ANDREW KOCH: U.S. government officials have repeatedly stated that they're concerned about the possibility of nuclear war in South Asia. Is their concern justified?

SUMIT GANGULY: Up to a point. I do believe that to some extent our fears are exaggerated, partly because of the role of the non-proliferation community in this country which wants to cap and limit and ultimately hopefully roll back India and Pakistan's nuclear programs. But on the other hand I think there is a certain justification for those fears, given that you have a history of conflict between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan have fought three different wars. It still continues to be a very tense relationship, particularly over the vexed issue of Kashmir. So there is some legitimate concern about the possibility of war and the war escalating to the nuclear level.

KOCH: You mentioned Kashmir as a potential source of conflict. Can you tell me a bit about the history of Kashmir? Why is it a conflict between these two countries?

GANGULY: Kashmir is a source of conflict between India and Pakistan today for simple imperatives of statecraft. Both India and Pakistan are unwilling to give up significant portions of territory and each of them has claims on the other. But that's today. There is an historical background to the Kashmir conflict which one needs to understand to be able to understand how the two countries have reached such an impasse over the Kashmir issue today.

It has to do with British Colonial policy at the time of British Colonial withdrawal in 1947. There were two classes of states within the Indian Union, in the British Indian empire. One class of states were known as the so-called princely states. Kashmir was one such state. There were 562 princely states, and in addition to that there were the states of British India. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, said that the states of British India had one of two choices. Sorry--the princely states had one of two choices: they could join either India or Pakistan; independence as an option was ruled out.

These so-called princely states had recognized the British as the paramount power on the subcontinent. With the departure of the British, the doctrine of paramountcy would lapse, and then the rulers of the princely states would have to join either India or Pakistan on the basis of two things: one, geographic contiguity with India or Pakistan or, and, their religious composition. So if they were predominately Muslim, they would go to Pakistan. Kashmir posed a peculiar problem. It had a Hindu monarch, a predominately Muslim population, and potential borders with both India and Pakistan.

So the monarch of Kashmir chose not to join either India or Pakistan, and vacillated on the question of acceding to one of the two states. To his dismay, what happened is the Pakistanis sent in troops disguised as local tribesmen, taking advantage of a tribal rebellion which had broken out in the Western reaches of the state in early October, 1947. When the tribal invaders came in armed, with regular Pakistani troops, supported by regular Pakistani troops, dressed as local tribesmen, the Maharaja panicked--this was the ruler of Kashmir, a man called Maharaja Hari Seng--panicked, and appealed to India for assistance. India agreed to provide support only if Kashmir acceded to India. Only when the maharaja acceded to India, Prime Minister Nehru sent in troops, but not before the invaders had captured 1/3 of the state, and 2/3 were still in Indian hands.

Why did Nehru so passionately hold on to Kashmir, and why did the Pakistanis, with equal zeal, seek to possess Kashmir? Principally because Kashmir went to the heart of the nation-building enterprises in both India and in Pakistan. For Pakistan, as the homeland for Muslims, as the homeland for Muslims in South Asia, it was vitally important to incorporate Kashmir, because otherwise Pakistan would not be complete, because here you had a contiguous, Muslim majority state. India at that was passionately a secular state. Nehru and others believed in the notion that a secular state would provide a home for people of all religions, of all ethnic groups, of all linguistic groups, that India could be a haven, a multicultural and multireligious polity which would respect all possible faiths that existed in its midst. And if you could somehow convince a Muslim majority state to stay within your midst, then the promise of Indian secularism would be realized.

But over the years, the commitment to secularism in India has eroded very significantly. In Pakistan, they haven't quite decided what it means to be a Muslim state, particularly after 1971 when East Pakistan breaks away on the basis of language and economic exploitation by West Pakistan. So Pakistan's claim to Kashmir also declined. So today the two countries, as I said at the very outset, hold on to Kashmir with such passion on the basis of simple statecraft and the desire that they're not gonna part with territory. The great moral and intellectual commitments of the 1940s and 50s have been effectively lost.

KOCH: What would you say is the largest cause of tension between India and Pakistan today?

