Truthout: Nuclear Fallout From Imploding Pakistan?

Nuclear Fallout From Imploding Pakistan?
By J. Sri Raman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 06 November 2007

A wide range of observers, from then-US President Bill Clinton to peace activists everywhere, saw South Asia as the scariest place on earth in the early months of 2002. The eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation of a million Indian and Pakistani troops across the border in Kashmir seemed to threaten an imminent nuclear war. Events in Pakistan alone have sufficed now to make the subcontinent the scariest spot in the world, and for a very similar reason.

The Musharraf-declared martial law in Pakistan has created a situation full of agonizing uncertainties ahead. The most horrendous prospect, however, is of a nuclear fallout.

Many analysts have mentioned this particular possibility in passing. The general tendency, however, has been to shy away from what specifically it can mean.

The subcontinent, of course, has never been free from nuclear insecurities ever since both India and Pakistan proclaimed themselves nuclear-weapon states in 1998. Right from the morrow of India's nuclear weapons test in May that year, militarists of the country have been threatening the neighbor with dire nuclear nemesis. Islamabad, for its part, adopted a nuclear doctrine that retained the first-strike option.

Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said in May 2002 that Pakistan did not want a conflict with India, but that if it came to war between the nuclear-armed rivals, he would "respond with full might." This statement was widely interpreted to mean that, if pressed by an overwhelming conventional attack from India, with superior conventional forces, Pakistan might use its nuclear weapons.

In January 2003, the general came out with the startling confession that he had been all set to unleash "an unconventional war" on India, had a single Indian soldier crossed the border into Pakistan during the previous year's tense standoff.

Less widely noticed, nuclear threats freely traded between India and Pakistan during the armed conflict in Kargil, in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, conjured up nightmarish prospects for Indians and Pakistanis who did not quite see it all as a computer game. According to a newsman who kept a tab, the nuclear threat was exchanged no less than 13 times during the conflict. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110607L.shtml