Countdown

About three months after Pokhran II (and Pakistani response), Amitav Ghoshwent to the Pokhran area and, invited to join the then Indian Defence Minister,George Fernandes' entourage, visited some military installations in theembattled state of Kashmir -- including the Siachen glacier in the Karakorammountains where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been exchanging fire since1983. He next visited Pakistan and Nepal. Countdown is partly a result of thesejourneys and conversations with many hundreds of people in India, Pakistan andNepal.

Its analyses of the compulsions behind South Asia's nuclearization, andthe implications of this, are profound, deeply disturbing and, ultimately,chilling. If this reads like a jacket-blurb, that might be because we arequoting directly from it here, and for a change, have no reason to differ:"haunting and evocative" it certainly is.

A shorter version of the book was published in 1998 by The New Yorker, byHimal magazine of Kathmandu, and by the Ananda Bazar Patrika of Calcutta. Theseshort excerpts are being carried with explicit permission and approval from theauthor.

(Page 43)

I was introduced to an officer who had just come off the glacier after athree-month tour of duty. He talked proudly of his men and all they hadaccomplished: injuries had been kept to a minimum, no one had gone mad, theyhad erected a number of tents and shelters.

He leaned closer. While on the glacier, he said, he'd thought of a plan forwinning the war. He wanted to convey it to the Defence Minister. Could Ihelp?

And the plan? I asked.

A nuclear explosion, he explained, inside the glacier, a mile deep. Thewhole thing would melt and the resulting flood would carry Pakistan away andalso put an end to the glacier. 'We can work wonders.'

He'd just come off the glacier, I reminded myself. This was just anotherkind of altitude sickness.

(Pages 61-63)

In India it is no easy matter to persuade people that nuclear weaponsconstitute a real and pressing threat. The prevalent attitude among Indiannuclearists is that the worst has never happened and so it never will-and ifit did the last place it would happen in is India. It is as though the veryidea of historic danger were abstract and insubstantial, a red herringdangled by those who seek to deny India her rightful place in the world. InPakistan on the other hand, the idea of historic catastrophe appears not inthe least unreal: the country has been circling the eyes of storms fordecades, almost without interruption. This, I think, is why the nucleardiscussion has much more a tone of realism there than in India, much more asense that the subject at hand concerns the here and now.

In this assymetry of perceptions there lies a real danger. Indiannuclearists seem to believe, in many cases sincerely, that they are merelyrunning laps in a race for prestige -- one that is not much different from thecontest of the Olympic Games. They believe that they and their Pakistanicounterparts are essentially in agreement on the nature of the game and therules that regulate it.

But in Pakistan nuclear weapons are not perceived inthe same way that they are in India: they cannot be. One of the mostdevastating conflicts of our era has been -- is being -- waged on Pakistan'sthreshold. Ordinary Pakistanis are well aware that their country is slowlyfalling victim to this conflict. Pakistanis know full well the differencebetween weapons and icons. They see nuclear weapons as instruments of massdestruction that pose a whole range of threats -- ranging from politicalintimidation and blackmail, to the possibility of annihilation. From theseperceptions, people of different inclinations draw different lessons. Formany -- including Asma and other like-minded Pakistanis -- the lesson is thatthese weapons must be done away with at once, unilaterally if need be. Butthere are others who use the same perceptions to arrive at conclusions of acompletely different kind.

In India I met very few people -- including antinuclear activists-whobelievedthat a nuclear war might actually occur in the subcontinent. In Pakistan,the opposite was true: almost everyone I met thought that nuclear war almostcertainly lay head, somewhere down the road. I came to be convinced thatIndian nuclearists are utterly in error in their belief that their Pakistanicounterparts share their own bland assumptions about nuclear weaponry. Thereis an abyss here -- a gap of perception -- of which both sides aredangerously unaware. Unfortunately, a nuclear standoff is the only knowncircumstance in which very small divergences of attitude and response canlead to millions of deaths.

Dr Durrsameem Ahmed, a Lahore psychologist, with many friends in India, saidto me one day: 'I see Pakistan as a male child trying to detach itself fromits maternal matrix. India is the devouring mother trying to consume its ownchild. It's a mutual obsession between mother and son and psychology is fullof it. If they don't let go they will destroy each other. It would seem thatthe possibility was there from the start, with Kashmir as the serpent in theparadise of independence. Nuclear war is not just likely. I would say thereis a certain inevitability to it. Frankly I am terrified: terror is anunderstatement.'

(Pages 105-106)

I think back often to the morning of 12 May. I was in New York then. Iremember how amazed I was, not just at the news of India's nuclear tests,but also at the world's response: the tone of chastisement adopted by manyWestern countries, the finger-wagging by many who were themselves content tolive under nuclear umbrellas. Had they imagined that nuclear technology hadwound its way back into the genie's lamp simply because the Cold War hadended? Did they think that it had escaped the world's attention that betweenthem the five peacekeepers of the United Nations' Security Council stillpossessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads? If that were so, I rememberthinking at the time, then perhaps India's nuclear tests had served aworthwhile purpose after all, by waking the world from this willed slumber.

So strong was my response against the implicit hypocrisy of the Westernresponse that I discovered an unusual willingness in myself to put my ownbeliefs on nuclear matters aside. If there were good arguments to be made indefence of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests then I wanted to know whatthey were: I wanted to hear them for myself. What I heard instead was forthe most part a strange mixture of psychologizing, grandiose fantasy andcynicism, allied with a deliberate conjuring up of illusory threats andimaginary fears.

The truth is that the motivation behind the Indian nuclear tests is simple.I once saw it summed up nicely: India's programme is status-driven, notthreat driven.' In other words the primary intention behind the programme isto push India into an imagined circle of twice-born nations -- 'the greatpowers'. India's nuclearists take it for granted that the blandness of theirmotivations will be sufficient to transform their nuclear weaponry intoharmless symbols of status.

In Pakistan's case too the motivation behind the nuclear programme issimilar: the status at issue here is parity with India. That the leaders ofthese two countries should be willing to run the risk of nuclear accidents,war, and economic breakdown in order to indulge these confused ambitions isitself a sign that some essential element in the social compact has brokendown: that there is no longer any commensurability between the desires ofthe rulers and the well-being of the ruled.

There is a deepening crisis in India and Pakistan and the almost mysticalhopes and beliefs that have come to be invested in nuclear technology are asymptom of this. The pursuit of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent is themoral equivalent of civil war: the targets the rulers have in mind for theseweapons are, in the end, none other than their own people.