- When earlier this year Pakistan's leaders made it abundantly
clear that they are prepared to use nuclear weapons first to prevent a
war in which they fear they will be overwhelmed by India's conventional
military superiority, four nuclear scientists got to work on a paper which
they adapted from the 2001 book, 'Out of the Nuclear Shadow', edited by
Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian. The four: Matthew McKinzie, of the Natural
Resources Defence Council, Washington DC; Zia Mian and M.V. Ramana of the
Programme for Science and Global Security / Princeton University, Princeton,
NJ; and A.H. Nayyar, of the Department of Physics, Quaid-i-Azam University,
Islamabad, titled their paper 'Nuclear War in South Asia'. They presented
details of the scenario expected after the decision had been taken by Pakistan
to use weapons of mass destruction and what would be the after-effects
were India to retaliate in the same manner.
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- While India has offered an agreement for no-first use
of nuclear weapons, in the event of war its armed forces could possibly
attempt to destroy Pakistan's nuclear capability before it is used, or
ponder its own capability to launch a nuclear attack if it believed that
enemy nuclear missiles were armed and ready for launch. Pakistan, in turn,
could seek to pre-empt such a situation by using its nuclear weapons straight
off rather than risk losing them.
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- Neither Pakistan nor India has the technology for an
early warning, and even if they did and it worked reliably, geography has
made sure that they could not use it against each other. In their nuclear
cold war heyday, the United States and the Soviet Union had a twenty-five
minute warning time to find out if in fact there was a real missile attack,
whether the launch was accidental or not, and what to do about it.
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- An Indian Prithvi missile would take somewhere between
three and five minutes to reach almost anywhere in Pakistan; and Pakistan's
Ghauri missile can reach Delhi in about five minutes. If they had early
warning systems, all they could do would be to give a warning of what was
happening - that missiles had been launched. There would be no time to
decide whether the attack was real or a mistake, and the decision to launch
a nuclear retaliation would have to be made regardless.
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- Targets for nuclear weapons are two. One is the indiscriminate
destruction of cities with the hope of forcing an end to hostilities or
an unconditional surrender. The second is the deliberate destruction of
military command structures and war fighting capabilities. In a drawn-out
war, Pakistan cannot hope to prevail and its leaders have made it abundantly
clear that they intend to take out the main Indian cities. If India decided
to attack only military targets, it would be tantamount to taking out Pakistan's
cities as most of Pakistan's military centres are either in, or located
close to, its cities. Karachi, Hyderabad, Bahawalpur, Multan, Lahore, Gujranwala,
Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta are all army corps headquarters. Islamabad
has the air force and naval headquarters. So they are prime and obvious
targets. And in any case, with the large-scale destruction caused by nuclear
weapons, even if they are specifically targeted at military installations,
any nearby city would not be saved.
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- The yield of the nuclear weapon used by the United States
in 1945 to attack Hiroshima, equivalent to 15 thousand tons of TNT detonated
at 580 metres above the surface of the earth, is comparable to the yields
of the nuclear weapons that India and Pakistan claimed they tested in May
1998. The four scientists have therefore described the effects of a single
explosion of a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb at an elevation of 600 metres
over Mumbai, the consequences of which would be similar for any other large,
densely populated South Asian city.
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- The average population density of Mumbai is about 23,000
people per square kilometre. But there are regions where the population
density exceeds 100,000 per square kilometre. To quote: "There are
three ways to estimate the number of casualties from prompt effects. All
of these are based on empirical data from Hiroshima when the casualties
were expressed as a function of different variables - radius, overpressure,
and thermal fluence, respectively. Using these three models and assuming
the above population densities, we can calculate that there will be somewhere
between 150,000 and 800,000 deaths in Bombay within a few weeks of the
explosion. These would be the result from just the blast and fire effects
of a Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapon, and assuming that fallout effects
are negligible (assumptions that lead to a very conservative casualty estimate)
the number of people dying of all causes could be as high as 350,000 to
400,000 for a 15-kiloton weapon.
