Thinking about the Unthinkable: Nuclear War in South Asia
     29-MAY-98

     By Donna Bryson
     Associated Press Writer

     NEW DELHI, India (AP) If Pakistan tops its missiles with nuclear
     warheads as promised, it could hit India's capital with a
     Hiroshima-size bomb in less than four minutes.

     If India puts nuclear caps on its missiles, it could devastate the
     Pakistani capital in just three minutes, launch to blast.

     Such a scenario whether the result of accident or design is
     conceivable now that South Asia's longtime rivals have declared
     themselves nuclear powers.

     The effects of what would be the world's first nuclear exchange
     are hard to measure because so many variables remain unclear.
     Neither country has said how many weapons it has or plans to
     stockpile, or been open about the destructive power of its
     weapons. And experts say it could be years before either has the
     technology to deliver a nuclear warhead.

     Paul Beaver, spokesman for defense publisher Jane's Information
     Group, said Pakistan and India each are believed to have 12 to 18
     nuclear weapons packing yields equivalent to about 20 kilotons of
     TNT.

     That's the size of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped
     on Hiroshima in 1945, killing about 100,000 people.

     Even more could die in a dense city like New Delhi, home to 10
     million people. Thousands of slum dwellers crowd plots the size of
     a city block.

     Most of the death and destruction would be within a half-mile
     radius of ground zero.

     Much of the fallout would be pushed into the stratosphere if the
     bomb exploded in the air, said Ted Taylor, a former nuclear bomb
     designer who now campaigns against such weapons.

     Bigger bombs could threaten people with radiation sickness and
     death for miles downwind, Taylor said.

     And fallout, of course, is likely to spread worldwide through the
     air and water. The effects of radiation from Hiroshima and the
     1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, including birth defects,
     were far-reaching and may not yet be fully understood.

     The world already has weathered fallout from dozens of
     above-ground nuclear blasts, including more than 100 test blasts
     in the former Soviet republic of Kazakstan alone.
     Environmentalists estimate those tests exposed 1.5 million people
     to radiation; the exact toll there remains unclear as well.

     Pakistan's Ghauri missile, which the country's foreign minister
     said would be fitted with nuclear warheads, can reach New Delhi,
     the Indian capital, from bases in the border city of Lahore in
     less than four minutes. India's Prithvi, based in the north, can
     reach the Pakistani capital of Islamabad in less than three
     minutes.

     Moscow and Washington were locked in a nuclear standoff for
     decades without going to war, and it can be argued that Islamabad
     and New Delhi already have shown such restraint during the years
     that their weapons programs were secret.

     But the United States and the Soviet Union did not have as long a
     history of hostility as do the two neighbors, which have fought
     three wars in the 50 years since British India broke up into
     Islamic Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India.

     And unlike the Cold Warriors, India and Pakistan two of the
     poorest countries in the world don't have the benefit of
     sophisticated communications links between their political and
     military leaders or a system for deciding when and where to use
     their weapons of mass destruction. A misunderstanding could set
     off a nuclear war.

     Or it could start small but deliberately in Kashmir, the corner of
     the Himalayas over which India and Pakistan already have fought
     two wars. About a third of Kashmir is in Pakistani hands, the rest
     in Indian, and both countries say they want it all.

     Pakistan, emboldened by the idea that nuclear bombs will keep
     India from embarking on all-out war, could step up its support of
     separatist militants in Indian-held Kashmir, said Eric Arnett, a
     nuclear weapons researcher with the Stockholm International Peace
     and Research Institute.

     In that case, Arnett said, India might respond to a Pakistani move
     in Kashmir by broadening the battlefield, sending tanks across its
     southwestern desert into Pakistan.

     India has 1.2 million fighters the world's third-largest army and
     there is no sign that its policy-makers believe that nuclear
     weapons have erased its superiority over Pakistan.

     Would a frightened Pakistan react by trying to wipe out Indian
     tanks with a missile carrying a small nuclear weapon? It's
     possible, Arnett said, "if you get into this Strangelove world
     that we're talking about."