One Misstep Away From Nuclear War

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf insisted Saturday that “any sane individual” cannot contemplate a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, but U.S. officials and other experts say history’s first such battle could erupt if conventional fighting breaks out over bitterly contested Kashmir and one side makes a mistake or misjudges its foe.

In one widely discussed scenario, if conventional fighting escalated beyond a clash in the Himalayan region, Pakistan could set off a nuclear weapon over an unpopulated area of India in an effort to intimidate its far larger foe. (India has about 1.2 million active-duty troops, compared with Pakistan’s 600,000.) Instead of persuading India to back down, a Pakistani bomb might provoke full-scale nuclear retaliation.

Nuclear war could also come as a result of mistakes in judgment by subordinate military commanders in the field, or from an accidental mishandling of the nuclear materials that are now being shifted around the battlefield, some experts say.

“This is a region that tends toward misreadings, tends toward surprises, tends toward misperceptions,” said Michael Krepon, founding president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “In all of their wars, they have tended toward misreadings.”

There is no question that if a nuclear exchange occurred, it would inflict a horrific toll.

According to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment made public last week, a full-scale exchange could kill as many as 12 million people and could injure as many as 6 million more, not including victims of long-term radiation. The casualties would include U.S. troops stationed in the region. And the devastation would create a humanitarian and economic disaster that would scar the region for decades.

The effects of radiation in areas much farther away, such as the United States and Europe, would probably be small, however, analysts say.

Experts such as Krepon and government officials stress that they don’t believe Musharraf or Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee intend to resort to nuclear weapons. Some specialists say they don’t expect the present crisis to lead even to a major conventional war, as India and Pakistan waged over Kashmir in 1947-48 and 1965.

Musharraf, speaking to CNN on Saturday, downplayed the risks of a nuclear war. “I don’t think either side is that irresponsible to go to that limit,” he said. “I would even go to the extent of saying one shouldn’t even be discussing these things, because any sane individual cannot even think of going into this unconventional war, whatever the pressures.”

This morning, Musharraf arrived in Tajikistan, bound for a 16-nation Asian security conference in Kazakhstan that Vajpayee also will attend. The two are not expected to meet one on one, however.

Despite Musharraf’s reassurances, hundreds of United Nations staff members in Pakistan and India have been ordered to send their families home, a U.N. official told Associated Press in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, on Saturday.

The order came a day after the United States urged more than 60,000 Americans to leave India immediately and authorized the departure of U.S. nonemergency personnel as soon as possible. Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and South Korea released similar warnings to their citizens in India. Most already had issued similar advice for Pakistan.

Kashmir represents a special danger because of 50 years of bloodshed there coupled with the two countries’ vagueness about what enemy actions would cause them to launch a nuclear attack, experts say.

Tensions between the uneasy neighbors have risen since a deadly attack on India’s Parliament building in December that left 14 people dead, including five gunmen. India accuses Pakistan-based Kashmir separatists of launching the brazen raid. Soon after, India began a buildup of forces that has now brought almost 1 million Indian and Pakistani troops to the border region.

Many analysts believe that the first step toward war could come in the form of a new terrorist attack by the Islamic militants.

If that happens, India might react by launching a counterattack on the areas in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir where the militants are alleged to have been training. This attack could be carried out by Indian air force fighters or through a coordinated assault by fighter-bombers, tanks and ground combat forces.

Some analysts believe India might try to push farther north, to seize the mountain passes through which the militants enter the Indian-held portion of Kashmir.

Under this scenario, Pakistan would feel pressure to counterattack in the face of an Indian assault and might strike back at Indian troops, artillery and fighter squadrons concentrated near the border.

All that would remain within the realm of conventional fighting, but experts say India’s numerical superiority is so great that such incursions could convince Pakistan that its existence was threatened.

In the past, Pakistani officials haven’t ruled out the use of nuclear weapons against a conventional attack. India, however, has pledged no first use.

Teresita C. Schaffer, a former U.S. diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said the danger is that a series of tit-for-tat conventional exchanges could lead to uncontrolled escalation.