GANGULY: The principal cause of tension between India and Pakistan today is Kashmir. But, the interesting thing is, between 1971 and 1989 Kashmir was virtually dormant. In fact, for all practical purposes it was dormant. It's the rise of this ethno-religious insurgency in 1989 that once again exacerbated relations between India and Pakistan, and has given rise to the state of tension that has followed in its wake.

KOCH: How would this tension affect India and Pakistan's international security?

GANGULY: Because, very bluntly put, there are border firings across what's called the line of control in Kashmir, this was the line that was agreed upon in terms of the force dispositions that obtained after the 1971 war. And frequently Indian and Pakistani forces exchange fire and there's no particular honor on either side; it's not that the Indians are solely to blame or that the Paks are solely to blame, both sides behave in provocative ways. There's an attempt to sort of test the mettle of each side. Also the Indians argue that the Pakistanis try to send in infiltrators, and there is some independent evidence that corroborates the Pakistani attempt to support the insurgency. I want to be quite clear on this point, however: that the roots of the insurgency are quintessentially indigenous, however, Pakistan's support, training, organization, and sanctuaries for the insurgents has prolonged the insurgency and increased its ferocity. But the roots of the insurgency must be traced back to the dynamics of center-stage politics in India. And because of the border firings, these things can escalate; even if no-one intends to go to war, we know enough that powderkegs in particular parts of the world have resulted in full-scale war.

KOCH: What could this escalate into? Could this escalate into conventional warfare or even nuclear warfare?

GANGULY: Thus far, the three wars that have taken place between India and Pakistan in 1947, in 1965, and in 1971 were the results not so much of misperception, but really, political calculations to go to war. Now, some of those political calculations may have been deeply flawed, and may have been the result of misreading of the other side's capabilities and the other side's intentions, but they were deliberate decisions to go to war.

On the other hand, we may now have a war as a consequence of misperception at a much lower level, but then ratcheting up because someone decides that we need to bring in heavy artillery, and having brought in heavy artillery, engages the other side to bring in heavy artillery. And with command and control being devolved to local commanders, something spinning out of control, particularly as you get more and more sophisticated forms of weaponry--and various political scientists have written about this, about organizational errors which can then lead to a larger conflict, an escalation which neither side, frankly, intended. And this becomes all the more important when you have things like offensive doctrines, where decisions have to be made fairly quickly, and there's a premium on pre-emption, and even using conventional forces, mind you. And then of course there's the looming nuclear shadow in the background.

KOCH: How exactly do nuclear weapons fit into this equation?

GANGULY: Well, so far, neither India nor Pakistan have talked explicitly about what's called the use doctrine--how would one actually use nuclear weapons? The India fear traditionally was the following: that if India did not have nuclear weapons and Pakistan had nuclear weapons, then a particularly risk-prone Pakistani military decision-maker might decide to make a short sharp incursion into Kashmir, seize a significant portion of territory, and then say that if you decide to try and use coercive power and compel us to leave the portion of Kashmir that we have occupied, remember that we then can lob nuclear weapons say in New Delhi, or on the outskirts of New Delhi, and you have nothing to retaliate with. So think twice about trying to compel us to leave the portion of Kashmir that we've already grabbed. That was the traditional Indian fear.

But now, with both sides possessing nuclear weapons, resorting to that kind of tactic or strategy would be exceedingly dangerous for Pakistan.

KOCH: Do you think that the nuclear tests in India were conducted for security reasons, or for other reasons?

GANGULY: I think that it was a multiple set of factors that played into this. I think in part it was security, but not security in a straightforward sense that the Chinese have missiles, the Chinese have nuclear weapons, and hence we need nuclear weapons to deter the Chinese. It was also in part to confer a new strategic image on India, that we too can be tough. And this kind of toughness will lead others to take us more seriously. And also in part it was directed at the Chinese because, despite US dissembling on this subject, it is quite clear that the Chinese have played an important role in terms of supplying Pakistan components of nuclear weapons, in terms of providing Pakistan with missilery. Whether or not those missiles have been uncrated in Karachi, there is ample evidence that the M-11 missiles have been transferred. And the sense was, for a conservative government which is somewhat jingoistic in its orientation, that if we possess nuclear weapons, we will be taken more seriously by the Chinese, and this will enhance our negotiating ability with the Chinese.

