Nuclear War on the Indian subcontinent

India and Pakistan have been to war with each other 3 times, and they both have nuclear arms, Pakistan is and has been an unstable mess, since Pakistan public tested its first bomb in 1998 there have been 3 border flares between India and Pakistan, could any of these or any other issue in the years after Pakistan got nuclear weapons turn into a full nuclear war between the two nations, if so what gets nuked and what does the subcontinent (and world) look like after that?
 
The US, Commonwealth, Russia and China, all of which are allied with one or both countries, would make clear that lobbing nukes around is unacceptable. Ditto for the other UNSC countries. No way in hell are Russia and China letting nuclear exchanges happen near their borders.

If somehow this comes to pass...

Military bases, population centres, economic hubs. Just like any nuke strike, or conventional first strike for that matter.
 
The US, Commonwealth, Russia and China, all of which are allied with one or both countries, would make clear that lobbing nukes around is unacceptable. Ditto for the other UNSC countries. No way in hell are Russia and China letting nuclear exchanges happen near their borders.

1)
:confused:
If the Indians and Pakistanis are desperate enough to start lobbing nukes on purpose, you think that friendly nations are going to be able to deter them? ???

The US is supposedly an ally of Pakistan ATM - but the former can't even convince the latter to stop supporting Al Qaeda...

2) that supposes that there is TIME for any kind of conversation. Given how close the two countries are, the flight times for missiles is really, really short. The chances of one side launching on a false report is huge. It nearly happened a couple of times with the US/USSR, but the tens of minutes minutes a transpolar missile takes to reach its target meant that the operators could think for a few minutes and decide it was a glitch. Not a luxury an Indian or Pakistani missileer has.
 
2) that supposes that there is TIME for any kind of conversation. Given how close the two countries are, the flight times for missiles is really, really short. The chances of one side launching on a false report is huge. It nearly happened a couple of times with the US/USSR, but the tens of minutes minutes a transpolar missile takes to reach its target meant that the operators could think for a few minutes and decide it was a glitch. Not a luxury an Indian or Pakistani missileer has.

Indeed. The state of C3I infrastructure also means that launch authority has to be delegated to a worrying degree in time of crisis. It's a situation with plenty of scope for things to go wrong.
 
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The concept of a nuclear exchange has intrigued me. According the the West Wing, the Pakistanis and Indians do not share the western fear of the bomb. If that is indeed true, it could make exchange more likely.

It'd be interesting to see what this does to India on the world stage. It is an emerging power, and one which the business community is involved in. While the above was a joke, that would be something that would happen. Everything that has been outsourced to India will be possibly in the range of atomic warheads, and the ramifications to the economic community world wide could be quite bad. Nuclear war would also assuredly retard growth or limit it at least.
 
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The concept of a nuclear exchange has intrigued me. According the the West Wing, the Pakistanis and Indians do not share the western fear of the bomb. If that is indeed true, it could make exchange more likely.

It'd be interesting to see what this does to India on the world stage. It is an emerging power, and one which the business community is involved in. While the above was a joke, that would be something that would happen. Everything that has been outsourced to India will be possibly in the range of atomic warheads, and the ramifications to the economic community world wide could be quite bad. Nuclear war would also assuredly retard growth or limit it at least.

I have always maintained that there is no nation on Earth more likely to use nuclear weapons than Pakistan. India not only outperforms Pakistan economically but their army is also vastly larger. The Pakistanis know that the ONLY way to truly "win" a war with India at this point would be to use nuclear weapons, which would obviously doom themselves. In my opinion their crazy enough to do it, but I would like to think they're a little more rational than that.
 
Nuclear war between India and Pakistan would pretty much destroy any hope India has of becoming an economic powerhouse for the next century or two. Pakistan would simply cease to exist.
 

Cook

Banned
The big problem both countries face is ‘Use them or lose them’. Being neighbours any warning of missile attack is going to be under ten minutes, especially for the Pakistanis who have zero strategic depth. So once the fighting becomes more than just border skirmishing and becomes significant, every inbound airstrike is going to look like the start of a nuclear attack.
 
Things go very badly. While I don't think India and Pakistan have the sort of city-busters on the Minutemen and Satans, you don't need a megaton-range yield to kill a million people when you're talking Asian population densities.

On Ground Zero, I dropped a B61, full yield 340 kt, on Mumbai, and, well...the entire peninsula is as good as gone. The B61 is a pretty typical fighter-launched weapon, and you can probably mount two equivalents on a Fantan or a Mirage III. Even if the Indians manage to intercept nearly everything, two bombs each on New Delhi and Mumbai and you can write off both cities. The same B61, if you're wondering, covers about half of New Delhi.
 
