How It Was - How It Will Be
Threat Of Nuclear War Blows In The Wind

June 5, 2002
By Gordon Thomas

There is no description like it: "In the first milli-second a pinprick of purplish-red light expanded to a growing fireball hundreds of feet wide. The temperature at its core was 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. The flash heat started fires a mile away and burned skin two miles distant. Stone columns were rammed straight down into the ground. People were vaporised. Sixty-two thousand other buildings, out of a total of 90,000, were destroyed. All utilities and transportation services were wrecked. One hundred and eighty of the city's 200 doctors and 1,564 of its 1,780 nurses were dead or dying. Eighty thousand other people were killed instantly.

"Almost all this happened in the time it took me to blink behind the goggles. Below, on the ground, granite was melting and the shockwave had created fireballs and screaming hailstorms. A seething mass of red and purple began to rise into the sky. The column was sucking into its base super-heated air which set fire to everything combustible. Beside me, my co-pilot, Bob Lewis, was saying `My God what have we done.' " The words are those of Colonel Pat Tibbets, the pilot of the aircraft, Enola Gay which dropped the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.

India and Pakistan are close to repeating the holocaust Tibbets witnessed.

His words - the only time he ever spoke about it - were delivered to me for my book Enola Gay. I have just read them again alongside an equally chilling report published this week by M. V. Ransana, an Indian nuclear physicist. He has created a doomsday scenario of a Pakistani 12 kiloton warhead - the same power as he one Tibbets released over Hiroshima - exploding over Bombay.

Ransana postulates: "Up to 860,000 will die from a single missile strike. They would mostly be vaporised in one flash. Depending on wind direction and the location of the blast, millions more could be exposed to fatal radiation. Apart from the human casualties, the environmental consequences would be of the utmost gravity. Radiation would rise into the stratosphere to 30,000 feet. It could be carried for 2,000 miles. The impact on the world economy would be far, far greater than in the aftermath of September 11."

While desperate diplomatic moves continue - with, as Globe-Intel had predicted, China and Russia playing key roles - the clear and present danger is that in both countries - but especially Pakistan - hardline military commanders might gain control of a missile.

"There's a lot of potential for this spiralling out of control, " warned David Albright, a leading US nuclear expert. He is not alone in believing that either country could "go for broke" and launch a nuclear conflagration that could, according to M. V. Ransana's 57-page study of the likely effects of a nuclear attack, cost 12 million lives, Yet even the direst predictions seem to have little effect on the military establishments in New Delhi and Islamabad.

A typical response was that of General Talat Masood. Though retired from the Pakistani army, he still remains in close contact with its strategic planners.

This weekend he told Globe-Intel: " If we are pushed too far by India, we will go nuclear. It may well be suicidal to do so, but Pakistan will use its nuclear weapons rather than sit back and see our entire nation annihilated."

It is this inflammatory sabre-rattling which has led to unprecedented diplomatic activity - and alarm bells in the Western world ordering its citizens to leave the sub-continent. But while the flights out are full from India and Pakistan and foreign leaders try to avert the greatest threat of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis four decades ago - when the United States and Russia went to the brink - the best hope of staving off a nuclear holocaust may be the weather.

The monsoon season has just begun. It will move up from southern India and is expected to reach the centre of conflict - the Line of Control in divided Kashmir - by early July.

Once the rain starts, it will be almost impossible to manoeuvre tanks and other conventional weapons systems.

Strategists in London and Washington agree that India may be basing its next moves on a "weather window." This may allow it to still launch a ground attack on Pakistan, but for such an attack to be too short to escalate into an all-out nuclear war.

India has always said it would not use first-strike nuclear weapons. But again, should the war escalate to a nuclear exchange, the monsoon season may still benefit India. The prevailing winds could send the fallout back over Pakistan and into Afghanistan.

Professor Julia Slingo, the acting director for the Centre for Global Atmosphere Modelling at Reading University in England, a world-ranking authority on monsoon behaviour, said that India has a better system of predicting the weather more accurately.

Given that the monsoon season will last until September, military analysts in the Pentagon believe that India will want to keep some of the 650,000 troops confronting 350,000 Pakistani forces across the Line of Control. Much will depend on how successful U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld will be during his current visit to the region.

The reality is that whether a nuclear war does break out will depend on Kashimri militants. It is their attacks on the Indian parliament and other targets, which have provoked India's fury.

They, of course, operate in any weather conditions. Equally worrying, it is becoming clear that Pakistan's leader, General Pervaz Musharraf is increasingly losing control over what the militants will do. He is beginning to emerge as the region's equivalent of Yasser Arafat - full of promises for the West but unable to put them into practice due to the increasingly radical pressure in the streets of Islamabad.