India-Pakistan Conflict, will ?… Nuclear ?
Asia’s nuclear powers – India and Pakistan – do not intend to follow the example of the two superpowers. The ongoing standoff in South Asia may lead to catastrophic consequences for the whole world.
The conflict between India and Pakistan lasts for over 60 years already. Their confrontation became especially dangerous after 1998, when both India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests and showed the world their ability to build nuclear weapons.
India has never concealed an intention to possess nuclear weapons. The nuclear doctrine was approved in the nation in 2001. It is worthy of note that India never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Indian government believes that it has a full right to possess nuclear arms just like Russia, the USA, China, France and Great Britain.
None of the people in India or Pakistan want to have a nuclear war. A nuclear war would affect both equally, no matter who had/has the better weapons stockpile.
If conflict were to begin, analysts see the most likely scenario as an Indian strike on what it sees as militant targets in Pakistani Kashmir or in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The Pakistani military has vowed to respond to any such strike “within minutes”. Tit-for-tat missile strikes would be followed by the rapid mobilisation of troops along the line separating the two sides in disputed Kashmir and along their international border that runs south to the Arabian Sea. Both sides have hundreds of thousands of soldiers and large amounts of a range of military hardware based near their frontier. Their navies would face off in the Arabian Sea and analysts say India would probably try to block Pakistan’s main port of Karachi.
The fear is that strikes and counter-strikes would rapidly escalate between two countries armed with nuclear weapons and various ways of delivering them. Domestic pressure on India to pursue a military option would rise sharply if militants struck in India again and India believed the attackers came from, or got support from, Pakistan.