KOCH: Now things have changed slightly since then. Pakistan has gotten nuclear technology from other places, including the FSU, and have gotten sophisticated missilery from North Korea. But you continue to see this back-and-forth. Pakistan tests, India feels it has no choice but to test, etc. Where do you see this leading to? What's driving this dynamic?

GANGULY: It would be incorrect on my part and dishonest on my part to suggest that this is a straightforward arms-race relationship, that, you know, the Pakistanis ratchet it up a little bit, the Indians ratchet up a little bit. The Pakistanis respond to the Indian ratcheting and so on and so forth. That would be disingenuous. There is also sort of a bureaucratic-technological-scientific momentum at work quite independent of security threats. Certainly that exists in Pakistan; it exists in equal measure, perhaps greater measure in India, because of the greater sophistication of India's forces and India's bureaucratic-technological capabilities.

There is an organization since 1983--the DRDO, the Defense Research and Development Organization--which has played a very important role. It hasn't produced very good weaponry; the Army does not particularly like the Prithvi missile, because the CEP (the circular error probable) of the Prithvi leaves a great deal to be desired from the standpoint of a military man. And furthermore, the Prithvi takes a long time to fuel. It's liquid-fueled, it's not solid-fueled. These are not the kinds of things that the Indian military likes. They like stuff which works and which is proven and which is not messy. These guys also want to have a long life. And they don't want missiles which could create significant problems for them on the battlefield.

But to get back to the point about the DRDO, there are powerful domestic forces also at work which want to consume more resources. I mean, this is hardly an issue of brain surgery, here in the United States one also saw how the domain of the national security state expanded during the Cold War quite apart from meeting specific threats from the Soviets, though the Soviet threat played a very important role. But quite apart from that the politics of defense contracting, the aegis of the--the ideology of the national security state, the relationship between Congress, and pork-barrel politics, all of these things fed into creating a much larger nuclear infrastructure than that we needed. And democracies like India respond to these kinds of pressures. And then of course, scientists using obfuscatory language to justify various kinds of programs. And in particular in India you don't have something, well, we don't either anymore, but India never had something like the OTA, the Office of Technology Assessment, which could say, you know, Star Wars is a pie in the sky.

You don't have sufficient scientific debate in India. It also enables scientific bureaucrats to push a particular program without adequate scrutiny and accountability. And in Pakistan it's infinitely worse, where you don't have highly developed civil society.

KOCH: Re-state how bureaucracy is driving weapons development programs in both countries....

GANGULY: The bureaucracies associated with nuclear weapons and with missiles have a very important stake in ensuring that they have a long life. And what better to do than to produce new kinds of weapons, to come up with rationalizations, justifications for new weapons systems and say that, you know, we're mastering new kinds of technologies which will give us greater capabilities, and dangle these before politicians.

KOCH: The United States is worried that Islamabad and New Delhi could move to a position where they have nuclear-tipped missiles aimed across the border at each other. If this were to come to pass, how would you feel about that? Do you think it would be more dangerous, less dangerous, no difference?

GANGULY: I think it would be more dangerous, for the very simple reason and for the very reason that most arms-controllers point out: that here you have situations of considerable tension, and we know enough from other experiences in other parts of the world about the possibilities of human error and organizational error under conditions of stress, under conditions of tension, that often there are short-circuits in terms of human decision-making. And I'm not explicitly making a cultural argument; I don't think Indians and Pakistanis are any less or any more rational than any other culture. I'm making an argument purely on the basis of organizational procedure, of organizational error, and information processing errors. And here the margin of error is much smaller because the flight times of the missiles are significantly shorter.

Secondly, technological capabilities are not nearly as good. If we know from the work of people like Scott Sagan on organizational errors during the Cold War, we do know that a flight of Canadian geese set of a nuclear alert here in a country that prides itself on its technological capability. Imagine where technology is far more rudimentary--the dangers thereof, the increased dangers thereof. So you have shorter flight times, greater possibilities of human error because of organizational limitations and then because of technological limitations also. You may be closer to the brink. But I would underscore that I do not believe for one moment that the Indians and the Pakistanis are any more bloodthirsty than any other culture.

KOCH: So the tensions, coupled with presence of nuclear weapons, are leading to a dangerous situation?

