by Amitav Ghosh
Fernandes spoke of an old political mentor who had urged him to maintain a dialogue with every segment of the political spectrum. He spoke of a bitter feud with a former protégé, Laloo Yadav, a powerful Bihar politician. Then, suddenly, he cut himself off. "Look," he said, "I'm rationalizing."
He had gone to the BJP as a last resort, he explained. He had tried to reach agreements with various secular left-wing parties. He tried many doors, he said, and "only when all other doors were closed" did he go to the BJP.
The causes of Fernandes's despondency were suddenly clear. He had spent a lifetime in politics, and the system had spun him around and around until what he did and what he believed no longer had the remotest connection. I knew that he still possessed a certain kind of idealism and personal integrity. But what had prevailed finally was vanity—the sheer vanity of power.
Fernandes is not alone. This sense of deadlock is an essential part of the background of the nuclear tests of May 11. To the leaders of the BJP, hanging on to power by the goodwill of a tenuous coalition, the tests must have appeared as one means of blasting a way out of a dead end. But if the BJP bears the principal responsibility for the tests, the blame is not its alone: it was Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party who set the precedent for using nuclear technology as political spectacle. Since then, many other Indian politicians have battled with the same temptation. Two other recent prime ministers, Narasimha Rao and I. K. Gujral, resisted, to their great credit, but they both came very close to succumbing. In the end, it is in the technology itself that the real danger lies. As long as a nuclear establishment exists, it will always tempt a politician desperate to keep a hold on power.
That night in Leh, I thought of something Fernandes had said to me earlier: "Someday we will sink, and this is not anything to do with China or with Pakistan. It is because this country is cursed to put up with a leadership that has chosen to sell it for their own personal aggrandizement." This seemed now like an unconscious self-indictment.
There are, in fact, many reasons to fear nuclear catastrophe in South Asia.
Both India and Pakistan have ballistic missiles. Their nuclear warheads will necessarily be produced in only a few facilities, because of limited resources. India's nuclear weapons, for instance, are thought to be produced at a single unit: the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, in Bombay. Both sides are therefore realistically able to destroy each other's production capacities with not much more than a single strike.
Several major cities in India and Pakistan are within a few hundred miles of each other, so once launched, a missile would take approximately five minutes to reach its target. Given the short flight time, military planners on both sides almost certainly have plans to retaliate immediately. In other words, if either nation believed itself to be under attack, it would have to respond instantly. In moments of crisis, the intelligence services of both India and Pakistan have historically had unreliable perceptions of threat. They have also been known to produce outright faulty intelligence.
The trouble will probably start in Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over the state. In recent months the conflict has spilled into other parts of India, with civilian populations coming under attack in the neighboring state of Himachal Pradesh, for example. The Indian government once mooted the idea of launching "hot pursuit" attacks across the border, against insurgents sheltering in Pakistani-held territory. In Pakistan, such assaults are likely to be perceived as an invasion. The risks of escalation are very real.
Zia Mian, a Pakistani-born nuclear expert at Princeton, said to me, "There are soldiers on both sides who have a hankering for a grand act of heroic erasure. A day might well come when these people would say, 'Let's get it over with forever, once and for all, no matter what the cost.'"
On a hot and humid August day, I drove around New Delhi with an old friend, Kanti Bajpai, trying to picture the damage the city would sustain during a nuclear explosion. Kanti has a doctorate in strategic studies from the University of Illinois, and he was among the many antinuclear activists who, on learning of the tests of May ii, immediately went to work. At the time, the BJP's cadres were organizing celebrations in the streets of several Indian cities. Opposition politicians looked on in stunned silence, struggling to gather their wits. It fell to citizens' associations to take on the task of articulating a critical response. Kanti came to national attention at this time.
Kanti believes that India, in pursuing a nuclear program, has gambled away its single greatest military advantage over Pakistan: the overwhelming superiority of its conventional forces. In legitimatizing Pakistan's nuclear program, India's military planners have in effect rendered their ground troops redundant. Kanti sees no threat from China. There is no history of persistent antagonism. No Chinese emperor ever invaded India; no Indian ever sought to conquer any part of China. In thousands of years of close coexistence, Chinese and Indian soldiers have fought only once, during the war of 1962.
Along with a number of other academics, Kanti has been trying to assess the consequences of a nuclear war in South Asia. A friend of his, M. V. Ramana, a research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, had recently computed the possible effects of a nuclear attack on Bombay. It was one of the first such studies to be done of a South Asian city. Ramana's findings caused some surprise: the casualty rates that he cited, for instance, were lower than expected—about 200,000. This was because in his calculations Ramana assumed that neither India nor Pakistan would use bombs much greater than what was dropped on Hiroshima—with a yield of about fifteen kilotons.
We set out on our journey through New Delhi armed with a copy of Ramana's seminal paper. Kanti wanted to apply the same calculations to New Delhi.
