Worry over nukes casts shadow on Kashmir dispute

At a secret plant in Pakistan's northern hills, nuclear technicians are believed to be working overtime in these days of crisis, producing bomb uranium around the clock, specialists say. Next door in rival India, they say, atomic warheads may already be coming out of storage.

The explosive impasse over divided Kashmir is more than a showdown between two neighbors' massed armies. It has a nuclear dimension, too, and that has the world worried.

Those who follow the Asian powers' emerging strategies doubt they will come to nuclear blows. But ultimate weapons force consideration of ultimate scenarios, and of miscalculation even by the coolest heads.

"Vajpayee could drive the Pakistanis up the wall" and into threatening a nuclear strike, said U.S. nuclear proliferation specialist David Albright. "The Pakistanis know they're completely outgunned."

India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, this week ratcheted up tension over Kashmir, claimed by both countries, by rallying his troops with words of war, talk of preparing "for decisive victory against the enemy." Passions had risen days earlier when 34 people, mostly Indian soldiers' wives and children, were killed in a Kashmir raid by suspected Islamic militants from Pakistan.

It was a back-to-back series of bomb tests in 1998 that announced to the world that Pakistan and India, enemies in three wars since 1947, were now both nuclear powers. India has since declared a policy of no first use of atomic weapons, but Pakistan, whose army is half the size of India's, has not foresworn "going nuclear" first in a war.

"This is Pakistan's trump card," Miriam Rajkumar, an Indian analyst at Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an interview.

Equivalent to Hiroshima

Albright said the Indians are believed to have so far produced 50 to 100 plutonium-core nuclear warheads, and the Pakistanis 30 to 50 using the other bomb material, highly enriched uranium. Some specialists think the Indians have no more than 50 devices.

Each warhead's average destructive power is probably equivalent to the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, that is, around 15 kilotons, or 15,000 tons of TNT, said Albright, a physicist with the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

"A callous reaction is, 'So what? Let them nuke each other. Millions die and they can pick up the pieces,"' Albright said. But in the end, he said, "I expect we would have to pay to reconstitute their societies."