India does have fusion based weapons of the 1-2 megaton yield and yeah one single bomb on delhi or mumbai is effectively writing off both the cities for a few generations at the least. delhi in particular is a nasty proposition as it would put the whole indo-gangetic plain which is one of the most fertile regions in the country out of action. the ramifications of that can only be imagined with drought famine and disease reigning supreme.
that having been said. the nuclear exchange is unlikely. all the wars that india and pakistan have fought were deliberately kept away from population centers and if a nuclear exchange were to happen it'll pretty much be restricted to the armed forces field maneuvers aiming to wipe out troop concentrations and other such strategic goals.
you would note that the pakistan nuclear institute which prepares the actual warheads is within 45 minute flying distance from the palam airforce base.
india has an established no first strike policy and if at all pakistan does launch first it would wipe out few population centers while you can pretty much write off the very nation of pakistan in the indian response
 
Couple years ago, I read an article in Scientific American about the climatic effects of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. Apparently, the dust kicked up by the nuclear exchange is sufficient enough to block out enough sunlight to severely damage grain harvests across North America. It's not a full blown nuclear winter, but harvests around the globe would be hit pretty hard, and you can expect food prices to rise in accordance.
 
Except since its hitting big producers in both the northern and southern hemispheres, you'd see discontent in all sorts of states that are in poor economic shape. From countries as disparate as Haiti and Zimbabwe, there'd likely be price increases that the people would be unwilling to bear.
 
The Indo-Pakistani wars are some of the least bloody wars in the 21st century. Not counting the civilian toll during partition, the wars themselves are of modest scale with minimal civilian casualties.

While there's a lot of bad blood, neither side has ever shown any inclination to really throw down. Personally I think they never will. A watched pot never boils.
 
Couple years ago, I read an article in Scientific American about the climatic effects of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. Apparently, the dust kicked up by the nuclear exchange is sufficient enough to block out enough sunlight to severely damage grain harvests across North America. It's not a full blown nuclear winter, but harvests around the globe would be hit pretty hard, and you can expect food prices to rise in accordance.
That was if the entire arsenal was used and focused on the cities. Due to the wooden mega-cities of both cities they would burn like the worlds largest bonfires, the ash not dust would cause the temperature to drop by about 3 to 4 degrees in the immediate area, 2 degrees in the surrounding area, and 1 degree or less around the rest of the world. They estimated it would last for about a year and then warm up again.
If they focused most of the nukes on military targets and only a few cities got hit, it wouldn't be a world wide disaster, just a regional one.
 
That was if the entire arsenal was used and focused on the cities. Due to the wooden mega-cities of both cities they would burn like the worlds largest bonfires, the ash not dust would cause the temperature to drop by about 3 to 4 degrees in the immediate area, 2 degrees in the surrounding area, and 1 degree or less around the rest of the world. They estimated it would last for about a year and then warm up again.
If they focused most of the nukes on military targets and only a few cities got hit, it wouldn't be a world wide disaster, just a regional one.

Now that's a pretty bad way to combat global warming...

Sarcastiolus
 
Such a war is the very definition of a shite state of affairs. They are locked in a "Paired Minority Conflict" where each feels like the wronged underdog, a situation which exaggerates the emotional level any tension between them.

India's nuclear posture is quite relaxed, they store key components of their warheads seperately from each other and these are stored seperately from the lauch systems. They also have a declared no first use policy. But they are far more powerful than Pakistan in every way.

Pakistan also has a relaxed nuclear posture, warheads are not mated to delivery sytems. But Pakistan has a stated first use nuclear policy, if India crosses the border in force they will nuke India. This is because a decent armoured attack on Pakistan would cut the country in half. Pakistan uses this policy to upport it's insurgency in Kashmir, India can't attack ISI supported insurgent bases in Pakistan because Pakistan makes no secret that they will get nuked if they do.

However India has purchsed Green Pine radars from Israel but no Arrow2 TABMs and Pakistans SRBM programme is progressing poorly. On the other hand India has a powerful and improving military, I'd hate to see what will happen when India get it's 126 Typhoons or Rafales, or worse still if they take up their option for 74 more. They'll be able to hunt Pakistans nuke delivery systems, but I digress.

Perhaps the testing saga of 1998 turns into an actual nuclear exchange.
 
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