Power's world: nuclear matchsticks on the Indian sub-continent

However tense the relationship between India and Pakistan becomes, the government of Manmohan Singh is highly unlikely to initiate or participate in a nuclear war with Pakistan. That would go against the deeply held moral beliefs of the prime minister. Both he and Congress party chairman, Sonia Gandhi, have told me privately that they are utterly repelled by the idea of such an act. Nevertheless, Singh has had few qualms about supporting the build-up of India's nuclear deterrent, regarding it as an inevitable process given India's place in the world; and he has been a passionate advocate of the new nuclear deal with the US that has resulted in Washington lifting its 30-year-old embargo on nuclear supplies for India.

Immediately after the Mumbai atrocities, tough talk seem to billow out of quarters of India's military and foreign affairs establishment. Singh quickly fanned it away. On the Pakistani side, President Asif Ali Zardari also appeared to be in a peace-making mood. Just before the atrocities, he publicly abandoned his country's ”first use” doctrine, which had meant that Pakistan could use its nuclear weapons even without an Indian attack. He has also, like his predecessor General Pervez Musharraf, reached out for a deal on the central flash point, the disputed state of Kashmir. Neither he nor Musharraf (once he was in power) ever showed they were the type to reach for their nuclear guns.

But does this mean we don't have to fear a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? Well, it helps. But India could get more warlike if Singh and Congress are defeated in the coming elections. The main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is the one that first publicly demonstrated India's nuclear deterrent. Meanwhile, on the Pakistani side, there is a growing chance that the war in Afghanistan and the American attacks inside the borders of Pakistan will fan the militancy of a growing part of Pakistani public opinion, with hysterical consequences.



That is not all, however. To look at the record of America's nuclear deterrent during the cold war is to realise just how precarious an object a nuclear armoury is. What exactly has happened there? Here are some examples:

At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Castro and the Soviet leaders argued for a tough response to the American demand that they remove their missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev initially ordered work on the missile sites to be accelerated and ordered Cuba-bound ships to ignore the quarantine. At the height of the crisis, Soviet commanders in Cuba, acting on their own authority, ordered air defence units to shoot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane. Later that same day, another U-2 strayed accidentally over Soviet airspace—a seemingly  calculated provocation.

During the crisis, American officers, unknown to Kennedy, jerry-rigged one of the launch systems to give themselves the ability to launch their Minuteman nuclear missiles. At the same time, the US Strategic Air Command deployed nine nuclear weapons at Vandenberg Air Force base. They used the tenth to launch a previously scheduled nuclear test, apparently oblivious to the possibility that Soviet intelligence was monitoring the base and could have reasonably concluded that this was the beginnings of a nuclear attack. US radar operators also mistakenly reported that a missile had been launched from Cuba

Indeed, all through the cold war there were mistaken "sightings" of Soviet launches; not to mention evidence of some launch officers being drunk or drugged on the job, and revelations of trigger happy officers who would act on the first alert from Washington, failing to await a second confirming call. Zibigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, tells the tale of how in the middle of the night the emergency phone rang and the duty officer said that a launch of Soviet missiles aimed at the US had taken place. Brzezinski knew he had less than five minutes to seek confirmation and awake the president. Ninety seconds later he was called again to be told the attack was bigger than first thought. Again he demanded new confirmation. A couple of minutes later the phone rang to say it was a false alert. Brzezinski later was asked if he woke his wife. He wryly replied, ”What was the point? If it were true, we would all have been incinerated within minutes.”

We should remember that, in the US, controls on the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons have always been much more sophisticated than those in the sub-continent. India and Pakistan must take note. Playing with nuclear matchsticks is a dangerous game.