World safety is at stake under threat of nuclear war

Huck Gutman, Professor of English University of Vermont, USA, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

Americans know little about the current confrontation of massed troops across the Line of Control, but then Americans in general know little about either India or Pakistan. What happens in distant places is all too often just a faint haze on the most distant limit of sight.

Exacerbating this shortsightedness, Americans operate out of what cultural historians call American exceptionalism.

A less kind view would call it unbridled egotism. To a larger degree, Americans ignore what takes place beyond their national borders, unless what is happening affects them directly. Or unless the occurrences reverberate symbolically, forcing Americans to reconceptualize society or history and hence change the axes of their lives.

President George W Bush, said of the current standoff between India and Pakistan, "I don't believe the situation is defused yet, but I do believe there is a way to do so, and we are working hard to convince both the Indians and Pakis there's a way to deal with their problems without going to war."

Did the President of the United States mean to be derogatory in his usage of the term "Pakis?" I very much doubt it. What he revealed was his ignorance.

Unhappily, the President's ignorance is the nation's.

What, if not America's imperial ambitions, can explain Bush's concern with events in Kashmir? To Americans, the events which followed the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13 could affect them directly, and to alter the way in which they and others will henceforward view the world.

Reality and symbol: Both may be unalterably changed by the course of action taken by India and Pakistan in coming weeks. Even following Sept. 11, it cannot be said that the attack in New Delhi has deeply affected the Americans, nor has their new understanding of Afghanistan created a hunger to understand the history of Kashmir.

Although the American government said it wants to root out terrorists everywhere, what it meant was that it was implacably opposed to all terrorism directed toward the United States. And possibly toward some of its closer western European allies.

What America sees when it looks at India and Pakistan today is a nasty disagreement between two nuclear powers, a disagreement that could easily slide into armed conflict. And this conflict, is one that could slide further, into a war in which nuclear weapons are deployed, and used.

Americans do not understand the place of religious difference in this disagreement, neither in Kashmir nor in the prickly relations between the two nations.

What readers of this newspaper take for common knowledge and feel as part of the heft of current events -- the significance of Gandhi and Jinnah, the role in Kashmir's destiny of Maharaja Hari Singh and Lord Mountbatten, the past wars between the two nations, the former regimes of General Zia-ul-Haq and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the creation of Bangladesh, the seemingly endless migrations which continue even to the present moment -- is neither known nor felt by foreign observers.

Americans do not know how to weigh, in the affair of Kashmir, the competing claims of autonomy and sovereignty, of liberation and continuity, of indigenous struggle and foreign intervention, of self-determination and national integrity. What Americans do know, along with Europeans and Africans, South Americans and Asians, is that the storm clouds of nuclear war have appeared on the world's horizon. They know that there is great anger in both India and Pakistan, anger fueled by religious fundamentalism.

America, too, knows about fundamentalism; Christian fundamentalism is a major force in American politics.

Based on their understanding of how implacable can be those who are convinced that they have God on their side, combined with their understanding of how strong a motivating force is national pride, thoughtful Americans can foresee that the course of affairs in Kashmir might tragically slip into nuclear war.

In mid 19th century, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a great essay about circles. His dominant image was of a stone dropped into a pond: Circular ripples appear, and they spread outward. He was writing about ideas, about how they circulate, about how growth and expansion is a natural law, true not only for ripples in ponds but for human culture. But there is another kind of circle, the nuclear circle.

If Pakistan or India, Pakistan and India, resort to detonating nuclear weapons or blowing up nuclear reactors, hundreds of thousands will die. Tens of millions will be maimed by radiation.

Hundreds of millions will be at future risk all over the globe.

Worse -- can there be worse? -- the prohibition which has held since Nagasaki is in danger of unraveling. "Mutually assured destruction", as savage a threat as there ever has been, has somehow constrained nations from first use of nuclear weapons for over five decades.

But once the nuclear prohibition is breached, it will become much easier for the next nation, or terrorist group, to use nuclear devices. So there is good reason for America, and Americans, to be concerned. We are, even if we don't always realize how urgently, in this together.

If the conflict between Pakistan and India expands, especially if it goes nuclear, the human world will pay the price. And the natural world, as well. A savage destruction looms, not as a certainty but as a possibility.

It is not the place for Americans, with their national obtuseness, to tell the nations of the sub-continent what to do. But they can always urge prudence, moderation, and the necessity of dialog.

All are human responses that have proved useful in crisis after crisis. And they can recite a lesson they would do well to learn themselves, as a nation: It is not just one nation's interest that is at stake, or two, but the fate of the entire world.

Sharing the rounded globe, we are linked in a circle of humanity, The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai understood circles, too. His poem, The Diameter of the Bomb, has much to tell us about destruction and its widest circles:

The diameter of the bomb was 30 centimeters/and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,/with four dead and 11 wounded. And around these, in a larger circle/of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered/and one graveyard. But the young woman/ who was buried in the city she came from,/ at a distance of more than 100 kilometers,/ enlarges the circle considerably,/and the solitary man mourning her death/ at the distant shores of a country far across the sea/includes the entire world in the circle./And I won't even mention the crying of orphans/that reaches up to the throne of God and/beyond, making/a circle with no end and no God.