GANGULY: Absolutely. Which is why I think some form of arms control, in however incipient a fashion, is definitely called for. Ongoing negotiations.... Even if you are going to have these weapons, at least let's get some transparency about them. Let's agree that we won't deploy certain things in certain areas. Certain kinds of verification measures. Because it may be exceedingly politically difficult to forswear these programs until we can get some reduction in tensions. But at least certain kinds of confidence-building measures, certain kinds of verification measures, certain agreements on deployments, on non-deployments that we can put into place before we can proceed to a situation where you can genuinely start dismantling some of this hardware.

KOCH: Talk briefly about the 3 wars that India and Pakistan have fought. What were reasons behind the decisions to go to war?

GANGULY: In 1947, basically Pakistan wanted to grab as much of Kashmir as possible. It's very simple. And the Indians were equally interested in ensuring that that did not happen. And basically, as a consequence thereof, the two sides went to war. A UN resolution in January 1949 finally brought the war to a close with a UN-sponsored cease-fire. There is still a UN observer group, very small, in India and Pakistan, and their mandate is quite limited. They basically have to report on border incidents, on cross-border firings and the like, which they do very well. That's a job that they do very well. They are sort of the forgotten peacekeepers in many ways.

In 1965, several factors led to the 1965 war. One was India's rearmament program after the disastrous border war with China in 1962. Pakistan feared that a window of opportunity was rapidly closing and it needed to do something. That was one factor. At an international level there was another factor in that the UN, by 1960, basically had lost interest in the Indo-Pakistani conflict because there were interminable debates from 1949 to 1960. And finally there was a sense of 'a pox on both your houses'. You know, we are no closer to a settlement, and the UN was losing interest. And consequently, the Pakistanis started to fear that the multilateral interest in the conflict was declining, so we need to do something to revive the interest of the international community in this issue.

Thirdly, at another level, apart from India's increased armaments acquisition after 1962, and the fear that the window of opportunity was about to close, what also happened was there were a set of talks that were held between 1963 and 1964, six rounds of talks at a bilateral level. And they teetered on the brink of an agreement but nothing really happened at the end. These were bilateral talks urged on by the United States and the United Kingdom in the wake of what was called the Harriman-Sands mission, former governor Averell Harriman...

In essence, a negotiated settlement to the Kashmir dispute failed at both the bilateral and multilateral levels, and there was this fear that the situation would worsen in the future--the military balance between India and Pakistan would worsen in the future, and consequently, the Pakistani decision-makers felt that this was a right moment to go to war against India. The war proved to be inconclusive; neither India or Pakistan grabbed substantial portions of territory in 1965, so the issue was deferred yet to another date, which came to haunt India and Pakistan again in 1971.

But this time the issue was not really Kashmir. Even though Kashmir was one of the theaters of war in '71, this time the issue was Pakistani domestic politics. And the Pakistani military cracked down in East Pakistan, which led to the flight of 9.8 million refugees into India over the span of 3 or 4 months, and the Indians just made a rational calculation that it was cheaper to go to war with Pakistan and provoke the Pakistanis into a war than absorb 9.8 million people into its already turgid population. This is what led up to the '71 war.

KOCH: Is there any accuracy to statement that Kashmir has as much to do with resources, particularly water, than Indo-Pakistani statecraft?

GANGULY: Not really. I wish that there was that kind of rational calculation in New Delhi or in Islamabad. It's almost never mentioned; I've done interminable interviews in Islamabad and New Delhi, and nobody talks about the headworks of water. And frankly that's a red herring, if one can mix one's metaphors, because one of the more interesting things that one learns by looking at the three Indo-Pakistani wars is the low level of violence and the unwillingness of both sides to destroy irrigation facilities. These were real gentlemen's wars, if one may use that term. India could have very easily bombed water resources in the Pakistani Punjab and wreaked havoc. And the Pakistanis could have done the same thing, but they chose not to do that. But there was a conscious avoidance of certain kinds of very painful strategies. In part this was possible because people knew each other. They had gone to the same military schools in England. One wonders if that tradition will continue, now that the contacts, the high-level military contacts no longer exist.

KOCH: Do you have any comment on recent indications that India and Pakistan may accede to the CTBT?

