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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
U.S. intelligence says a nuclear exchange between the two feuding countries could kill 12 million. Here's how experts believe the region could explode.
May 31, 2002 | A U.S. intelligence assessment released this week warned that a full-scale nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, whose bitter dispute over Kashmir continues to escalate, could immediately kill up to 12 million people. Assuming that both countries would use most but not all of their nuclear arsenals, the report argued that the combined blasts would immediately draw American forces into the conflict. With millions dead and up to 7 million people wounded, the world would collectively have to respond.
"The humanitarian crisis that would result would be so great that every medical facility in the Middle East and Southwest Asia would be quickly overwhelmed," a Defense Department official told the New York Times. "The American military would have no choice but go in and help with the victims and to clean up."
But are these U.S. intelligence assumptions -- and the horrific conclusion -- accurate? How exactly would the region's rising tensions lead to a nuclear exchange, and how would the world be affected? The questions take on rising urgency as President Bush sends Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the region next week to help cool tensions.
Most military observers agree that any attempt to predict how a war between India and Pakistan might intensify will likely prove inaccurate. It's nearly impossible, they argue, to "game out" a path of altercation. There are too many variables to consider, and most of the people who make military decisions don't have enough information or wherewithal to understand the possible consequences of their actions.
"People in power don't escalate logically," says Tony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense policy think tank. "They escalate in ways that are more emotional than reasonable. The history of war is almost never one in which each side knows the other side's perception of the actions taken. When we game out the conflict [between India and Pakistan] we approach escalation as if history doesn't exist."
And most observers think the U.S. intelligence report is likely the worst of all worst-case scenarios. Still, Cordesman and other experts admit that one nuclear scenario -- with a few permutations -- has gained traction in the intelligence community. That is the possibility of at least one nuclear explosion -- one that, according to an oft-discussed academic report, would immediately kill up to 860,000 people, while slowly killing many more. No one hopes to see the prediction come true, and some experts seem confident that India and Pakistan will disengage. But increasingly, regional observers say the world has to at least plan for the possibility that the conflict could go nuclear -- if not the worst-case scenario laid out in the U.S. intelligence report, a bad enough scenario that requires some attention.
