Tit-for-tat tests political in their nature

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Now we will enjoy the fighting," grinned a bearded man nicknamed 'Ayatollah' at the headquarters of an Islamic guerrilla outfit on the Pakistani side of the Kashmir cease-fire line, "because the Indians are fundamentalists and we are fundamentalists too!" Nuclear fundamentalists, on a collision course for the world's first nuclear war.

Pakistan's five nuclear test blasts on Thursday followed India's five tests of two weeks ago as surely as the day follows the night. And however outraged Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee may pretend to be, New Delhi knew they were coming.

Indeed, Indian strategists probably even calculated that forcing Pakistan to test would leave it at a greater disadvantage than before. Both countries would face economic sanctions from the United States and the international lending institutions where Washington has influence, but Pakistan would suffer far more than India because it is much more dependent on foreign aid and loans.

There is also a naive belief in Indian political circles that nuclear weapons are just a bigger kind of artillery. Since India, with seven times Pakistan's population and twenty times its wealth, can afford more nuclear weapons, it now (in this kind of magical thinking) has a bigger stick with which to beat Pakistan.

Indian Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani is clearly of this persuasion. India's nuclear tests, he said, have "brought about a qualitatively new stage in Indo-Pakistan relations...it signifies India's resolve to deal firmly and strongly with Pakistan's hostile designs and activities in Kashmir." How would you interpret that declaration if you were a Pakistani?

Of course, the most important reason for India's nuclear tests was not military but political. 'Vajpayee's Viagra', cynical Indian journalists are calling the tests, and they have certainly inflated the shaky coalition government's prestige in the public's eyes.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's main motive for replying with his own nuclear tests was equally political: he would have been driven from office by popular demand had he refused. So the tests are heavily symbolic on both sides -- except that a 43- kiloton nuclear weapon is one hell of a symbol.

Nawaz Sharif seems personally aware that nuclear weapons are bad for your health. "Today the flames of the nuclear fire are all over," he said. "We have jumped into these flames...with courage." But general awareness of the true nature of nuclear weapons was better conveyed by the official who announced that "the long-range Ghauri missile is already being capped with nuclear warheads to give a befitting reply to any misadventure by the enemy."

Once the warheads have been mounted on India's Prithvi and Pakistan's Ghauri intermediate-range missiles (which have already been flight-tested), then every Indian and Pakistani city is about fifteen minutes away from oblivion. But this doesn't yet worry the new members of the nuclear weapons club. After all, as their more sophisticated citizens point out, every city in America and Russia has been in that position for the past fifty years, and nuclear deterrence kept them all safe. It will work the same here.

It won't, for two reasons. One is that for a long time India and Pakistan will not have the essentially invulnerable nuclear arsenals that finally conferred some stability on the Soviet- American nuclear confrontation -- the kind of mobile or hardened systems that give you time to think before acting because they can ride out a first strike by the other side, and still hit back with crushing force afterwards.

Instead, they will both have relatively small numbers of vulnerable nuclear delivery vehicles, poor detection capabilities, and close to zero warning time. These will be hair- trigger systems -- just like those in the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the first decade of the Cold War, when there were several terrifying crises (Korea, the Berlin blockade, Cuba) that almost went over the brink.

The other reason was best expressed by Pakistani strategic analyst and former general Talat Masood: "This is not a region where nuclear deterrence might work like it did between America and the Soviet Union. We have a history of mistrust, territorial disputes, contiguous borders. Think of all the things that can lead to a conflict and they are all here."

Indeed, the nuclear weapons themselves become a potential source of crisis, as each side examines the other's deployments for signs that it is planning a pre-emptive strike. (This was the essence of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, at a point when Soviet-American mutual deterrence was already a great deal more stable than Indo-Pakistani deterrence will be for the next decade).

What has just happened, therefore, is very bad. It has stalled the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty in the U.S. Senate, and may well sideline it for good. The nuclear weapons club has jumped from five to seven in a single month, after it had been stable at the lower figure for 34 years. And it creates a serious possibility that we will shortly see our first real nuclear war.

The danger will peak around six to eighteen months from now, as both India and Pakistan deploy their nuclear weapons and delivery systems as fast as they can, but it will not recede greatly for many years. One miscalculation, and you could lose a lot of cities.

Still, there is a bright side. This calamitous breakdown in the 'nuclear firebreak' has occurred after the hankering for nuclear weapons, either for status reasons or for potential use, has passed its peak in countries like Brazil and Argentina (which closed down their programs) and South Africa (which actually built six bombs in secret, and then dismantled them all).

And if you're still worried, remember that the Dalai Lama says India's nuclear tests were a good thing. (Of course, India does offer him and his fellow Tibetan refugees shelter...)