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."