Here’s a couple of facts that will surprise most people. Pakistan has between 110 and 130 nuclear warheads and will have 200 by 2020. India currently has between 110 and 120 nuclear weapons. The consequences of a nuclear war between them would be horrific for the entire planet. From Conn Hallinan at antiwar.com:
President-elect Donald Trump’s off the cuff, chaotic approach to foreign policy had at least one thing going for it, even though it was more the feel of a blind pig rooting for acorns than a thought-out international initiative. In speaking with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the New York Times reported, Trump said he wanted “to address and find solutions” to Pakistan’s problems.
And what big problems they are.
Whether Trump understands exactly how dangerous the current tensions between Pakistan and India are, or if anything will come from the November 30 exchange between the two leaders, is anyone’s guess. But it’s more than the Obama administration has done over the past eight years, in spite of the outgoing president’s 2008 election promise to address the ongoing crisis in Kashmir.
Right now that troubled land is the single most dangerous spot on the globe.
War, Famine, and Radiation
India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the disputed province in the past six decades and came within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear exchange in 1999. Both countries are on a crash program to produce nuclear weapons, and between them they have enough explosive power to not only kill more than 20 million of their own people, but also to devastate the world’s ozone layer and throw the Northern Hemisphere into a nuclear winter – with a catastrophic impact on agriculture worldwide.
To continue reading: A Global Nuclear Winter: Avoiding the Unthinkable in India and Pakistan
