Keep in mind that a all-too-frequent cause of war is some idiot General/President-for-Life, in order to whip up enthusiasm among the local yokels, starts banging the war drums to reclaim “lost territory”. It’s usually just a diversion from the real problems the country is facing. Who cares if thousands of lives are lost, right? At least no one is complaining about the messed up economy.
So no real objective if either India or Pakistan starts something up. Just insecurity on someones part. (The one during the Bangladesh war of Independence was something of an exception. Does Pakistan have any other breakaway-ish areas next to India? Vice-versa? I know some Sikhs have be getting upset lately in Punjab.)
Argentina goes thru this cycle every once in a while over the Falklands. You can practically judge the state of the economy by how loud the squawking over the Falklands is. (Currently increasing and the economy is stagnant, again.)
Astonishingly, the local yokels always buy into this.
Unlike the USA - Soviet Union faceoff, where both sides had thousands of hydrogen bombs, the India-Pakistan faceoff involves a vastly smaller number of weapons.
Ploughshares says ‘ESTIMATED TOTAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS: INDIA: 60-80, PAKISTAN: 70-90’.
Only a fraction of those weapons will make it through the defenses and not suffer some type of failure. Aircraft and ballistic missiles are by no means reliable and flawless delivery systems : the book Command and Control mentions how early American missiles had abysmal failures rates when they were actually launch-tested. The Jupiter missile worked less than half the time, the Titan 2s failed at a similar rate when missiles that had been deployed in silos for years were finally launched (without warheads, of course).
The Minuteman missile is better, using newer technology and solid fuel, but does Pakistan or India have the resources and experience to develop a rock-solid, reliable ICBM? The likely answer is “no”, despite whatever official lies they tell about their technology.
Aircraft have a raft of comparable problems.
So, TLDR, optimistically both sides will probably run out of nukes after “only” leaving maybe 30-50 smoking holes in each other. I don’t think either country has the really high end bomb designs, either, so it’s not as if it would be a complete destruction of a particular city, either.
Another problem is that both country’s arsenals are so small that a crippling first strike is entirely possible. The USA, with vastly more resources, was in fact extremely vulnerable to a first strike for decades. Command and control mentions this - the party line
The unfortunate part is that irritants cause itches, and the Pakistani 'establishment’s relationship with terrorism is a pretty big irritant, as the west has also discovered in the last decade. The idea of proportionate response is important of course, and one that America has more or less managed to find with the drone strikes and diplomatic pressure, while India has in the past and will in the conceivable future struggle to find something similar. The workaround which India is currently pinning its hopes on is fencing off the Kashmir line of control to prevent infiltration of jihadists from the Pakistani side. It has apparently worked to some extent, but my personal suspicion is that once the Americans have left the region, things will take a turn for the worse.
Acts of terror - specific acts using terror to affect political change - have not yet amounted to anything that should result in the firing of over 100 nuclear weapons.
In my initial post I assumed only 30% of the nuclear weapons fired would hit. Take the 30 most populous Indian cities and assume a 20% casualty rate and a further 40% that are sufficiently injured to only be able to contribute to the economy at 50%. At a GDP per capita of $1500, that would remove $80 billion in annual economic strength from India. Assume each city takes *only *$10 billion in damage and you wind up with floor of $380 billion dollars of value destroyed. Note, we haven’t even begun to tally up military expenditures, military deaths or deaths resulting from secondary causes like crop failure or disease.
So, given that low balled value for unleashing hell, the irritant causing the itch had better be worth it.
The Pakistanis have been buying nuclear tech from China for years, including ballistic missiles, and the Indians have probably been buying delivery systems from the Russians.
Exactly. It would be horrendous for both sides (and for people in the rest of the world catching the fallout) but there would be a whole lot more Indians left alive at the end than Pakistanis, and probably a fair few Indian military, and virtually no Pakistani military.
Dervorin and ReallyNotAllThatBright: yes, I was referring to the politics more than the demographics. Hindu nationalism as an ideology has its origins and traditional heartland in Maharashtra, and it’s also very big in neighboring states like Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, IIRC Rajasthan, etc… It used to be a big deal in Uttar Pradesh as well, but more recently Congress and the BJP in that state have both been largely eclipsed by the rivalry between two low-caste, vaguely center-left parties.
The BJP is generally less of a big deal in the south and east (with some exceptions like Karnataka). West Bengal is dominated by the Congress vs. Communist rivalry, as is Kerala: Tamil Nadu is dominated by the rivalry between two vaguely center-left Tamil nationalist parties, and the far northeast is heavily Christianized. Even though Tamil Nadu is about 88% Hindu, for example, Hindu nationalism is very unpopular there, and one of the two main parties is traditionally hostile to Hindu clericalism.
