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Nuke nightmare on the cards in South Asia

George Iype in New Delhi

By testing ten nuclear devices in 17 days, India and Pakistan have lifted the veil on their military capabilities and unleashed the spectre of a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

As the bilateral rhetoric between India and Pakistan reached fever pitch on Thursday, security and foreign policy experts said the nuclear arms competition and the resultant economic santions will torment both nations.

They also believe that the India-Pakistan nuclear weapons race has resulted in reshaping the security scenario in the Asia region.

"The most negative consequence of the India-Pak nuclear testing will be the emergence of a new US-China-Pakistan axis," said Brahma Chellaney, an eminent security analyst at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research.

"China is definitely India's number one security threat. Nuclear Pakistan, with the help of China, will now attempt to dominate the whole of Asia," he told Rediff On The NeT.

Security analysts further believe that the nuclear competition between India and Pakistan in recent days has led to China becoming very close to Pakistan.

Foreign policy experts, however, put a different spin on the scenario, pointing out that Pakistan's nuclear tests have "exposed both China and Pakistan."

"India's accusation that China has been transferring missile and nuclear technology to Pakistan has been proved true," an official at the Ministry of External Affairs told Rediff On The NeT.

But analysts fear that fifty years after the sub-continent's bloody partition in 1947, the rivalry between India and Pakistan -- largely focused on disputed Kashmir -- has taken dangerous nuclear routes.

"Both India and Pakistan have been engaged in an arms competition for 50 years. Now they have exercised their nuclear options. How and when any bilateral dialogue for peace between the two countries will now happen is now difficult to say," says Professor Kanti Bajpayee, professor at the School of International Relations in New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

India, with 3.29 million square kilometres of land, has a 967 million population whereas Pakistan, with an area of 796,000 square kilometres, has a population of 137 million.

India has a total armed forces of more than 1.1 million, and Pakistan more than half a million.

Over the years, both the countries -- after three wars -- have stacked up battle tanks, submarines, surface combatants, combat aircrafts and missiles worth billions of dollars.

India's nuclear program began in 1953 with the "atoms for peace" slogan that spread nuclear know-how to those nations which generally agreed not to use it to terrorise their rivals across the world.

India set up the apex Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, and received technological help to build its nuclear reactors from the United States and Canada for nearly 30 years.

Both the US and Canada helped the country build a nuclear research reactor by supplying heavy water used to control nuclear fission.

While India tested its first nuclear device in 1974, Pakistan pledged to develop nuclear weapons after the country was defeated in the 1971 Bangladesh war.

Pakistan's nuclear programme took real shape in 1975 under the guidance of its German-trained metallurgist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.

India's nuclear technology is based on plutonium whereas Pakistan is believed to have developed bulky bombs out of highly enriched uranium.

In 1976, both Canada and the US stopped the nuclear co-operation with India, but the Soviet Union took over as its principal supplier of heavy water.

Around this time, China covertly began nuclear co-operation with Pakistan and has, since then, been supplying highly enriched uranium besides furnishing Pakistan with nuclear bomb designs.

In 1995, despite a warning from the US, China reportedly sold Pakistan 5,000 ring magnets for gas centrifuges that enrich uranium.

"Now that both the countries have announced that they have nuclear bombs, the struggle should be to make peace with the weapons," says Professor Bajpayee.

Analysts such as Professor Bajpayee feel "the atoms for peace" slogan should be strictly adhered to by Pakistan and India, or else the smaller countries in the region would always live under the threat of a nuclear bomb.

Few now believe that the US will pressurise China to back away from Pakistan's nuclear programme. Rather, there is a strong expectation of China and Pakistan coming together in a nuclear alliance to dominate the region.

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