JUNE 1998: India under the National Democratic Alliance (I) government (under prime minister Vajpayee) followed by Pakistan (under Nawaz Sharif) entered into ‘the bottomless pit of nuclear rivalry.’ This piece authored by the late veteran peace activist, author and journalist, Praful Bidwai was Communalism Combat’s cover that month. We bring it to our readers now at Sabrangindia, with an accompanying piece by scientist, Zia Mian, to urge restraint and sanity in the region.

Nuclear weapons act like boomerangs on both India and Pakistan

For more than the one and a quarter billion people who live in South Asia, the world has been radically, horrifically, shockingly transformed. After the nuclear tests of India and Pakistan in May, they now live under the shadow of the Mushroom Cloud — that is, to put it bluntly, the threat of mass annihilation, unspeakable destruction, and epochal devastation. Unless India and Pakistan stop their descent into the bottomless pit of nuclear rivalry now, they will inflict unlimited damage upon their societies, states and, above all, their peoples.The bulk of the blame for this terrifying development must be squarely laid at the door of communalism. The nuclear obsession of a particular party was imposed upon a billion people on May 11, when the BJP–led minority government made a violent break with a policy with a 50–year–long continuity — of opposing nuclear deterrence and not exercising the nuclear weapons option. The BJP altered this radically, undemocratically, without the pretence of a strategic review, and without even the fig leaf of a security rationale.

The BJP’s decision to put India on the dangerous path of nuclearisation deeply offends all notions of civilised public conduct. It degrades, it does not enhance, India’s security. It has propelled us into a confrontation with our neighbours and lowered our global stature. India is the object of reprimand, reproach, and humiliating sanctions from the world community. Nuclearisation will promote the profoundly undemocratic values of militarism, secrecy, jingoism and male chauvinism. And it could prove economically ruinous. Most of all, it is fraught with unconscionably destructive human consequences.

Let us look at some of these on the basis of a scientific analysis. To start with, India and Pakistan are likelier to fight a nuclear war than the two rival blocs came close to at any point during the Cold War barring perhaps the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Even a limited exchange would result in the killing of lakhs of people in the two countries in ways that will make Genghis Khan look like an angel.

If a single nuclear weapon is exploded over a major city such as Bombay, Karachi, Lahore or Delhi, it could result in the death of up to 9,00,000 people, depending on factors such as population density, height of airbust and prevalent wind velocity. Apart from these early deaths, there would be hundreds of thousands of cancer and leukaemia victims due to radiation, besides a host of other serious illnesses and disorders. As Nikita Khrushchev once said: “The survivors would envy the dead”.

That is not all. The damage would be carried to a number of future generations. Some of the worst effects would be caused by plutonium–239, named after the God of Hell, and the most toxic substance known to science, which has a half–life of 24,400 years which means it will not decay fully for millions of years. A few millionths of a gram of plutonium, if ingested or inhaled, can cause cancers of the lung and the gastrointestinal tract over a period of time. The victims of a nuclear explosion would experience a series of effects.

Professor Karl Z. Morgan, former chairman of the International Commission for Radiological Protection, describes these as follows:

The first effect is an intense flux of photons from the blast, which releases 70 to 80 per cent of the bomb’s energy. The effects go up to third–degree thermal burns, and are not a pretty sight. Initial deaths are due to this effect.
The next phenomenon is the supersonic blast front. You see it before you hear it. The pressure front has the effect of blowing away anything in its path. Heavy steel girders were found bent at 90–degree angles after the Japanese bombings.

After the front comes the overpressure phase. This would feel like being under water at a few hundred metres’ depth. At a few thousand metres under the sea, even pressurised hulls implode. The pressure gradually dies off, and there is a negative overpressure phase, with a reversed blast wind. This reversal is due to air rushing back to fill the void left by the explosion. The air gradually returns to room pressure. At this stage, fires caused by electrical destruction and ignited debris, turn the whole area into a firestorm.

