Big Trouble in South Asia

The greatest threat to world peace over the next decade is an arms race and potential nuclear war in South Asia. The only two muclear powers who have enough hatred toward one another to pull the nuclear trigger are India and Pakistan. And furthermore, considering that Pakistan is a part of the world with former and current ties to international terror, an enormously large concentration of madrassahs and Islamists, and a history of selling nuclear secrets... having them build more nuclear weapons is about the worst thing that can happen for global stability and security.

This is exactly what's happening:

Pakistan has begun building what independent analysts say is a powerful new reactor for producing plutonium, a move that, if verified, would signal a major expansion of the country's nuclear weapons capabilities and a potential new escalation in the region's arms race.

Satellite photos of Pakistan's Khushab nuclear site show what appears to be a partially completed heavy-water reactor capable of producing enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year, a 20-fold increase from Pakistan's current capabilities, according to a technical assessment by Washington-based nuclear experts.

The construction site is adjacent to Pakistan's only plutonium production reactor, a modest, 50-megawatt unit that began operating in 1998. By contrast, the dimensions of the new reactor suggest a capacity of 1,000 megawatts or more, according to the analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security. Pakistan is believed to have 30 to 50 uranium warheads, which tend to be heavier and more difficult than plutonium warheads to mount on missiles.

"South Asia may be heading for a nuclear arms race that could lead to arsenals growing into the hundreds of nuclear weapons, or at minimum, vastly expanded stockpiles of military fissile material," the institute's David Albright and Paul Brannan concluded in the technical assessment, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post.

Tensions are running hot in the region, especially in the aftermath of the Mumbai train bombings. The Indian Prime Minister has already accused Pakistan of aiding the terrorists who detonated the trains. And peace talks between the two nations have been deferred indefinitely.

We have been here before. The New Yorker article detailing just how close we were to a South Asian war back in 2002 is not available online, but it's chilling. Kashmiri militants had nearly pulled off a major terror attack in December of 2001, coming very close to opening fire inside the Indian Parliament while it was in session. As it was 9 policeman and a staffer were killed. India was ready to go to war over this, and a New York Times article from May described the potential tragic consequences:

An American intelligence assessment, completed this week as tensions between India and Pakistan intensified, warns that a full-scale nuclear exchange between the two rivals could kill up to 12 million people immediately and injure up to 7 million, Pentagon officials say.

Even a "more limited" nuclear war — as measured in number of warheads — would have cataclysmic results, overwhelming hospitals across Asia and requiring vast foreign assistance, particularly from the United States, to battle radioactive contamination, famine and disease, officials said.

"The humanitarian crisis that would result would be so great that every medical facility in the Middle East and Southwest Asia would be quickly overwhelmed," one Defense Department official said. "The American military would have no choice but go in and help with the victims and to clean up."

American estimates of the number of warheads in the Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals, and their capacity, remain classified. But Pentagon and administration officials, speaking in general terms, said Pakistan has "a couple of dozen" nuclear warheads and India "several dozen."

And that was four years ago, before this latest Pakistani proliferation. Neither India or Pakistan are signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The government of Pakistan is maintaining its secular nature by the skin of its teeth and the fact that the military hasn't rebelled against Gen. Musharraf yet. It's a very fragile state that could turn into an Islamocracy with one assassin's bullet. I know we're supposed to be concerned about the birth pangs in the new Middle East (and how clueless, and offensive, is that, by the way?), but Pakistan becoming a full-fledged member of the nuclear club is serious business.

Steven D at the Booman Tribune is just as freaked out:

I don't know the reason why the Bush administration has completely dropped the ball on this issue, but I do know what the result of their failure to lessen the risk of nuclear proliferation in Pakistan and India will lead to. It will spark an arms race in Southwest Asia, not only between India and Pakistan, but likely also Iran (which being Shia has much to fear from a Sunni dominated Pakistan), and even possibly Saudi Arabia. It highlights the complete failure of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, one of many legacies of the Bush administration's deeply misguided policies. Instead of strengthening enforcement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, we have enabled India and Pakistan to open the door to a massive build-up in nuclear arms and fissile material, with all of the heightened danger for nuclear confrontation that that entails.

Not only that, we have greatly expanded the possibility that Islamic terrorist organizations may obtain a nuclear device for use against either Israel or America. Pakistan is awash in extremist Sunni madrassahs. These schools fuel radical fundamentalists sentiment throughout the citizenry of Pakistan. Supporters include many members of Pakistan's military and intelligence services, individuals who have no particular love of General Musharraf, the dictator and strongman who grasp on power is increasingly threatened by his pro-American policies. Should Musharraf's regime fall, the likely replacement would be a group of fundamentalist Islamic reformers and military officers who would sympathize with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and might not be averse to holding America hostage to their demands with threats of providing nuclear material and/or weapons over to terrorist organizations.

I seem to remember both Bush and Kerry agreeing in the third Presidential debate that nuclear proliferation was the greatest threat facing America today. Where is the Bush Administration, when that threat is being fully realized in one of the most volatile areas on the globe?

There was no immediate reaction to the report from the Bush administration. Albright said he shared his data with government nuclear analysts, who did not dispute his conclusions and appeared to already know about the new reactor.

"If there's an increasing risk of an arms race in South Asia, why hasn't this already been introduced into the debate?" Albright asked. He said the Pakistani development adds urgency to calls for a treaty halting the production of fissile material used in nuclear weapons.

"The United States needs to push more aggressively for a fissile material cut-off treaty, and so far it has not," he said.

The Israeli situation is dangerous. Iraq is incredibly dangerous. But there's no doubt that the most dangerous spot in the world today, Pakistan, is being criminally ignored by this Administration, and the consequences for the world are dire.