We drove up Rajpath, the grand thoroughfare that separates North Block from South Block. Ahead lay the domed residence of the president. This was once the palace of the imperial British viceroy; it is now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan. The palace looks down Rajpath toward a monument called India Gate. In the distance lie the ramparts of the Purana Qila, a sixteenth-century fort.
Ground zero, Kanti said, will probably lie somewhere near here: in all likelihood, between North and South Blocks.
On detonation, a nuclear weapon releases a burst of high-energy X-rays. These cause the temperature in the immediate vicinity to rise very suddenly to tens of millions of degrees. The rise in temperature causes a fireball to form, which shoots outward in every direction, cooling as it expands. By the time it reaches the facades of North Block and South Block, it will probably have cooled to about 300,000 degrees—enough to kill every living thing within several hundred feet of the point of explosion. Those caught on open ground will evaporate; those shielded by the buildings' thick walls will be incinerated.
South Block and North Block, like many of the ceremonial buildings in New Delhi, are made principally of pink Rajasthan sandstone. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, granite surfaces and ceramic tiles up to several hundred feet from the explosion melted. Sandstone is considerably less dense than granite. The facades of the two blocks will probably melt like candle wax; so will the dome and walls of Rashtrapati Bhavan, and possibly even a portion of India Gate.
As the fireball expands, it generates a shock wave called the Mach front, which delivers a massive blow to everything in its path. This in turn is followed by an enormous increase in air pressure and very high wind velocities. The pressure of the air in the wake of the Mach front can reach several thousand pounds per square inch: it's like being inside a pressure cooker, but with pressure that is many thousands of times greater. The shock can generate winds that blow at speeds of more than 2000 miles per hour.
"Human beings will become projectiles," Kanti said. "If you're here and you're not incinerated immediately, you will become a human cannonball."
We drove toward the Jamuna River, passing the enormous circular building that houses India's parliament. Everyone here, Kanti said, will be either incinerated or
killed by the radiation.
We proceeded to the National Archives and the vast bureaucratic warrens that house the government's principal administrative offices. These too will be destroyed. The recorded basis of government, Kanti said, will vanish. Land records, taxation documents—almost everything needed to reconstruct a settled society—will perish from the blast.
The changes in pressure caused by the explosion, Kanti explained, even a small one, will make your lungs burst. You won't necessarily die of burns or poisoning. "Your internal organs will rupture, even if you survive the initial blasts and flying objects."
Later I asked Gautam Bhatia, a New Delhi architect, about the effects of the blast on the city's buildings. Many of the landmark buildings of British-era New Delhi, he wrote to me, have very thick walls and are laterally buttressed with cross walls. These are capable of withstanding great pressure. But many of the city's contemporary public buildings, like some of its five-star hotels, have glass curtain walls. "Such structures have a poor rating for withstanding pressure, poor facilities for egress, and virtually no firefighting equipment."
New Delhi's newer residences will fare very badly. Most of the buildings are designed to withstand winds of about a hundred miles per hour: in the event of a nuclear explosion, they will face wind speeds of up to twenty times that. "The walls would be blown away instantly; if columns and slabs remain, the pressure will rip the building out of its foundations and overturn it."
In Indian cities, many households use canisters of liquid petroleum gas for everyday cooking. For about a mile around ground zero, Ramana estimates, these canisters will explode.
Kanti explained to me that the geographical spread of New Delhi is such that a single fifteen-kiloton nuclear explosion could not destroy the whole area. He estimated that the casualty figures for New Delhi would be much lower than those that Ramana had cited for Bombay: as low, potentially, as 60,000. Only the central parts of the city would be directly affected. "The city would continue to function in some way," Kanti said, "but its municipal, medical, and police services would be in total chaos. The infrastructure would disappear."
Fatalities, however, will account for only a small part of the human toll. Several hundreds of thousands of people will suffer burn injuries.
In New Delhi, I met with Dr. Usha Shrivastava, a member of a group called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. She told me that over the past few decades, while New Delhi's population has more than doubled, the total number of hospital beds in the city has increased only slightly. She estimated that there are only 6000 to 7000 beds in the government-run hospitals that serve the majority of the city's population. These hospitals are already so crowded that in some wards two or three patients share a single bed. But the major hospitals—including the only one with a ward that specializes in burn injuries—are all within a few miles of the city's center, and they will not survive the blast anyway.
In the event of a nuclear explosion in New Delhi, Dr. Shrivastava said softly, "The ones who will be alive will be jealous of the dead ones."
When it's over, millions and millions of people will be without homes. They will begin to walk. The roads will soon be too clogged to accommodate cars or buses. Everyone will walk, rich and poor, young and old. Many will be nursing burn wounds and other severe injuries. They will be sick from radiation. There will be no food, no clean water, and no prospect of medical care. The water from the mountains will be contaminated. The rivers will be ruined. Epidemics will break out. Hundreds of thousands will die.