Then come the middle term effects such as cell damage and chromosomal aberrations. Genetic or hereditary damage can show up up to 40 years after initial irradiation. In a nuclear blast, with a crude, first–generation Hiroshima or Nagasaki–type bomb, everything within a radius of 0.8 km would be vaporised, with 98 per cent fatalities. There would be firestorms raging at a velocity of 500 kmph and an unbearable overpressure of 25 pounds per square inch. Within a radius of 1.6 km, all structures above ground would be totally destroyed, and the fatality rate would be 90 per cent.In the next concentric circle, with a radius of 3 km, there would be severe blast damage. All factories and large buildings would collapse, as would bridges and flyovers. Rivers would flow counter–current. Winds would blow at 400 kmph. The fatality rate would be 65 per cent.

Next comes severe heat damage within a radius of 4 km: everything flammable burns. People would suffocate because most of the available oxygen would be consumed by the fires. The likely wind velocities: 200 kmph. Likely fatalities: 50 per cent. Injuries: 45 per cent.

In the fifth zone, with a radius of 5 km, winds would blow at 150 kmph. People would be blown around. The fatality rate would be 15 per cent plus. Most survivors would sustain second– and third–degree burns. Residential structures would be severely damaged.

A huge electromagnetic pulse would be produced by the radio-radar portion of the multiple–wavelength discharge of radiation. The EMP effect increases the higher you go into the atmosphere. High–altitude explosions can knock out electronics by inducing a current surge in closed circuit metallic objects — computers, power lines, phone lines, TVs, radios, etc. The damage range can be over 1,000 km.

All these effects would be magnified roughly 25 times if a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb with an explosive yield of one megaton is burst over an altitude of 8,000 ft (i.e. about 2,500 metres). India claims to have developed just such a bomb. If a 20 megaton device — which is not difficult to make once the thermonuclear technology is learnt — is used, the destruction would be roughly 100–fold greater.

After a nuclear blast, all water bodies within a radius of 100 to 300 km would be dangerously contaminated. As would all vegetation and the soil. Cattle would be so severely exposed to radiation that milk could not be consumed. Underground aquifers would remain polluted for years. Not just cities, but whole regions, comprising anything between five and 20 districts, would become wastelands.

Millions of people would be severely traumatised and will never be able to live normal, sane lives. Children would be the worst affected, with lasting physical and psychological damage, most of it irreversible.

In the South Asia context, a nuclear attack would have clear trans-border consequences. Bombing Lahore will amount to signing the death warrant for half of Amritsar’s population. Radioactive fallout from Jalandhar will not leave Pakistan’s Punjab unaffected. And Bombay’s bombing could have devastating effects in Sindh. Nuclear weapons will act like boomerangs on both India and Pakistan. Using them would tantamount to committing suicide.

Among the early casualties in a nuclear explosion would be the civil defence and medical infrastructure. As International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War say, First Aid would be reduced to Last Aid. There will be, can be, no defence against a nuclear bomb. These are not fanciful scare–mongering scenarios, but sober estimates based on hard–core physics and biology, developed by Nobel Prize–winning scientists and physicians. These estimates must be treated with the utmost seriousness and gravity.

The threat of megadeath today hangs over India and Pakistan. The very circumstance that a nuclear war between the two is possible should alarm us all. But the situation may be even worse: an India–Pakistan nuclear exchange appears likelier than an East–West nuclear attack at any time during the Cold War except perhaps the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. This is not because Indian and Pakistani politicians and nuclear scientists are more irresponsible than those in America and the former USSR. It is more because South Asia is the only part of the world which has experienced a relentless hot-cold war over 50 years. It bristles with mutual hatreds, suspicions and hostility on so many counts that any of them could turn into a flashpoint — the Kashmir Valley, the border dispute in the eastern sector, military exercises getting out of hand, as happened in 1987 under Gen. K. Sundarji.

The very fact that the two states continue to sacrifice hundreds of men in fighting an insane war at Siachen — the world’s highest–altitude conflict, where it costs Rs.1.5 lakh to reach one chapati to a soldier — speaks of the profound irrationality that mark their relations. And today, their politicians are actually talking about using nuclear weapons — witness Dr Farooq Abdullah’s statement of June 8. Equally worrisome is the likelihood that both are working on battlefield-level tactful nuclear weapons.(Hence the sub–kiloton tests). These considerably lower the danger threshold.

There is, besides, the horrific likelihood of accidental, unauthorised or unintentional use of nuclear weapons. This is not some fantasy, but a real possibility. More than 100 such incidents occurred during the Cold War in spite of scores of confidence-building measures and precautionary procedures adopted by the two warring blocs. These included multiple hot lines, permissive action links (PALs, which are computer chips with codes for authorisation), early warning systems, false alarm filters, efficient radars and expensive control and communications systems.

