When it comes to matters of mass life and mass death, it is best to think in simple, even simplistic, terms. And so it is when flagging the urgency for a nuclear arms freeze in South Asia. The fact that newspapers and columnists rarely refer to it hardly means that the Sub-continent is not engaged in a nuclear arms race, which it is. India has come out with its Draft Nuclear Doctrine and Pakistan has announced the command-and-control structure of its nuclear programme. There has been a hardening of nuclear postures on both sides and, like little boys messing for a fight, there is too easy a recourse to the use of threat of nuclear annihilation. This is dangerous to the extreme, but the level of concern (and outright fear) which ought to be there, is simply missing.
By testing its nuclear weaponry in May 1998 at Pokhran, New Delhi's politicians, bureaucrats and scientists set off a lethal trigger, not limited to Pakistan's entirely unnecessary response with its own nuclear blasts at Chaghai. What we saw subsequently was an adventurism by the Pakistani military in Kargil, which was obviously linked to the supposed umbrella provided by its nuclear capability.
The threat by religio-political fanatics on both sides of the Attari-Wagah divide to use nuclear weapons to blast the enemy off the map may be dismissed by some as just so much bombast. But when the danger is of unprecedented mayhem the kind that the world has never, never seen, should we not be speaking of pulling back from the nuclear precipice? Should we not be reminding ourselves that here, in South Asia, with two governments actually planning for the eventuality of a nuclear war, we are probably the closest to Armageddon than any other sets of adversaries have ever been? To be sure, the loose talk concerning use of nuclear weaponry that we have heard in India and Pakistan, did not occur in the US-Soviet nuclear arms race (in retrospect, so much more civilised).
There was a conference of South Asian antinuclear scholars and activists called in Dhaka in the middle of February, which sought to try and arrest the nuclear tailspin that all us South Asians are willy-nilly part of at this stage. Unfortunately, because 'peacenik' is a dirty word among the analysts who pander so successfully to the politico-military complexes of South Asia, the very sanity of the conclusions of this conference seems to have been reason enough for the nationalist media in India and Pakistan to ignore its recommendations.