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- Many more people would be subject to lower doses of radiation,
which in the case of already sick people, the old and the young, could
well be lethal in the absence of medical care. Many more people will certainly
die from long-term effects, especially radiation-related causes. Studies
involving survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveal
that the mortality rates for all diseases, leukemia and malignancies other
than leukemia, are all significantly higher than among people not exposed
to radiation. Increases in the cancer rates among survivors of an atomic
bombing of Bombay may be comparable to, if not greater than, those among
Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.
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- A large-scale nuclear war in South Asia would have terrible
consequences. An estimate of the numbers of deaths and injuries from nuclear
attacks on ten major Indian and Pakistani cities has been made by transposing
onto each city the characteristics and consequences of the August 6, 1945,
Hiroshima bombing with its mass fires, radiation sicknesses, severe burns,
deaths in buildings collapsed by the shock wave, hurricane-force winds
propelling missiles through the air, and blindness. Calculated to the nearest
thousand, is the numbers of dead, severely injured, and slightly injured
persons after a nuclear attack on the following five large Indian and five
large Pakistani cities. A total of 2.9 million deaths is predicted for
these cities in India and Pakistan with an additional 1.5 million severely
injured (figures are given in order of total population within five kilometres
of Ground Zero: killed; severely injured; slightly injured; total immediate
casualties):
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- Bangalore: 3,077,937; 314,000;
175,000, 411,000; 900,000.
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- Mumbai: 3,143,284; 477,000;
229,000; 477,000; 1,183,000.
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- Kolkata: 3,520,344; 357,000;
198,000; 466,000; 1,021,000.
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- Chennai: 3,252,628; 364,000;
196,000; 449,000; 1,009,000.
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- New Delhi: 1,638,744; 176,000;
94,000; 218,000; 488,000.
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- Faisalabad: 2,376,478; 336,000;
174,000; 374,000; 884,000.
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- Islamabad: 798,583; 154,000;
67,000; 130,000; 351,000.
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- Karachi: 1,962,458; 240,000;
127,000; 283,000; 650,000.
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- Lahore: 2,682,092; 258,000;
150,000; 354,000; 762,000.
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- Rawalpindi: 1,589,828; 184,000;
97,000; 221,000; 502,000.
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- These estimated predictions of casualties merely scratch
the surface of what would actually transpire were both countries to use
their nuclear arsenals against each other. Key social and physical networks
that make daily life possible would disappear: families and neighbourhoods
would be devastated; factories, shops, communications, electricity and
water systems demolished; hospitals and schools and offices destroyed;
governments rendered totally non-functional; and the flood of refugees
would carry the physical effects far beyond the cities. Nothing, just nothing,
would ever again be the same.
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- And, now in India and Pakistan, let us see how the unbalanced
opinion makers help us. Let us look at what is read in our press and the
international press by the world leaders and decision makers who have an
impact on both countries.
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- India's Defence Minister George Fernandes, in an interview
with the Hindustan Times, voiced his sentiments: "We could take a
strike, survive, and then hit back. Pakistan would be finished." (May
2002) Indian Defence Secretary Yogendra Narain took things a step further
in an interview with Outlook magazine: "A surgical strike is the answer,"
he said. But if that failed to resolve things, he added, "We must
be prepared for total mutual destruction." (May 2002)
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- Pakistan's former Chief of Army Staff, General Mirza
Aslam Beg, in a public debate in Islamabad, declared: "We can make
a first strike, and a second strike, or even a third." The dreadful
vision of nuclear war left him unmoved. "You can die crossing the
street, or you could die in a nuclear war. You've got to die someday anyway."
(May 2002)
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- Former chief of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence,
now with political aspirations, retired Lt General Hameed Gul has declared
that "the moment India strikes, Pakistan will call for a jihad against
India and invite Muslims from all over the world to sneak into India and
wage attacks. He added that Pakistan would also support separatist movements
[in] India and might even bomb India's high-tech centres. 'If India attacks,
then it's come one, come all, it's jihad'." (New York Times, June
2002) "Hamid Nasir Chattha, a prominent politician, noted in a newspaper
essay yesterday that Pakistan had spent a fortune acquiring a nuclear capability
and suggested that as a result it would be almost a shame not to use it.
'If the use of nuclear is unavoidable for the survival of Pakistan, then
it must be used with no hesitation'." (New York Times, June 2002)
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- http://www.dawn.com/weekly/cowas/cowas.htm
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