A Brookings Institution study says that it was sheer luck, not nuclear deterrence, or fear of unacceptable damage that prevented a nuclear war between the two blocs.

At the height of the Cold War, the lag time between the NATO and Warsaw Pact was never less than 30 minutes. Their strategic missiles would take that long to reach their targets. In the case of India and Pakistan, the missile flight–time would be just two to three minutes — grossly inadequate to take remedial action or activate war–prevention procedures. And given that virtually no interception of missiles is possible, a nuclear warhead could almost certainly be delivered across the border before there is time to react — with devastating results.

Nuclear weapons and missiles are highly complex systems with strong coupling between different subsystems and processes and hence a high chance of accidents. There is no way that their accidental or unauthorised use can be reliably prevented. There is, besides, the real possibility of a group of overzealous officers launching an attack on the “enemy” on their own. Pakistan, for instance, has had a series of army coup attempts by Islamic fanatics. If they have access to nuclear weapons, they could play havoc.

You just cannot take chances with nuclear weapons. They are too destructive to be left with even an infinitesimally low chance of use. That is why they must never be made, leave alone deployed, especially in this subcontinent where the two governments are working up bestial responses to one another and indulging in open war–mongering.

All of us citizens who do not wish to be roasted to death and turned into radioactive dust must act to prevent nuclear weapons from being made or deployed. This is too important a task to be entrusted to governments, least of all governments led by recklessly irresponsible fanatics and bigots. We must act by building a citizens’ movement that mounts pressure on our government to stop in its tracks and get them to retrace steps.

They must commit themselves never to test again, and drop all plans to make nuclear weapons, leave alone think of using them or threatening to use them under any circumstances.
We must act NOW. Or it could soon be too late.

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 1998, Cover Story

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This article was first published in Waging Nonviolence.

The seven members of the Kings Bay Plowshares, who entered the Georgia naval base on April 4 2018 to protest nuclear weapons, white supremacy and racism. Credit: Waging Nonviolence/Kings Bay Plowshares. All rights reserved.

“Our grandma is in jail,” Madeline tells a woman wrestling a shopping cart at Target.

“She went over a war fence and tried to make peace,” Seamus adds helpfully. “They arrested her, and she is in jail now.”

“Where?” the woman asks, looking from them to me in disbelief and maybe pity.

“We don’t remember,” the kids say, suddenly done with their story and ready to make passionate pleas for the colorful items in the dollar section over the woman’s shoulder.

“Georgia,” I say, but I don’t have a lot of energy to add detail to my kids’ story. They hit all the high points.

“There’s a lot going on these days,” she says. I agree, and we move on into the store and our separate errands.

I was happy not to say more at that moment, happy to avoid a sobbing breakdown at Target, happy to wrestle one little bit of normal out of a very abnormal day.

My mom, Liz McAlister, who turned 78 in November, had been arrested deep inside the King’s Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Along with six friends, she carried banners, statements, hammers and blood onto the base. They started their
action on April 4: the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Their statement made connections between nuclear weapons, white supremacy and deeply embedded racism. It is a long statement, but given that they were carrying it into a free-fire zone—where military personnel are authorized to use deadly force—there was no particular need for brevity: “We come to Kings Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to ‘beat swords into plowshares’ by disarming the world’s deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine. We repent of the sin of white supremacy that oppresses and takes the lives of people of color here in the United States and throughout the world. We resist militarism that has employed deadly violence to enforce global domination. We believe reparations are required for stolen land, labor and lives.”

They walked onto King’s Bay Naval Station just hours after Saheed Vassell was shot and killed in a barrage of bullets by New York City police officers, just hours after hundreds of demonstrators filled the streets of Sacramento for another day, shouting “Stephon Clark, Stephon Clark, Stephon Clark” and demanding accountability after the young father of two was killed by police officers on March 18. These seven white activists know that when you are black in this country, your own corner, your grandmother’s own backyard, is a free-fire zone more dangerous than any military base.There is indeed a lot going on these days.

The statement continues: “Dr. King said, ‘The greatest purveyor of violence in the world (today) is my own government.’ This remains true in the midst of our endless war on terror. The United States has embraced a permanent war economy. ‘Peace through strength’ is a dangerous lie in a world that includes weapons of mass destruction on hair-trigger alert. The weapons from one Trident have the capacity to end life as we know it on planet Earth.”

