The Thinkable Nuclear War

Newspaper headlines are filled with words like unthinkable, Armageddon, and nightmare. But as India and Pakistan continue their downward military and diplomatic spiral in a threat of nuclear war that American military analysts consider at least as credible as the Cuban missile crisis some 40 years ago, official Washington, D.C. seems considerably less aghast than the rest of the world.

In fact, you can almost see the wheels turning as White House officials weigh the costs versus benefits of a nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent.

As with previous crises in the last year -- notably the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Israel's invasion of the West Bank -- most international media accounts of this crisis, and its risks, are differing starkly from those of their U.S. counterparts. This time, however, the differences have less to do with the reporting of events than the significance attributed them. Elsewhere, possible war between India and Pakistan is daily, front-page, multiple-story fodder, and the reports aren't pulling any punches. Consider this segment from a story in the Sunday (June 2) London Observer:

"The U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency calculates that the first hour of a full-scale nuclear exchange could kill as many as 12 million people and leave up to seven million injured. Millions more would die in other fighting or from starvation and disease.

"In Britain, government experts calculate that all Pakistan's water and food would be contaminated by even a limited exchange, with large areas of India rendered practically uninhabitable.

"'We don't even know where to start in thinking about how to deal with a humanitarian crisis on this scale,' said one source. 'There are simply no models for it. We don't even know how we would get aid in the immediate aftermath. No one has any experience of a humanitarian operation on this scale on a nuclear battlefield, and India and Pakistan have no mechanisms for coping with this.

"And it is not simply the fate of the combatant nations that frightens the planners. 'In a worst-case scenario,' said a senior Foreign Office source, 'we would be looking at contamination affecting Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, even China.'"

It's easy to rationalize the difference in tone as one of distance; in North America, half a world away from the Indian subcontinent, such talk seems fantastical and far removed from American concerns or influence. But the United States is, in fact, knee-deep in this crisis in a variety of ways, and one of the most obvious of these is revealed by another, subtler difference in news coverage: in the U.S., the interviews and perspective come largely from the Pakistani side of the disputed "Line of Control" that divides Kashmir and defines the conflict.

There seems little doubt that the Bush Administration has cast its lot with the terrorism-sponsoring military dictatorship of Pakistan rather than democratic India, and that it has done so purely out of self-interest. Last week it was noisily announced that Secretary of Empire Donald Rumsfeld would at last be shuffling off to the subcontinent -- and presumably with some urgency, as most of his European counterparts had already made the trip. Much of his message is likely to be for Pakistan's military dictator, er, General, er, "President" Musharraf -- not concerning Kashmir, but demanding that Musharraf stop redeploying troops away from Pakistan's western border regions with Afghanistan, where they are reinforcing the American snark hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Reports out of Pakistan last week suggested that the majority of those fighters aren't in Pakistan's mountainous west at all -- they're in the cities. And this is Musharraf's dilemma, and what makes the current face-off with India so treacherous. After teaming with the Americans, Musharraf's grip on power is tenuous at best; at least symbolically he's now breaking with the Islamic extremists that Pakistan has long trained and deployed in its effort to "liberate" the largely Muslim Kashmir from Indian control.