[sacw] S A A N Post | 13 Aug. 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

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South Asians Against Nukes Post
13 August 2000
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#1. Amartya Sen on the Indian bomb
#2. New novel envisages a nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent

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#1.

The Times of India
13 August 2000

AMARTYA SEN ON THE INDIAN BOMB

L K Sharma

LONDON: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen called for nuclear restraint by India
saying that the Indian bomb had failed to deliver the anticipated
strategic benefits and carried very large human and economic costs. He
told the 50th Pugwash conference in Cambridge that "resenting the
obtuseness of the established nuclear powers is not a good ground for
shooting oneself in the foot".

Delivering the first Dorothy Hodgkin lecture, Prof Sen said nuclear
restraint was compatible with demanding a change of world order. "India
has reason to pursue two policies simultaneously aimed at two different
issues, which must be clearly distinguished. Abstinence in making and
deploying nuclear weapons strengthens rather than weakens India's
voice".

He said "to demand that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty be redefined
to include a dated programme of denuclearisation may well be among the
discussable alternatives. But making nuclear bombs, not to mention
deploying them, and spending scarce resources on missiles and what is
euphemistically called "delivery", can hardly be seen as sensible
policy.

He said it could not be claimed that India benefited from the 1998
blasts of Pokhran-II. not to mention the well-being of the people, even
the strategic goals of the government of India could not have been well
served. This was true in the context of India's standing vis-a-vis both
Pakistan and China. There was little success in getting recognition for
India as being in the same league as China, or for its grumble that
internationally, inadequate attention was paid to the dangers India was
supposed to face from China.

Spokesman of the Indian government were vocal on these issues before and
during the blasts. However, as a result of the tit-for-tat nuclear tests
by India and Pakistan, China could stand well above India's grumbles,
and even join President Clinton in making a joint statement, in June
1998, resolving to cooperate in non-proliferation efforts in the
subcontinent.

In the context of Pakistan, India lost the advantage of its massive
superiority over Pakistan in conventional military strength. This is now
neutralised by the mutual nuclear threat. Also, after the 1998 tests,
India's and Pakistan's position seem to be much more even. That was not
the case earlier since India had demonstrated in 1974 its capability to
make nuclear weapons. now, the international newspapers standardly refer
to the "two recent nuclear powers" with a sense of symmetry.

Aside from perceptions, in terms of the scientific requirement for
testing, Pakistan clearly had a greater need to test, never having
conducted a nuclear test before 1998, and having less scientific
expertise than India in computer simulation. The Indian blasts in May,
1998, created a situation in which Pakistan could itself go in that
direction without being blamed for starting any nuclear adventure.

Prof Sen said the thesis, often articulated by India's pro-nuclear
lobby, that India was in a greater danger of a first strike from
Pakistan before the summer of 1998 lacked both scientific plausibility
and political credibility. He said the Kargil war demonstrated that
nuclear deterrence did not make war between India and Pakistan less
likely. The argument that nuclear deterrence makes it less likely was
not sound either in theory or in practice. Kargil was the first military
encounter of that magnitude between India and Pakistan in nearly thirty
years. Of course, the nuclear dimension "adds heavily to the "penalty"
of war -- a possible nuclear holocaust -- if the war escalates", he
said.

Prof Sen said it was important not to confound two distinct problems
that had a bearing on Indian nuclear policies, first, the world order on
weapons needed a change and particularly required an effective and rapid
disarmament in nuclear arsenal. India should have a voice on this issue.

Second, this fact does not give India or Pakistan a good reason to
pursue a nuclear policy that worsened their own security and added to
the possibility of an unimaginable disaster. He said "the people whose
lives are made insecure as a result of these adventures are primarily
the residents of the subcontinent themselves''.