I had always imagined that a nuclear blast was a kind of apocalypse, beyond which no existence could be contemplated. Like many Indians, I associated the image of pralay—the mythological chaos of the end of the world—with a nuclear explosion. Listening to Kanti that day as we drove around New Delhi, I realized that I, like most people, had been seduced into a species of nuclear romanticism, into thinking of nuclear weapons in symbolic and mythic ways. The explosion that Kanti was describing would not constitute an apocalyptic ending: it would be a beginning. What would follow would make the prospect of an end an object of universal envy.
My journey would not be complete without a trip to Pakistan. It was to be my first visit, and the circumstances looked far from propitious. The week before, the United States had fired Tomahawk missiles at terrorist camps in southern Afghanistan. Some had landed near the border of Pakistan. There were reports of Indian and American flags being burned in the streets.
At the airport in Lahore, I steeled myself for a long wait. My Indian passport would lead, I was sure, to delays, questions, perhaps an interrogation. But nothing happened: I was waved through with a smile.
When Indians and Pakistanis visit each other's countries, there is often an alchemical reaction, a kind of magic. I had heard accounts of this from friends: they had spoken of the warmth, the hospitality, the intensity of emotion, the sense of stepping back into an interrupted memory, as though an earlier conversation were being resumed. Almost instantly these tales were confirmed—in taxi drivers' smiles, in the stories that people sought me out to tell, in the endless invitations to meals.
At mealtimes, though, there were arguments about how long it would be before Taliban-like groups made a bid for power. After dessert, the talk would turn to the buying of Kalashnikovs.
I went to see Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's principal religious party. The Jamaat's headquarters are on the outskirts of Lahore, in a large and self-sufficient compound, surrounded by a high wall and manned by sentries.
Ahmed has a well-trimmed white beard, twinkling eyes, and a manner of great affability. "Other than the army," he said, "all the institutions in this country are more or less finished. These are all institutions of a Westernized elite, of people who are corrupt. We are now paying the price of their corruption. All the problems we have now—the economic crisis and so on—are the fruit of their corruption."
I was hearing a strange echo of voices from India.
"We are not for nuclear weapons," Ahmed told me. "We are ourselves in favor of disarmament. But we don't accept that five nations should have nuclear weapons and others shouldn't. We say, 'Let the five also disarm.'"
On one issue, however, his views were very different: the probability of a nuclear war. "When you have two nations," he said, "between whom there is so much ill will, so much enmity, and they both have nuclear weapons, then there is always the danger that these weapons will be used if war breaks out. Certainly. And in war people become mad. And when a nation fears that it is about to be defeated, it will do anything to spare itself the shame."
Almost without exception, the people I spoke to in Pakistan—hawks and doves alike—were of the opinion that the probability of nuclear war was high.
I spent my last afternoon in Lahore with Pakistan's leading human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir. Asma is forty-eight, the daughter of an opposition politician who was one of the most vocal critics of the Pakistani Army's operations in what is now Bangladesh. She spent her teenage years briefing lawyers on behalf of her frequently imprisoned father. Today she cannot go outside without an armed bodyguard.
"Is nuclear war possible?" I asked.
"Anything is possible," she said, "because our policies are irrational. Our decision-making is ad hoc. We are surrounded by disinformation. We have a historical enmity and the emotionalism of jihad against each other. And we are fatalistic nations who believe that whatever happens—a famine, a drought, an accident—it is the will of God. Our decision-making is done by a few people on both sides. It's not the ordinary woman living in a village in Bihar whose voice is going to be heard, who's going to say, 'For God's sake, I don't want a nuclear bomb—I want my cow and I want milk for my children.'"
I often think back to the morning of May 12. I was in New York at the time. I remember my astonishment both at the news of the tests and also at the response to them: the tone of chastisement, the finger-wagging by countries tha
t still possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Had they imagined that the technology to make a bomb had wound its way back into a genie's lamp because the cold war had ended? Did they think that it had escaped the world's attention that the five peacekeepers of the United Nations Security Council all had nuclear arms? If so, then perhaps India's nuclear tests served a worthwhile purpose by waking the world from this willed slumber.
So strong was my response to the West's hypocrisy that I discovered an unusual willingness in myself to put my own beliefs on nuclear matters aside. If there were good arguments to be made in defense of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, then I wanted to know what they were: I wanted to hear them for myself.
I didn't hear them. What I heard instead was a strange mix of psychologizing, grandiose fantasy, and cynicism. The motivation behind India's nuclear program is summed up neatly in this formula: it is status-driven, not threat-driven. The intention is to push India into an imagined circle of twice-born nations—"the great powers." In Pakistan, the motivation is similar. Status here means parity with India. That the leaders of these two countries should be willing to risk economic breakdown, nuclear accidents, and nuclear war in order to indulge these confused ambitions is itself a sign that some essential element in the social compact has broken down; the desires of the rulers and the well-being of the ruled could not be further apart.
I think of something that George Fernandes said to me: "Our country has already fallen to the bottom. Very soon we will reach a point where there is no hope at all. I believe that we have reached that point now." I think also of the words of I. A. Rehman, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan: "This is the worst it's ever been. Everything is discredited. Everything is lost, broken into pieces."