I was somewhat alluding nostalgically to the fact that Bengal and a large part of Southern India both flirted with the idea of becoming separate countries in 1947:
and if things had turned out a bit differently they might have succeeded. I don’t think secession would be super popular in the south right now, but if there was an apocalyptic nuclear war, who knows what might happen. (Southern Indians are generally racially, culturally, and linguistically different from northerners, and the south is generally more ‘modernized’ when it comes to things like literacy rates, fertility rates, etc.). For disclosure, I’m American-born but mostly ethnically Tamil (i.e. south indian).
My private suspicion is that Indian politicians play up the horrible threat of Pakistan in order to keep a chunk of the electorate distracted from much more important domestic issues. In the scheme of big problems facing India (desertification, climate change, pollution, inequality, landless peasants, unemployment, sexual assault and other crimes against women, debt slavery, and others) Pakistan isn’t even in the top ten.
A single act of terror has involved the US in a more than decade long war where the economic cost is measured in what - hundreds of billions? Consider that terrorism has been de facto Pakistani state policy against India for nigh on decades now, and has previously caused wars between the two countries. It is definitely at the point where another high profile act that can be traced back to Pakistan(like Mumbai) can easily snowball.
I haven’t heard any secessionist noises out of the south in my conscious lifetime, so about two decades now. Much of the early flirtation with secession was a largely language driven affair, and I think now that the ‘imposition’ of Hindi has ceased, indeed the involvement of the state in cultural matters has reduced in general and Indians are a bit more comfortable in our own skins, the secession idea is about as far fetched as the Texas threads that we get on the dope. Even the militancy in the Northeast has cooled off lately, especially since the Islamist/Pakistan friendly governments have been out of power in Bangladesh for years, and it’s looking like they will continue to be out of power for years to come. Hopefully the Indian state will get its act together and reduce the desire of people there to support any such militancy in the future.
Indian politicians rarely mention Pakistan anymore, and honestly I can’t remember a time when they did, apart from in response to specific incidents, of which there are plenty, but I don’t think they can be blamed for that. As Yossarian says, you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you. Even the ‘right-wing’ candidate Modi, who should by all rights be of the mould to play up such fears, has barely mentioned Pakistan in the dozens of speeches he’s been giving in the past months. On an aside, and I know you probably didn’t put any thought into it, I don’t know that I would necessarily put any of your laundry list into a ‘top 10 problems Indian politicians should do something about’.
Well my estimate is over a much smaller time period and are BOE kind of calculations. I only took estimates of city population I could find and assigned equal GDP per capita (given city dwellers might tend to the high side of GDP creation my estimates may be low) and I only said $10 billion in damage per city which should be seen as an impressive exercise in hand waving. I didn’t find any actual papers on a prospective war so I winged it.
Consider the hyper-power state of the US in 2001 and then consider that even their Republican executive manged to *not *turn Afghanistan into glass despite not having to worry about retaliation.
I have no doubt that Pakistan will continue to use asymmetrical warfare on India, but as India continues to outpace Pakistan culturally and economically India will have more and more to lose in a limited nuclear exchange. I don’t envy anyone in the Indian cabinet.
But they only managed to do that because there was no threat of retaliation, not despite it. Had there been any chance of actual retaliation, the chance to snowball would have existed.
I don’t envy the people who get caught up in the results of that warfare. The Indian cabinet is largely composed of cocksuckers who couldn’t care less, or they would try and govern better. Sorry about the bitterness.
I do agree with your general point though. Once the Americans leave the area, Pakistan will have no reason to even nominally oppose the terrorists. I anticipate some sort of backroom deal to try and get the militants refocus their attention on foreign targets. They have turned over territory to them in the past.
While you’re broadly correct, I have a nit to pick. West Bengal is not dominated by Congress/Communist rivalry. It was dominated by the Communists, but is currently(for the first time in more than 30 years), governed by a party which is called the Trinamool Congress. It broke away from the main Congress party years ago and is largely hostile to it. I’m also curious - why do you define the DMK and AIADMK as Tamil nationalist parties?
India’s Agni Missile system has been in development since 1991 and the AGNI I-III versions are operational. The Agni has a range of 3,500 km with a claimed CEP of 40 metres - pretty good really.
It’s hard to say how reliable they are, but I wouldn’t want to bet against them. The Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehiclehasn’t had a failure since it’s initial test. All in all I’d guess the Indian missiles are broadly as effective as 1960s era US ones.
India recently also had its first successful launch of the Geo Stationary Launch Vehicle, something that they’ve struggled with for the longest time. Since that craft(with an indigenously developed cryogenic engine) can lift significantly higher payloads and launch payloads into geostationary earth orbit, I’d say Indian expertise in the area is now at pretty decent stage. Not that it requires particularly advanced missiles to reach Pakistan. Most of India’s latest missile developments have been to try and reach some degree of parity with China.
