WASHINGTON: In the annals of nuclear weapons use discourse, it is a commonly accepted proposition that while Pakistan is all too ready to use the ultimate weapon in a war against India, New Delhi will exercise the option only as a retaliatory measure — what pundits call a second strike.

The reason often cited for Pakistan’s hair-trigger nuclear stance is that it can never win a conventional war and its weapons are best used before they are "taken out". In fact, contemporary wisdom has it that Pakistan has barely enough resources to fight for 72-hour war, and a naval blockade of Karachi and shutting off the Indus waters will bring the country to its knees in no time.

But will the use of nukes bring Pakistan victory? No, say experts. If anything, it will invite its complete annihilation, because while India’s broad land-mass will ensure a degree of survivability, smaller Pakistan will just go up in smoke.

Indian officials are extremely chary of war-gaming a nuclear exchange scenario, which they consider vulgar and unbecoming. But in recent months they have been quietly letting it known that New Delhi has factored in all kinds of eventualities, an exercise that led junior foreign minister Omar Abdullah to warn that Pakistan will be "stupid" to go down the nuclear route.

In the event of such a scenario and a Pakistani first strike, India could lose a city or two but its response will be on a scale that will not leave behind much of Pakistan, which isn’t much in the first place. Even the two "worthwhile" targets, Karachi and Islamabad, are so close to India that New Delhi will be constrained to use some of the smaller weapons in its arsenal.

Privately, Indian officials have told some US interlocutors that India’s nuclear weapons are "assuredly secure" with its survivability and a chain of command ensured.

So why would Pakistan push the losing button? The answer lies in a chilling exchange related in a recent article in the journal Atlantic Monthly that is being circulated widely in the South Asia circuit.

In the article, writer Peter Landesman relates a hair-raising conversation he has with a retired Pakistani brigadier who was serving as an aide to Benazir Bhutto. On a visit to Brigadier Amanullah’s house in Islamabad, Landesman sees a landscape painting showing the Bhuttos with what he (Landesman) thinks is a rocket heading to the moon. He asks the Brigadier about it, and is told the painting is actually "A nuclear warhead heading to India".

I thought he was making a joke. Then I saw he wasn't. I thought of the shrines to Pakistan's nuclear-weapons site, prominently displayed in every city. I told Aman that I was disturbed by the ease with which Pakistanis talk of nuclear war with India.

Aman shook his head. "No," he said matter-of-factly. "This should happen. We should use the bomb."

"For what purpose?" He didn't seem to understand my question. "In retaliation?" I asked.

I looked for a sign of irony. None was visible. Rocking his head side to side, his expression becoming more and more withdrawn, Aman launched into a monologue that neither of us, I am sure, knew was coming:

"We should fire at them and take out a few of their cities—Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta," he said. "They should fire back and take Karachi and Lahore. Kill off a hundred or two hundred million people. They should fire at us and it would all be over. They have acted so badly toward us; they have been so mean. We should teach them a lesson. It would teach all of us a lesson. There is no future here, and we need to start over. So many people think this. Have you been to the villages of Pakistan, the interior? There is nothing but dire poverty and pain. The children have no education; there is nothing to look forward to. Go into the villages, see the poverty. There is no drinking water. Small children without shoes walk miles for a drink of water. I go to the villages and I want to cry. My children have no future. None of the children of Pakistan have a future. We are surrounded by nothing but war and suffering. Millions should die away."

"Tens of thousands of people are dying in Kashmir, and the only superpower says nothing," Aman said. "America has sided with India because it has interests there." He told me he was willing to see his children be killed. He repeated that they didn't have any future — his children or any other children.

I asked him if he thought he was alone in his thoughts, and Aman made it clear to me that he was not.

Aman stopped, as though he'd stunned even himself. Then he added, with quiet forcefulness, "Before I die, I hope I should see it."

It is this hopeless desperation that western officials are warning India about as New Delhi weighs the military option. A country without a future is quite willing to go down and try and take with it a country which is hopeful of its future despite its myriad problems.

For India, the dilemma is obvious: If it submits to this line of thinking (Pakistan’s irrationality), it risks being blackmailed into inaction; if it chooses to call the bluff, it invites the Amanullah solution.

