Hardly mentioned in the critiques of India and Pakistan’s development of nuclear weaponry is the most important fact of all: These weapons will certainly destroy the user as well as the victim.
Today’s warheads are many times more destructive and contaminating than the Hiroshima bomb. If Chernobyl’s power-plant reactor gone haywire made vast areas of Russia non-livable, and imperiled parts of Scandinavia with fallout, imagine the result of a missile exchange.
The additional problem with India and Pakistan is their religious rivalry. How ironic if Armageddon were sparked by conflicting views of holiness and the road to heaven!
In the Middle and Far East, Japan, as the lone victim of nuclear weapons so far, also stands out as being the only nation wise enough to abstain from developing them despite having the capacity to do so.
Maybe Japan should be the one to negotiate with India and Pakistan about disarming. Japan is a fellow Asian nation, with clean hands and, thanks to an empty nuclear arsenal, with the moral authority that the U.S., with its nuclear stockpile, lacks.