Moral resentment about the world order cannot justify a prudential
blunder at home. The nuclear and missile programmes carried very large
resource costs. And there were sacrifices involved in terms of public
expenditure for human well-being. Also, the deflection of scientists
from peaceful research and economic development was very costly for the
nation. However, ultimately the argument against nuclearisation was not
primarily an economic one. The biggest penalty was the increased
insecurity of human lives in the subcontinent, Prof Sen said.

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#2.

India Today
13 August 2000
BOOKS

APOCALYPSE 2007

A WESTERN JOURNALIST'S NEW NOVEL ENVISAGES A NUCLEAR WAR IN THE INDIAN
SUBCONTINENT. JUST HOW REALISTIC IS IT?

By Ashok Malik
Extract: The final Hours of Mumbai
"Let me tell you this. You succeeded in Kosovo, Timor and Iraq because
these were dying regimes of a bygone age. Milosevic was no new Hitler.
Saddam Hussein was no new Ayatollah Khomeini. But India and China are
new powers. In a hundred, a thousand years, when the American empire has
collapsed, we will be ruling the world. Let us fight our wars. Let the
tectonic plates of history shift naturally."

Chinese Foreign Minister Jamie Song to the American ambassador in
Beijing, pages 162-63, Dragon Fire

At the simplest level, Humphrey Hawksley's Dragon Fire is a
frighteningly entertaining tale, with an emphasis on both words. Set in
a tense six-day period in the near future -- May 3 to May 8, 2007 -- it
paints a nuclear war scenario involving India, Pakistan and China. Much
of the information Hawksley uses -- logistical details, military
equipment and the like -- is authentic. His bibliography is familiar.
Anyone who follows Delhi's seminar circuitry will recognise it instantly
as the bedtime reading of geriatric generals and silencer-challenged
diplomats. Fighting hypothetical wars, at least writing about them, is
not unknown in these realms. Where Hawksley, a war zone-friendly BBC
journalist who spent a decade reporting Asian strife from Sri Lanka to
the Philippines, differs is in his delivery mechanism. He has penned a
thriller, a taut drama divided into chapters so short they would qualify
for scenes in a play.

To summarise the story, a renegade unit of a Tibetan militia maintained
by the Indian Government shanghais a couple of aircraft and attempts an
audacious assault on Lhasa to rescue an imprisoned monk. Casus belli
cries Beijing, blaming Delhi. Next impetuous General Hamid Khan grabs
power in Pakistan and is keen to at least temporarily pacify extreme
Islamists so that they allow him to modernise the country. The price
they ask for is Kashmir; and so begins the fifth Indo-Pakistani war.

The dictator in Islamabad desperately wants the Chinese on his side. He
offers them a formula: back me on Kashmir and I'll help you quell your
Muslim insurgency in Xinjiang. A Chinese negotiator recognises the
"ideological contradiction" but nevertheless congratulates Hamid on "an
admirable example of pragmatism" -- and hands him a neutron bomb.

The Chinese, as inscrutable as they're innumerable, of course are
playing for greater stakes -- for a "one strike" resolution to an
ancient civilisational conflict. So while Hamid nukes Indian troops
before his country is pummelled to the point that "Pakistan no longer
existed as a functioning nation", India is simultaneously invaded
through Burma, "a military colony of China". Operation Dragon Fire is
underway.

Pushed to the backfoot by Indian resilience, China opts for the ultimate
weapon. Mumbai and Delhi encounter the Armageddon that was once
Hiroshima's experience. A principled Indian regime refuses to use the
Bomb on Chinese civilians.

What does the rest of the world do? An inward-looking US president with
re-election worries twiddles his thumbs and a gung-ho British prime
minister curses the Chinese, even invoking Francis Drake but not quite
being able to put the clock back. America's Manifest Domesticity, if a
neologism be permitted, and the geopolitical vacuum it is likely to
create is one of the cornerstones of the book.