Pakistan's 1999 nuclear mobilisation revealed

South China Morning Post May 12, 2002

Pakistan mobilised its nuclear arsenal during the 1999 Kargil conflict with India - the first such incident since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis - according to disclosures by a former senior White House adviser.

Bruce Riedel, a participant in Washington talks between then president Bill Clinton and then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif over the crisis, said Mr Clinton surprised his guest by telling him the US was alarmed by Islamabad's preparations. The revelation is contained in a paper by Mr Riedel, due to be published this week by the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr Riedel does not say how the United States obtained such sensitive information or what types of weapons were involved. But a Washington-based security specialist said it was probably Chinese-designed M11 nuclear-tipped missiles that Pakistan started to deploy.

"It's possible that someone in the Pakistan military gave the information to the US because they were authorised to do so by a senior military commander," said John Pike, director of Washington-based Global Security.Org. Mr Pike said that then military chief General Pervez Musharraf could have used the nuclear threat to force the US to push for a crisis settlement.

Pakistan made preparations for nuclear strike on India

Sunday Times (London) May 12, 2002

THE Pakistani army mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India in 1999 without the knowledge of its prime minister, a senior White House adviser at the time has disclosed.

As the Indian army pushed the Pakistani forces back across the so-called "line of control" dividing the disputed territory of Kashmir, Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani prime minister, asked for American intervention and flew to Washington.

In a paper to be published shortly by the University of Pennsylvania, Bruce Riedel, who was a senior adviser to Bill Clinton on India and Pakistan, recalls how the president was told that he faced the most important foreign policy meeting of his career. "There was disturbing information about Pakistan preparing its nuclear arsenal," Riedel writes. Riedel and other aides feared that India and Pakistan were heading for a "deadly descent into full-scale conflict, with a danger of nuclear cataclysm". They were also concerned about Osama Bin Laden's growing influence in the region.

Intelligence experts had told Riedel that the flight times of missiles fired by either side would be as little as three minutes and that "a Pakistani strike on just one Indian city, Bombay, would kill between 150,000 and 850,000 alone".

He told Clinton not to reveal his intelligence hand in the opening talks with Sharif, in which the president handed the prime minister a cartoon that showed Pakistan and India firing nuclear missiles at one another. But in a second discussion, at which Riedel was the only other person present, "Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war really was. Did Sharif know his military was preparing their missiles?" he writes.

"The president reminded Sharif how close the US and Soviet Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over Cuba. Did Sharif realise that if even one bomb was dropped ... Sharif finished his sentence and said it would be a catastrophe."

Riedel does not state in the paper how the Americans gathered their intelligence, nor what the mobilisation entailed. But John Pike, director of the Washington-based Global Security Organisation, said intelligence channels could have become aware of the trucks that carry Pakistan's nuclear missiles being moved from their bases at Sargodha, near Rawalpindi.

"One scenario is that missile trucks were picked up parked in a convoy," he said.

Pakistan's uranium bombs are designed to be dropped by plane or carried by Ghauri missiles, while smaller plutonium warheads can be attached to Chinese-made M 11 missiles.

Clinton drove home the advantage that the intelligence coup had given him, Riedel recalls. "Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action," the prime minister was asked. "Did he realise how crazy that was?"

Riedel describes how an "exhausted" Sharif "denied he had ordered the preparation and said he was against that, but worried for his life back in Pakistan". Soon afterwards Sharif, who now lives in exile in Saudi Arabia, signed a document agreeing to pull back his forces.

If, as Riedel implies, Sharif was kept in the dark about his nuclear programme, he suffered a similar embarrassment to that of his predecessor, Benazir Bhutto, who is said to have asked the CIA for a briefing on Islamabad's nuclear capability because that privilege was denied to her by her own generals.

A recent report by the CIA, Global Trends 2015, predicts that the threat of nuclear war will remain a serious regional issue for the next 15 years.

By next year Pakistan is thought likely to have between 50 and 75 nuclear warheads, while India will have between 75 to 100.

Riedel, a visiting member of the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, said that during the same meeting Clinton upbraided Sharif for his failure to rein in Bin Laden, who was known to be colluding with the Taliban with the connivance of the Pakistani intelligence service.

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