On Wednesday, nuclear-armed India attacked nuclear-armed Pakistan. According to Pakistan, more than 20 people were killed and many injured, with 9 sites being targeted. Pakistan claims that it shot down 5 Indian jets and a drone. This short Aljazeera video captures some of the results of the bombing and the conflicting claims of both sides. The New York Times today expressed optimism that “India and Pakistan May Have an Off-ramp After Their Clash.” “Will They Take It?” queried the “newspaper of record.” This evening, according to NBC News, “Pakistan vows retaliation.”
Should we worry? Since the 1980s, scientists have examined the likelihood that a nuclear war would be followed by a "nuclear winter." The quantity of ash and smoke generated by blast and fires following a significant nuclear exchange would block out the sun and thus impact agriculture for several years. As both Pakistan and India have about 170 nuclear warheads, their arsenals are more than adequate to cause such as crisis. A recent article in Nature concludes that a nuclear war “would lead to mass food shortages, and livestock and aquatic food production would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output, in almost all countries. ... We estimate more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan.”
What is this conflict about? The context begins in 1947, when “India” achieved its independence from the United Kingdom. On day one, the predominately Muslim area of India broke away to form Pakistan. Massive killing and war followed, centered in part on a dispute between the two new countries over who got Kashmir. In 1949 India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire that resulted in an India-administered Kashmir in the south and a Pakistan-administered Kashmir in the north, though both countries claimed their “legitimate right” to all of Kashmir. Brokered by the UN, the ceasefire resolution included this language: “The question of the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan should be decided through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite.” Now, nearly 80 years later, no “impartial plebiscite” has been held..
Since then, India and Pakistan have fought three wars: a major war and two smaller wars over Kashmir. A war over Kashmir in 1955 ended in a stalemate; a war in 1971 resulted in the separation of East Pakistan from Pakistan, becoming Bangladesh; and a third conflict in 1999 centered on an area of the border separating the northern and southern zones of Kashmir. The POINT IS that much of the 70 years of tension and war between India and Pakistan since “decolonization” has centered on the Kashmir Question. (Check out an excellent analysis of all this from Aljazeera, complete with charts and colored maps.)
The immediate cause of the current conflict was the attack on tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir two weeks ago by unknown assailants. India claimed that Pakistan had instigated and/or controlled and/or harbored the killers, though no evidence or information about this has so far become available. India’s attack on Pakistan is allegedly in response to these killings, though analysts speculate that India’s fascist prime minister Modi believes a strong military response will boost his popularity in India. Pakistan’s statement today that it will retaliate, and India’s statement that any Pakistani retaliation would be answered by another military attack, recalls the fears during the 1999 “Kargil” conflict that the use of nuclear weapons was a possible outcome.
Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist and political activist. Her political essays are powerful and moving. In May 1998 India exploded its first nuclear weapon. Roy wrote several essays in response to India’s Bomb and to the pride and excitement that the possession of a nuclear weapon created among Indians. Her most important essay is called “The End of Imagination.” In it she wrote:
There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently, and knowledgeably. I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes and speak our second-hand lines in this sad second-hand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight. Once again we are pitiful.
And in “The End of Imagination” she also wrote:
It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreck more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our dreams. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness
Abolishing nuclear weapons
Of course these latter remarks could be applied to all nuclear-weapons states. For inspiration, we can turn to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), whose work led to the UN “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” and won them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. The Treaty came into force in 2021, when enough nations signed on (though not, of course, any of the states possessing nuclear weapons). The Treaty “prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits them from assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.” In March, ICAN condemned the “nuclear proliferation” that may be emerging in Europe and elsewhere, responding in part to Trump’s distancing US policy from the traditional US “nuclear umbrella” allegedly protecting Europe from Russia.
Many agreements that limited or controlled nuclear weapons have been ended in the last few decades. The potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, and the dangers associated with a possible nuclear conflict coming out of the Russia-Ukraine war, remind us that peace advocacy must double down on our campaigning against nuclear weapons.
