Columnist Steve Chapman correctly sized up the India-Pakistan confrontation in “India and Pakistan: Angry, but not crazy” (Commentary, June 9): “Neither . . . is deluded enough to think it can win a nuclear exchange.” So the world can expect only conventional hostilities between them–provided that there are enough safeguards to prevent some berserk zealot from single-handedly pushing the launch button.
The harsh reality: These developing Third World nations have both spent millions, perhaps billions, developing nuclear arsenals that, in the final analysis, are as good as unusable.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of their respective populations eke out livings and suffer marginal health-care access and scant educational opportunities, with dim prospects of betterment in hand-to-mouth economies that have yet to produce general prosperity.
