What The Bomb Can Do

When earlier this year Pakistan's leaders made it abundantly clear that they are prepared to use nuclear weapons first to prevent a war in which they fear they will be overwhelmed by India's conventional military superiority, four nuclear scientists got to work on a paper which they adapted from the 2001 book, 'Out of the Nuclear Shadow', edited by Smitu Kothari and Zia Mian. The four: Matthew McKinzie, of the Natural Resources Defence Council, Washington DC; Zia Mian and M.V. Ramana of the Programme for Science and Global Security / Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; and A.H. Nayyar, of the Department of Physics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, titled their paper 'Nuclear War in South Asia'. They presented details of the scenario expected after the decision had been taken by Pakistan to use weapons of mass destruction and what would be the after-effects were India to retaliate in the same manner.

While India has offered an agreement for no-first use of nuclear weapons, in the event of war its armed forces could possibly attempt to destroy Pakistan's nuclear capability before it is used, or ponder its own capability to launch a nuclear attack if it believed that enemy nuclear missiles were armed and ready for launch. Pakistan, in turn, could seek to pre-empt such a situation by using its nuclear weapons straight off rather than risk losing them.

Neither Pakistan nor India has the technology for an early warning, and even if they did and it worked reliably, geography has made sure that they could not use it against each other. In their nuclear cold war heyday, the United States and the Soviet Union had a twenty-five minute warning time to find out if in fact there was a real missile attack, whether the launch was accidental or not, and what to do about it. An Indian Prithvi missile would take somewhere between three and five minutes to reach almost anywhere in Pakistan; and Pakistan's Ghauri missile can reach Delhi in about five minutes. If they had early warning systems, all they could do would be to give a warning of what was happening - that missiles had been launched. There would be no time to decide whether the attack was real or a mistake, and the decision to launch a nuclear retaliation would have to be made regardless.

Targets for nuclear weapons are two. One is the indiscriminate destruction of cities with the hope of forcing an end to hostilities or an unconditional surrender. The second is the deliberate destruction of military command structures and war fighting capabilities. In a drawn-out war, Pakistan cannot hope to prevail and its leaders have made it abundantly clear that they intend to take out the main Indian cities. If India decided to attack only military targets, it would be tantamount to taking out Pakistan's cities as most of Pakistan's military centres are either in, or located close to, its cities. Karachi, Hyderabad, Bahawalpur, Multan, Lahore, Gujranwala, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Quetta are all army corps headquarters. Islamabad has the air force and naval headquarters. So they are prime and obvious targets. And in any case, with the large-scale destruction caused by nuclear weapons, even if they are specifically targeted at military installations, any nearby city would not be saved.

The yield of the nuclear weapon used by the United States in 1945 to attack Hiroshima, equivalent to 15 thousand tons of TNT detonated at 580 metres above the surface of the earth, is comparable to the yields of the nuclear weapons that India and Pakistan claimed they tested in May 1998. The four scientists have therefore described the effects of a single explosion of a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb at an elevation of 600 metres over Mumbai, the consequences of which would be similar for any other large, densely populated South Asian city.

The average population density of Mumbai is about 23,000 people per square kilometre. But there are regions where the population density exceeds 100,000 per square kilometre. To quote: "There are three ways to estimate the number of casualties from prompt effects. All of these are based on empirical data from Hiroshima when the casualties were expressed as a function of different variables - radius, overpressure, and thermal fluence, respectively. Using these three models and assuming the above population densities, we can calculate that there will be somewhere between 150,000 and 800,000 deaths in Bombay within a few weeks of the explosion. These would be the result from just the blast and fire effects of a Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapon, and assuming that fallout effects are negligible (assumptions that lead to a very conservative casualty estimate) the number of people dying of all causes could be as high as 350,000 to 400,000 for a 15-kiloton weapon.

Many more people would be subject to lower doses of radiation, which in the case of already sick people, the old and the young, could well be lethal in the absence of medical care. Many more people will certainly die from long-term effects, especially radiation-related causes. Studies involving survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveal that the mortality rates for all diseases, leukemia and malignancies other than leukemia, are all significantly higher than among people not exposed to radiation. Increases in the cancer rates among survivors of an atomic bombing of Bombay may be comparable to, if not greater than, those among Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.

A large-scale nuclear war in South Asia would have terrible consequences. An estimate of the numbers of deaths and injuries from nuclear attacks on ten major Indian and Pakistani cities has been made by transposing onto each city the characteristics and consequences of the August 6, 1945, Hiroshima bombing with its mass fires,