Posted on 06/02/2002 4:58:30 AM PDT by mhking
Defence Secretary warns of nuke retaliation
REUTERS [ SUNDAY, JUNE 02, 2002 11:55:50 AM ]
NEW DELHI: India would retaliate in the event of a nuclear strike by Pakistan, and must be prepared for mutual destruction on both sides, Defence Secretary was quoted as saying.
In an interview with the weekly magazine Outlook, which hit news stands on Sunday, Yogendra Narain said India was prepared for conventional war turning nuclear.
"But Pakistan is not a democratic country and we don't know their nuclear threshold," he said. "We will retaliate and must be prepared for mutual destruction on both sides."
On Saturday, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf sought to calm international fears that a military stand-off with India could escalate into nuclear conflict, saying it would be unthinkable.
With a million soldiers massed along the border, there are fears that war could be triggered by another attack against India by Pakistan-based militants.
In response to such an attack, Narain said surgical strikes by India would be the "realistic option", not all-out war. And they could come at three hours' notice.
Such strikes would target militant bases in the Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
"Surgical strikes are the realistic option," Narain said.
"But we also know that there will be retaliation on other parts of the border from Pakistan. It'll escalate and will not be confined to one region."
New Delhi accuses Islamabad of fomenting violence in Kashmir by arming and training militants.
It says there are dozens of militant camps sheltering the rebels across the border in PoK.
Pakistan denies Indian charges and says it only provides moral, political and diplomatic support to the legitimate Kashmiri freedom struggle.
India has ruled out first use of nuclear weapons, while Pakistan has not.
Tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals were triggered in December after an attack on Parliament which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants.
They flared again last month after a raid on an army camp in Jammu, which killed 34 people including the three attackers.
I've got a bad feeling about this...
| The India-Pakistani Conflict... some background information- | ||||||
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You also might wish to keep handy: Nuclear, Biological, & Chemical Warfare- Survival Skills, Pt. II |
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Just to keep things in perspective, look here:
-Tables on nuclear tests worldwide--
...and you'll see that over 500 megatons of nukes were touched off for testing alone. Naturally, it would be far better if these clowns don't nuke each other, but it won't be Armagheddon, either.
This is more frightening than anything that has occured in many months, and the blame for a lot of this can be laid right at the door of the Clinton administration. But the media will never remind us of that. This situation bears more than watching. It needs attention, but from who? No one, including the US, has anyone fit to deal with these kinds of threats anymore.
The best we can hope for is that this is all just "talk" and nobody pushes the button on either side.
Now conventional warfare could very likely break out, but escalation to suicide is very unlikely now. Musharif's statement yesterday was basically a backing down, so the direction has been changed.
The hard part for the Indians is determining when Pakistan has done enough for the Indians to return to their bases. There's no way to determine when the incursions have permanently stopped.
The other problem is that al-Qaida would greatly appreciate it all-out war occurs, hopefully one that destroys the Pakisitani Army and gets rid of Musharraf and his crackdown on terrorists within the country. They have every incentive to conduct more terrorist attacks in Kashmir or in India to provoke an Indian response. Whether Pakistan can prevent that or not is an open question.
The danger is that India, in responding to terrorism, might actually assist terrorists and actually make the situation worse in the long run.
I have to think that some people in India understand that, and hopefully all of them do. If so, the strategy is sound; threaten a devastating war in order to make Bush lean on Pakistan and to force a more rapid crackdown on terrorists in the country. But don't actually launch that attack.
That still leaves the problem of no exit strategy for India for this policy.
Killing 8 to 14 million people by conventional arms is difficult. Therefore, it is almost essential that nuclear arms be employed in order to reach a decisive outcome, either by victory or exhaustion of the sides.
The use of <100 fission bombs of low (<50 MTon) yield will produce casualties of the right order of magnitude. Worldwide nuclear fallout will be comparable to the atmospheric testing of the '50s.
A world government will be established by the great powers shortly thereafter to ensure against a repeat.
What if India determines that it is willing to "absorb" the relatively small number of Paki bombs now, in order to make for a safer future later? Using their own nuclear weapons and their own superior numbers, they take Pakistan and occupy it, thereby placing a non-Moslem army in control of a Moslem country. As long as the USA has no part in that operation, it could be good for us, re-directing the wrath of Islamo-insanity towards India. Let THEM deal with it for the next 50 years. Meanwhile, Islamofacists all over Pakistan would surely be rounded up and murdered (yay!) because an India that's just suffered nuclear strikes isn't going to be in a civil-rights-mood towards its enemies. I know there would be consequences, not the least of which are environmental... but there might be a kind of silver lining here.
It would probably be more like 500, or more. The Islamists have pre-industrial historical timescales and memories. They view Ferdinand and Isabella's ejection of the Moors from Spain as a recent event.
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