There is a basic risk
involved when there is a complete absence of dialog between two
nuclear states," said P.R. Chari, director of the New Delhi-based
Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

New Delhi has spelt out a nuclear doctrine that envisages
weapons deployed on aircraft, missiles and at sea, but it has not
announced a command-and-control system for such a force.

Pakistan has identified a national command system, but has not
laid out a nuclear doctrine that tells the world -- and India in
particular -- what to expect in a nuclear conflict.

Worse, there is no safety regime to check against
misperceptions by either side or even a nuclear accident on a
subcontinent riven by decades of distrust and misunderstandings.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan
President Pervez Musharraf are not expected to make dramatic
progress on issues that have defied solution for five decades.

But experts say they must try to push the nuclear clock back
from the midnight hour.

Until Vajpayee's surprise offer to Musharraf for a meeting,
the two sides were not even on talking terms.

"There has to be mutual dialog on nuclear risk reduction,"
agreed Shireen Mazari, director general of The Institute of
Strategic Studies, a think-tank associated with the Pakistan's
foreign ministry.

"...You must have dialog and resolve your political conflicts
because where political conflicts exist there is always some
level of nuclear risk," she said.

A year after they conducted underground nuclear explosions,
India and Pakistan teetered on the brink of a third full-scale
conflict over the bitterly disputed region of Kashmir. It would
have been the world's first war between two nuclear states.

Since then there have been countless warnings from the
international community, and paperback writers are now churning
out chilling fictional accounts of a conventional war over
Kashmir escalating into a nuclear exchange.

But the politicians and people of the two countries, many of
whom rejoiced over the 1998 tests, rarely speak of the dangers of
hostile neighbors living on the nuclear edge.

Vajpayee and then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif agreed
to implement a set of measures designed to reduce nuclear risks
during a summit in Lahore in 1999, but the undeclared war in
northern Kashmir three months later pushed everything into cold
storage.

"There is a touching faith here in the wisdom of our leaders
that somehow we will not go over the edge," said retired Indian
navy admiral Raja Menon.

But military experts believe a simple error of judgment by
either side could be catastrophic.

One army brigadier, painting a hypothetical scenario, said
unusual activity at a nuclear site of one country could trigger a
rapid and dangerous chain of events on the other side.

"Suppose there is some movement at Kahuta (Pakistan's nuclear
site) and we conclude, right or wrong, they are preparing for an
offensive strike. We have to react, or else it will be too late."

Since they decided to arm themselves with nuclear weapons,
both nations have frantically pursued missile development
programs aimed at delivering these crude weapons.

India's short-range Prithvi missile and Pakistan's Hatf
missile are extremely destabilizing because they allow very
little reaction time, said Gurmeet Kanwal, an expert at the
Indian government-funded Institute for Defense Studies and
Analyses.

He said both sides could enter into an agreement on the non-
use of such short-range missile for nuclear deterrence.

Among the other steps that India and Pakistan agreed to during
the Lahore summit were to consult each other on nuclear
doctrines, give advance notification of ballistic missile tests
and set up communication mechanisms to prevent misunderstandings.

"Both leaders have no higher responsibility than to reduce
nuclear dangers on the subcontinent," wrote Michael Krepon,
President Emeritus of the Washington-based Henry L.Stimson Center
in an article in Indian newsmagazine Outlook.

"There's a great deal of work to do to increase nuclear
safety; much time has already been lost."