Posted on 05/26/2002 7:42:41 PM PDT by AM2000
India and Pakistan haven't fought a real war with each other for over thirty years now, and few people on either side realise that it wouldn't be like the wars of the past, when mostly soldiers died.
In neither country has public opinion grasped the fact that nuclear weapons change everything. So let us imagine what a war between the two would be like in 2002.
India, of course, doesn't want a nuclear war, because its seven times bigger population and ten times larger economy mean that it would almost certainly win a conventional war with Pakistan. It makes perfect sense, therefore, for India to promise 'no first use' of nuclear weapons, and it has duly done so. It is in this wishful context that Indian officials talk about the possibility of a "limited war" in which India, naturally, would be victorious.
Pakistan's position is precisely the opposite. It has not promised to refrain from using its nuclear weapons first, because to do so would leave India free to crush it in a conventional war. For Pakistan, nuclear weapons are the essential 'equaliser' that puts both parties in a position of equal vulnerability. That is why the Vajpayee government's decision four years ago to test Indian nuclear weapons, forcing Pakistan to follow suit, was a strategic imbecility: the only war with Pakistan that India might not win is a nuclear war.
Prime Minister Vajpayee is determined to punish Pakistan for what he sees as Pakistani government-backed 'cross-border terrorism' (though the Islamist terrorists may now be beyond President Musharraf's control, and some are deliberately trying to precipitate a war). Musharraf is committed to launching nuclear weapons if the Indian army breaks through Pakistani defences. India would inevitably reply with its own nuclear weapons. What would such a war be like?
For those who do not live in the subcontinent, the most important fact is that the damage would be largely confined to the region. The cold war is over, the strategic understandings that once tied India and Pakistan to the rival alliance systems have all been cancelled, and no outside powers would be drawn into the fighting.
The detonation of a hundred or so relatively small nuclear weapons over India and Pakistan would not cause grave harm to the wider world from fallout. People over 40 have already lived through a period when the great powers conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, and they are mostly still here. Bangladesh and Burma would see a big rise in radiation-related deaths over the next decade, but the damage elsewhere would be slight.
For India and Pakistan, however, the experience would be beyond imagination. Take the lowest estimates of deliverable Indian and Pakistani nuclear warheads - say 100 for India, and 50 for Pakistan. Assume that one-third are destroyed before launch or fail to work. Drop most of the rest on cities, or on army bases and airfields that are near cities. What do you get?
Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Multan and Karachi: gone. Delhi, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Jaipur and maybe Bombay: gone. Twenty or thirty or fifty million people killed outright or condemned to a lingering death - as if somebody suddenly exterminated Spain or South Korea. Pakistan broken into squabbling successor states, and perhaps India split between the economically dynamic south and the less prosperous, horribly injured northern 'Hindi belt' as well.
Of course, nothing so bad has happened since the last nuclear war, 57 years ago. Maybe it won't happen now. Maybe Vajpayee and Musharraf are both just bluffing. We shall see - and probably by autumn.- Copyright
But on the other had, I have this feeling that it is out of our hands, and that it may be happening for a reason.
My take is this: Western whites are the carriers of civilization. We are not reproducing as we should. At this same time, third worlders who appear incapable of advancing civilization are breeding out of control. If third worlders completely sweep over the West, the advance of civilization will stop. Not only that, but human progress will be turned back, the rule of law will end. I shudder at what the world would become if members of the religion of peace took control all throughout Western Europe.
Maybe this is being directed on purpose from a higher source, to preserve human history. The self-destruction in Africa and the pending war in which the religion of peace will be crushed, cruel as it sounds, may be the only way for human civilization to be saved.
Thus, is the Death of the West. It was bound to happen anyway.
We had a nice run though.
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