Kings Bay is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world at about 16,000 acres. It is the home port of the U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet’s Trident nuclear-powered submarines. There are eight in total, two guided missile submarines and six ballistic missile submarines. These submarines were all built in Groton, Connecticut—right across the river from our home in New London. Each submarine, my mom and her friends assert, carries the capacity to cause devastation equivalent to 600 of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, Japan.

“Nuclear weapons kill every day through our mining, production, testing, storage and dumping, primarily on indigenous native land. This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet. As white Catholics, we take responsibility to atone for the horrific crimes stemming from our complicity with ‘the triplets’ [of evil]. Only then can we begin to restore right relationships. We seek to bring about a world free of nuclear weapons, racism and economic exploitation.”

That is not the end; you can read the whole statement and their indictment of the United States on their Facebook group. These sorts of actions—called Plowshares— have a nearly 40-year history, since my father and uncle and six others broke into the King of Prussia plant in Pennsylvania in 198o to “beat swords into plowshares.” They struck at nosecones with hammers and marked the weapons with blood to reveal the human costs and mess and suffering the weapons are built to wreak in the world.

My father participated in five of these Plowshares actions in his lifetime and helped organize countless others. Committed conspirers, steeped in active nonviolence, have carried out more than 100 of these actions since 1980. This is my mom’s second action. She and her current co-defendant Clare Grady, were part of the 1983 Griffiss Plowshares in upstate New York.

My parents estimated that they spent 11 years of their 27-year marriage separated by prison, and it was mostly these actions that kept them apart and away from us. Countless life events in our family—birthdays, graduations, celebrations of all kinds—were stuttered by the absence of one of our parents. I say this with pain and loss, but no self-pity. Dad was able to attend my high school graduation, but not my brother’s. We went straight from my college graduation to visit my dad in jail in Maine.

I missed all the raging keggers, sweaty dance parties and tearful goodbyes that marked the end of college for my friends to sit knee-to-knee with my father in a cramped and soulless room. On chairs designed for maximum discomfort, I tried to share my momentous day and all my 22-year-old big feelings while ignoring the guards and the room crowded with a dozen others doing the same thing. We wrote thousands of letters. They often crisscrossed each other so that there was a constant weaving of story and sharing across the miles.

So, when I explained that grandma was in jail to my kids—11-year-old Rosena, 5-year-old Seamus and 4-year-old Madeline—I felt the weight of a lifetime of missing and provisional family experiences, frequently lived in prison visiting rooms and through urgently scrawled letters.

I tried to figure out a way to talk to them that would make sense and, in thinking it through, I realized that none of this should make sense to anyone! Nuclear weapons? Absurd! Police brutality and white supremacy? Senseless! Plowshares actions with their symbolic transformation and ritual mess-making? A foolhardy act of David versus Goliath proportions!

So, I didn’t try to make it make sense. I just forged ahead, grateful that they had some context: We had participated in the Good Friday Stations of the Cross organized by Catholic Worker friends at our local submarine base a few days earlier, and—the night before—we had gone to hear a dramatic reading of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“Hey guys, know how we went to the sub base on Friday? Grandma was arrested in a place like that late last night. She is in jail now. She and her friends broke onto the base to say that nuclear weapons are wrong. Remember how Dr. King talked about just and unjust laws?” They nodded and remembered that King said “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” I told them that Grandma thinks that nuclear weapons—things that can destroy so much life on our planet—shouldn’t be built and protected and paid for when so many people are hungry, so many kids don’t have good schools to go to, so many people don’t have good homes. I went on and on.

“Wait, these nuclear weapons…They are war things?” Seamus asked.

“Yep, they are war things, bud.”

“Good for grandma,” he said, and that was the end of our serious conversation.

Mom and her friends are charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and two felonies: possession of tools for the commission of a crime and interference with government property.

The kids and I didn’t talk about the kind of jail time that could mean for their grandma. It is all I am thinking about right now, but they moved on, imagining out loud and with a lot of enthusiasm how grandma got by the attack dogs and police officers they had seen at the Groton Submarine Base. They were sure there was a similar set up in Georgia. “Grandma needed a ladder and a cheetah,” said Madeline. “A cheetah is the only animal that can outrun dogs and police officer’s bullets.”