The most likely trigger for a nuclear war would be a conclusion by Pakistan that its “national integrity” was threatened by a loss of territory, military assets or transportation links, or an attack on a city, she wrote in article on the think tank’s Web site.

“The key point about nuclear weapons in South Asia is uncertainty,” she wrote. “No one can be certain what would trigger a nuclear response, and the world needs to take the risk seriously.”

There is little question that India and Pakistan could reach targets in each other’s territory with nuclear warheads.

Both countries have nuclear arsenals numbering in the low dozens of warheads, according to U.S. officials. Analysts at defense publisher Jane’s Information Group say India has 100 to 150 warheads and Pakistan 25 to 50.

Although it is not clear that Pakistan’s missiles are reliable enough to pose a major threat to India, nuclear-equipped Pakistani F-16 fighters could probably penetrate India’s air defenses. India could probably strike Pakistan with both missiles and bombers.

Pakistan’s nuclear arms are believed to be concentrated in a small number of locations, a fact that could cause the Indians to think that they could wipe them out with a preemptive attack. For that reason, some experts believe that Pakistan is moving its nuclear explosives around the countryside, to make them harder to destroy.

India’s nuclear arms are more widely dispersed, making a preemptive strike less practical.

Still, some experts argue that the tit-for-tat attacks would not necessarily escalate.

Terrence Taylor, a South Asia expert and head of the U.S. operation of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said India has no strategic reason to want Pakistani-controlled territory in Kashmir.

India only wants to stop the militants’ attacks, he says, and probably would withdraw without much delay if it did invade. He judges a nuclear exchange as “extraordinarily unlikely” and said he doubts that there will be a conventional war either.

Although a nuclear exchange in Kashmir would be devastating for people in the immediate area, the impact on distant areas could be less than many people think, experts said.

The death rate would be high within a five-mile area of the blast but would decline sharply within another five miles. In the long term, there would probably be a measurable increase in cancer deaths within 100 miles downwind of the detonation, but only minuscule health effects beyond that area, said Arthur Upton, a radiation expert who formerly headed the National Cancer Institute and is now at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Even in the worst of circumstances, with multiple detonations, the amount of radiation that would be spread to Europe and the United States would be much less than existing background levels in those areas, Fred Mettler of the University of New Mexico added.

But it is difficult to predict the extent of radiation spread precisely, because many factors play into it, all experts agreed. The most crucial factor is whether the blasts occur on the ground or in the air. A nuclear blast in the air produces a bigger fireball and more destruction in the immediate blast area, but little fallout, said physicist John D. Boice Jr. of the Vanderbilt University Medical School.

The bombs that exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were both detonated in the air, and “there was no fallout,” he said. “The radiation didn’t travel at all.” As a consequence, the health effects observed were in people directly exposed to radiation from the blast.

But if a bomb is detonated on the ground, huge quantities of dirt are vaporized and hurled into the sky, carrying radioactive isotopes such as strontium, cesium and iodine with them. If this fallout reaches the stratosphere, it can travel long distances.

In fact, fallout from above-ground nuclear tests conducted in the 1950s and 1960s was dispersed throughout the world, even to the North and South Poles. But it gets diluted very rapidly so that little falls to the ground in any one area unless there are highly unusual meteorological conditions.

In the aftermath of one U.S. test in the 1950s, for example, a massive thunderstorm in upstate New York washed measurable concentrations of strontium and iodine out of the atmosphere so that radiation levels around Troy, for example, were higher than those in states next to the Nevada test site.

But there were still no measurable health effects as a result, Boice added.

Researchers have been able to make some predictions based on the 1986 Chernobyl accident, in which a fire in the Ukrainian nuclear power plant sent relatively large amounts of fallout into the atmosphere. That fallout was ultimately detected all around the world. But the primary health effect observed was an increase in thyroid tumors within a radius of 30 to 50 miles downwind.

If nuclear war came to South Asia, Upton said, “the biggest concern I have is that, according to the estimates I have seen, millions of people could be killed in that part of the world.”

“That would be an enormous tragedy,” he said. “That we would have detectable levels of radioactivity as far away as the United States is unfortunate but not a public health concern.”

*

Richter reported from Washington and Maugh from Los Angeles.