Hawksley began his research in October 1998 and was well into the early
chapters when the Kargil war broke out in the summer of 1999. In a
sense, his plot preempted the coup in Pakistan and the escape of the
Karmapa. Dragon Fire's principal attribute is the author's straight,
reportorial but nevertheless compelling power of description. His voyage
through the streets of Lhasa and into Drapchi prison -- where the monk
is being kept -- in the initial pages of the book is riveting stuff.
Astonishingly, Hawksley told INDIA TODAY he had never visited Lhasa,
"The Chinese authorities have consistently banned my going to Tibet. The
information came from detailed maps of the city and prison given to me
by contacts."

Aside from the images of holocaust Hawksley conjures, the names of his
characters demand notice. Prime Minister Hari Dixit -- despite the north
Indian surname, the development oriented former chief minister of
"Andhra Pradesh" -- appears inspired by Chandrababu Naidu but named for

J.N. 'Mani' Dixit; a foreign minister called Prabhu Purie; a Ninan here
and a General Jyoti Bose there. Before you know it you're in the grey
area between identifying private jokes and unwarranted second guessing.

Not that the book doesn't have its angularities. You are likely to grunt
at the spelling of "Arunchal Pradesh" and "Rajastan" and "Vijay Chow",
ask yourself if an Indian home minister would walk around wearing "faded
denim jeans", tell everybody that you never knew Mumbai actually had a
"Shivali bus terminal" and raise your eyebrows at the geographical
wonderment of the "Siliguri corridor around Sialkot". Following that,
you could sit down and agree with Hawksley when he hopes "the war never
happens". That makes about a billion of us.
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BOOKS
EXTRACT

The Final Hours of Mumbai

Bombay/Mumbai, India;
Local time: 1315;
Tuesday, 8 May, 2007
The temperature was 36 degrees C, the day was clear with visibility of
more than 25 km and a light wind blew in from the south at 8.33 kph. It
was one of the hottest days of the year and many workers had stayed
inside their air-conditioned offices for lunch away from the heat and
humidity.

Those outside who instinctively looked towards the flash had their eyes
burnt out. The ones who survived -- and not many did -- were blinded
with third-degree burns to their eyes. The breeze whipped up into
erratic gales which flung pedestrians at more than 160 kph to their
deaths. Within about 0.1 milliseconds after the explosion, the radius of
the fireball was about 14 m. The ground at the centre exploded with
heat. Tiles, granite, glass within a radius of 1,500 m melted. Fires
leapt out ... The first thought of most was to head for water and
thousands sought refuge on the sweeping beach along Marine Drive or
Sasoon Dock near the Gateway of India. The explosion had set off tremors
in the ground like an earthquake and the sea swelled angrily around like
water in an unsteady bowl. The sand exploded like popcorn, burning their
feet and driving them towards the water. As they swam out, the fires
proved to be faster and stronger. The victims were eventually
incinerated by leaping fireballs which seemed to bounce out to sea in
all directions, killing everything ...

Whether the missile had been targeted on the Fort area so the radiation
cloud would be blown north over the highly populated areas of the city
would remain a moot point for years to come. The Chinese claimed the
coordinates were 19 degrees 02' N, 72 degrees 56' E, the Bhabha Atomic
Research Centre (BARC) at Trombay 20 km north-east of the main Fort
financial district ...

The fact was that the single 15 kiloton warhead exploded 185 m directly
above Fort, at a lower altitude but with the same velocity as the
American strike on Hiroshima. The BARC complex was put out of action and
the prevailing winds blew the fallout due north over the most heavily
populated areas of Bombay. Just about every building was destroyed from
the west coast to the east coast, the Sea of Arabia to Harbour Bay and
from the southern coastal point in Colaba north through Fort, through
the Chatrapathi Shivali Terminus to the shacks of the Mohatta market.
Hardly anyone escaped alive -- and that was only in the first hour.

The population density in the most crowded areas of Bombay was as high
as 40,000 people per square km. Given that it was lunchtime on a working
day, the number of people in Fort was at least that. No one ever came up
with even a roughly accurate figure but, for the record, the Indian
Government put the number killed in the first hour of the explosion at
200,000.