GANGULY: Sure. I think, the latest news, Prime Minister, I think has made an offer, I haven't gotten the latest wires, but he spoke barely an hour ago. And I think he's made a conditional, shown a conditional willingness to sign the CTBT. The Prime Minister also made a conditional offer yesterday. But frankly, Prime Minister quite deftly put the onus on India, so he used virtue and necessity in the same breath. Necessity because he desperately needs the sanctions lifted, virtue because now the onus was placed on India to say something about the CTBT or to be clubbed together with North Korea, not exactly the most exemplary company on the world as the two only holdouts on the CTBT.

KOCH: If India and Pakistan do sign the CTBT, do you think the United States should lift sanctions?

GANGULY: Absolutely. Absolutely.

KOCH: What can be done to lessen the nuclear dangers in India and Pakistan?

GANGULY: I know this is completely heretical to the non-proliferation community in this country, but I would work both with India and Pakistan to suggest things like Permissive Action Links, to offer verification technology, and not directly intrude. Because there is an enormous reservoir of mistrust that we have, meaning the United States, has in South Asia, particularly in India. And the last thing we need to do is step in head first to this region, because the Indians simply will just get their guard up, In the worst kind of way. I think many of their fears are greatly exaggerated, but be that as it may, even paranoids of enemies, and the Indians are simply gonna thwart any effort that we undertake. On the other hand, by defusing certain kinds of technology, by making available certain kinds of technology, by starting military-to-military contacts for example, by widening the gyre, we can possibly then lower the temperature within the region.

KOCH: What are permissive action links.

GANGULY: These are various kinds of technological devices which ensure that nuclear weapons are not accidentally fired, for example. That command and control of nuclear weapons remains fairly tight--under fairly tight controls. So that it's not devolved to a local commander who, in a moment of mental weakness decides, 'well, I'm going to teach the Pakistanis a lesson', or 'I'm gonna teach the Indians a lesson'. And there are debates about how much you want to devolve and how much you want to centralize. But the point is there should be clear controls, whether you want a more devolved command and control or you want a more centralized command and control, these things should be fairly transparent, there should be clear lines of authority, there should be clear technological locks, for example, on nuclear weapons.

KOCH: Do India and Pakistan have a command and control structure in place?

GANGULY: These are highly incipient. They are sort of groping in the dark. One of the real shortcomings is that neither decision-makers in India nor Pakistan thought of what they would do the day after. They were so enamored of the nuclear weapons themselves, and the ability to test nuclear weapons, that no-one gave adequate thought to what kinds of command and control would we like. We are now seeing the first articles in the public domain about the command and control of small nuclear forces and what kinds of computers would they entail, what kinds of radars would they entail, and how would you link up radars with computers. I mean, the discussions are at a really incipient stage. And this is a discussion that we should get involved in.

KOCH: Let's talk worst-case scenario. Were tensions to come to pass and a nuclear device to go off, what would the consequences be?

GANGULY: I think politically it would have a devastating effect on international relations. Because there has been a nuclear taboo since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People have come to the brink, have stared into the abyss and then pulled back. As we did during the Cuban missile crisis, and as we did in other quasi-nuclear crises, Matsu for example, during the Eisenhower administration, the offshore island crises as they are referred to, and various other crises, over Berlin and over Israel, and the like. But we've only peered into the abyss and discovered what a horror lay there and then decision-makers have pulled back. We've never used nuclear weapons, nor has anyone else, for that matter. There's been this nuclear taboo. And I worry that once that nuclear taboo is broken, what consequences that has for the future of the taboo. And most international relations scholars agree on this.

The second (human toll) is an even more horrifying thought, particularly as someone with his roots in the region, and with substantial knowledge of the region. If a nuclear war were to take place, the consequences--people who reason from ordinary disasters to nuclear disasters are clueless. It's a fundamentally flawed analogy. There were people in this country who foolishly talked about during a certain period of the Cold War history, that if we had enough shovels, we could put, say, several feet of earth, and we could survive a nuclear war. That was the most irresponsible form of talk. There is no point of surviving a nuclear war. In fact the survivors might actually envy the people who died. And particularly in South Asia, where hospital facilities under good conditions are rudimentary, where inadequate amounts of money directed toward anything like civil defense--even conventional civil defense--to think that you could have nuclear civil defense is frankly chimerical. The costs would make Hiroshima look like a minor skirmish.