I am pretty sure no cheetahs were involved in the Kings Bay Plowshares, but I am happy my daughter sees her grandmother as a fierce and powerful anti-war activist astride a wild cat.

Frida Berrigan is a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and serves on the National Committee of the War Resisters League. She lives in New London, Connecticut with her husband Patrick and their three children, Madeline (2 months), Seamus (21 months) and Rosena (7 years).

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Two out of three categories of weapons of mass destruction – biological and chemical weapons – as well as landmines and cluster munitions already have strict conventions that largely ban them. The starting point for these conventions was the humanitarian impact; these weapons are so devastating that they should never be used.

But strictly speaking, the use of nuclear weapons – arguably the most destructive of them all – is currently not necessarily prohibited under international law. And countries that do not possess nuclear weapons, together with NGOs, have wanted to have them banned for a long time.

The human cost

The international community witnessed the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons as early as 1945 with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the destruction wrought on these cities by what are by today’s standards very basic nuclear bombs did not lead to their prohibition.
 

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which came into force in 1970 and was indefinitely extended in 1995, merely prohibits the spread of such weapons. But Article IV of the document does call for parties to the agreement to negotiate “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”.

Unfortunately, the dynamics of the Cold War meant that nuclear weapons remained a part of international politics and national security. Only since the end of the Cold War have questions about the use of nuclear weapons and their devastating consequences started to be seriously contemplated.

In 1996, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on the threat or use of nuclear weapons. This stated that it “would generally be contrary” to “the principles and rules of humanitarian law”.

And in 1997, a group of concerned lawyers, scientists, physicians, former diplomats, academics and activists drafted a model Nuclear Weapons Convention. Initiated by international NGOs, such as the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), the model was ultimately submitted to the UN General Assembly by Costa Rica that same year.

It was revised in 2007 to include key developments since 1997 and was again submitted by Costa Rica and Malaysia to the UN General Assembly that year. It was then circulated as an official document in 2008.
 

In 2010, the president of the International Commission of the Red Cross highlighted the importance of humanitarian considerations in his statement about nuclear weapons in Geneva. And, at the NPT Review Conference the same year, governments officially expressed in the final document their “deep concern at the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons”.

States, international organisations and civil society convened conferences in 2013 and 2014 that focused on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.

But although the “Humanitarian Pledge” issued in 2014 emphasised that nuclear weapons are simply too dangerous for us to permit their existence, none of the countries that possess nuclear weapons endorsed the idea. Neither did US allies protected under the country’s nuclear umbrella.

Opposing positions

In 2016, three sessions of the UN’s Open-ended Working Group taking forward nuclear disarmament negotiations were held for a total of 15 days. These led to more than 100 countries supporting the start of negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.

That, in turn, resulted in a UN General Assembly resolution advising states to pursue multilateral negotiations towards banning nuclear weapons in the next year. Not surprisingly, none of the countries that have nuclear weapons participated in any of the meetings. All of them will presumably not be attending the latest round of talks either.

Meanwhile, two opposing positions became apparent among countries that do not possess nuclear weapons, adding another divide to the existing gap between states that possess nuclear weapons and those that do not.

The first group of countries are those that want a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons based on the common understanding that the humanitarian consequences of their use cannot be ignored. Several members of this grouping have called for the creation of a nuclear weapons convention, while others have called for a stand-alone prohibition or a so-called “ban treaty”.

The second group consists of countries that depend on extended nuclear deterrence. They are calling for “progressive approach” that seeks non-legal and legal measures as “building blocks” towards a nuclear ban. These include reducing the risks of accidental and unauthorised use of nuclear weapons and bringing into force the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

According to their plan, only after a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons becomes a reality would a ban treaty be actually feasible to pursue.
 

While the first group emphasises the importance of negotiating a ban treaty, nuclear-armed states and those that fall under their umbrella are seeking to slow the process. And the gap between these two attitudes is the critical challenge for the process.
 

Non-state actors

Alongside state-to-state negotiations, civil society has also been playing crucial roles on the road to negotiations. The importance of civil society groups and NGOs is recognised in Article 71 of the UN Charter.

Civil society has been active in the moves towards prohibiting nuclear weapons with strong support by grassroots movements such as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a coalition of prominent and active NGOs.

In the end, governments will make the decisions on the actual wording, demands and breadth of any ban treaty. They will also decide whether to sign and ratify it. But pressure from civil society will contribute the atmosphere for moving forward.

No one in the world can argue against the idea of a world without nuclear weapons or the total elimination of nuclear weapons. And it is not just legal provisions and measures that are important. The norms and atmosphere created by the establishment of a ban treaty, or at least efforts towards concluding one, will be a vital part of the mix.

The humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons play a central part in the international nuclear disarmament initiative now starting. It goes beyond traditional strategic thinking about nuclear policy and appeals to the core of mankind. After all, a single nuclear detonation may set off a chain of events that could become the harbinger for the end of the world as we know it. Clearly, none of us wants to see that.

Wakana Mukai, Assistant Professor at the Security Studies Unit of the Policy Alternative Research Institute, University of Tokyo

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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From the June 1998 Issue of Communalism Combat

Image: Asian Age

Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif have two things in common. Both of them have ordered five nuclear tests, and both of them justified their orders by claiming that their nuclear weapons are defensive. This argument was invented by the Americans to justify their nuclear weapons, after the Soviet Union started to build its own nuclear weapons. It was such a convenient argument that all the nuclear states started to use it once they built nuclear weapons. Now every country with nuclear weapons claims that its weapons are defensive, it is just other countries’ nuclear weapons that are a threat.How are nuclear weapons a threat? The first answer given is that an enemy may threaten to use nuclear weapons as a way to intimidate or blackmail and so win a war. As the most destructive weapons ever made, nuclear weapons should make states that have them invincible. They should be able to win all their wars. In fact, no one should want to fight such states because they have nuclear weapons.

The facts of the last fifty years tell another story. Nuclear weapons states have elected to fight wars on many occasions. They have lost many of them. Britain fought and lost at Suez, even though it had already developed nuclear weapons. The United States suffered significant defeats during the Korean War and the war ended with a stalemate. The French lost Algeria, even though they had their nuclear weapons. China’s nuclear weapons did not help against Vietnam.
The most famous examples are of course the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan despite having enormous numbers of nuclear weapons. In all these cases, a non-nuclear state fought and won against a nuclear-armed state.

Another fact from the last fifty years is that having nuclear weapons offers no protection against nuclear threats. During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union made nuclear threats numerous times, with the United States making around twenty such threats and the Soviet Union making five or six. Even though both sides had nuclear weapons, this did not change the fact that they were threatened by the other side. If a state with nuclear weapons is going to make a threat, it will do so regardless of whether the state being threatened has nuclear weapons of its own.

The only other use for nuclear weapons that has ever been claimed is that nuclear weapons are supposed to deter attacks by other nuclear weapons and so prevent war between nuclear armed states. This is what is usually meant by nuclear deterrence. The normal example of nuclear deterrence that is used is between the superpowers during the Cold War.

The absence of war between them is widely attributed to both sides having nuclear weapons. This cannot however be proven. All that can be said is that the absence of war coincided with both sides having nuclear weapons. It is not logical to deduce that nuclear weapons prevented a war that would otherwise have taken place. The absence of war between the United States and the Soviet Union may simply have been due to neither side wanting a war. The experience of total war in World War II was so terrible that this may have been sufficient to prevent a major war. It is worth remembering over 20 million Soviets were killed in that war.

The history of the Cold War is in fact the history of the elusive search for deterrence. As the years passed and became decades, the amount of destructive power needed to create deterrence kept on increasing. From a few simple atom bombs, it became hundreds of bombs, then thousands and then came the hydrogen bomb, with a destructive power a hundred times greater than an atom bomb.

But, even having a few such hydrogen bombs was not enough. McGeorge Bundy, who was an advisor in the White House during both the Cuban Missile Crisis, has argued that deterrence works only if “we assume that each side has very large numbers of thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs) which could be used against the opponent, even after the strongest possible pre-emptive attack.”

It is this kind of nuclear arsenal that is credited by Bundy, and other American supporters of deterrence as being responsible for maintaining the ‘nuclear peace’ between the United States and Soviet Union. The urge to have weapons that could survive a pre-emptive attack is why both sides developed nuclear submarines and specially hardened silos for missiles. This effort to create deterrence cost the United States at least $4 trillion ($4000,000,000,000) to develop, produce, deploy, operate, support and control its nuclear forces over the past 50 years.

The Americans were not alone in thinking that large numbers of hydrogen bombs that could survive a nuclear attack were necessary for deterrence. All five of the established nuclear weapons states have tried to achieve this kind of nuclear arsenal. None of them has stopped developing their arsenals once they built simple nuclear weapons. They have not even relied on large numbers of such simple weapons. They have gone on to build weapons ten, if not hundred or thousand, times more destructive.

Even the smallest nuclear arsenal, belonging to Britain, has 200 thermonuclear weapons with a collective destructive power two thousand times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

There are, however, some important dissenting voices which say that deterrence never worked. General George Lee Butler, who until a few years ago actually commanded all of the United States strategic nuclear weapons has said the world “survived the Cuban missile crisis no thanks to deterrence, but only by the grace of God.” If general Butler is right, and even the fear created by “very large numbers” of hydrogen bombs was not enough to stop two nuclear states getting ready to go to war, then what purpose is served by this fear? What this fear can do is stop peace. Even though the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union gone, the nuclear weapons are still there. The US still has over 10,000 and Russia about as many. The fear now is not the other state, but the other’s nuclear weapons. As long as there are nuclear weapons there cannot be real peace.

History teaches us that nuclear fears cannot be calmed with nuclear weapons. The simple truth is that there has never been a weapon that can offer a defence against being afraid. The only defence against fear is courage and courage needs no weapons to make its presence felt.

(The writer, a scientist of Pakistani origin, teaches at MIT, USA)

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 1998, Cover Story
 

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The Uri attacks have inspired some ballistic bombast.

A horrible attack on an Indian Army base in Uri, Kashmir leaving 18 dead and 19 injured.

Social media, with characteristic restraint, decided to demand retribution by asking for more to be killed. Many, many, many more.

Here, an instant classic example:

That's a former Indian Administrative Services officer who works with the Rajasthan government choosing to run a Twitter essentially calling for nuclear warfare. That might be worth underling and putting in bold:
Nuclear warfare.

This bellicosity was not restricted to social media – the television channels certainly got in on the game too – but it thrived online.

Social media by its nature can be both trivial-seeming and more serious-than-you-realise, so it's worth spelling out exactly what is being demanded here: The use of nuclear weapons against Pakistan, a move that would almost certainly result in the use of nuclear weapons against India and kill untold millions.

Let's spell that out even more. There are a lot of nuclear weapons on this planet. 15,375 according to the World Nuclear Weapon Stockpile. India and Pakistan have 250 between them. Even North Korea is believed to have a few. Despite all these weapons out there, using technology that was developed in the 1940s, nuclear bombs have only been used twice.
Two times. Once on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and again on the city of Nagasaki in August 1945. There's a reason the weapons haven't been used ever since, despite plenty of conflicts. There's a reason those two weapons effectively ended the second World War.
That reason is this (warning: graphic images):

More than 1,40,000 were killed in Hiroshima alone, in an attack that destroyed 70% of the city and left parts of it uninhabitable. The physical and psychological effects of the attack would persist for decades. A couple of days later America repeated its experiment, this time with plutonium, over Nagasaki. The results were equally disastrous.

Most of this should be obvious to anyone who has learnt about the horrors of the nuclear bombs, but as we get further away from those fateful days, it is possible that social media warriors have not fully understood exactly what they are advocating. This is destruction on an unimaginable scale.

India choosing to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for Uri – which would already go against the country's stated doctrine of no-first use – would most likely lead to Pakistani retaliation that could leave millions dead, and cause environmental devastation that would "suddenly dwarf any other global problem."

All of this for, as Dixit, says "finishing Pakistan", an outcome that is by no means assured even with the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

None of this is to suggest that India cannot find a response that might be an appropriate way to retaliate after the Uri attacks. India has one of the world's largest militaries and has presumably spent much of its time acquiring equipment and expertise aimed specifically at neutralising Pakistan's capabilities. But to suggest that this retaliation has to be nuclear suggests, at best, a certain level of delusion about India's capabilities (or a level of nihilism that is only appropriate for anyone who spends too much time on social media).

Thankfully, for every bit of such Twitter terror there is a wisecracker who can add some levity in reply.
 

 

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