How a fist fight in the Himalayas could spark nuclear war that engulfs the world
As Indian and Chinese troops die in border clash...
THE crystal blue waters of Pangong, the world’s highest saltwater lake, rest like a jewel in the glacial landscape of Ladakh in the Himalayas.
Each year, thousands of people flock here to savour its pristine beauty, most of them blithely unaware, as they pose for selfies, that they stand in one of the most dangerous places on the planet — a trigger point for a nuclear catastrophe.
And this week, detonation came a step closer as Asia’s two megastates — India and China — traded, quite literally, blows.
On Tuesday night, at least 20 Indian soldiers died, including a colonel, and an unknown number of Chinese troops were killed after a month-long standoff erupted high on a cliff top as temperatures plummeted.
After a fatal shooting in 1975, the military on both sides often go unarmed as they patrol the remote and hotly disputed border, and this conflict was fought hand to hand over several hours with batons, rocks, fence posts and clubs wrapped in barbed wire.
If it were not so deadly serious, it would be comical.
Precarious
Albert Einstein once predicted that if World War III was fought with nuclear weapons, then World War IV would be fought with clubs and rocks.
China and India have reversed Einstein’s order of conflict, but they have not reduced the risk of nuclear war. Emotions in both countries have been newly stirred by this primeval violence. Beijing insists that Indian soldiers had ‘crossed the border line twice...provoking and attacking Chinese personnel’.
For its part, New Delhi counters that the clash was the result of China trying to ‘unilaterally change the status quo there’.
In the West, over several decades, we got so used to anticipating and avoiding the ‘big one’ — conflict between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union — that we tended to discount other simmering potential atomic wars.
Yes, North Korea’s nuclear bombast grabs our attention intermittently, while India and Pakistan have danced on the nuclear tightrope too often for comfort. But the nuclear-armed elephant in the room is the rumbling rivalry between India and China.
It is indeed epic: the former is the biggest democracy in the world, and the other is the world’s biggest dictatorship.
Both nations have been building up nuclear arsenals and delivery systems in recent years, but an imbalance exists that makes the situation even more precarious.
India has about 140 warheads (and a nuclear-capable submarine which could carry 12 missiles, but is not yet armed), and depends on manned bombers to deliver them to targets deep in China. Given China knows the location of India’s bases, it could launch a pre-emptive first strike. Even if the bombers got airborne, they could be shot down by Chinese air defences in a war.
China has more than double the number of India’s warheads — around 300 —and its strategy is based on the destruction of key urban centres which, it believes, would terrify an opponent into passive, appeasing mode.
When it comes to launching weapons, China also has a bigger range of options, including bombers and submarines. It has up to 75 intercontinental missiles in silos and solid-fuel mobile rockets. In April, images of scores of these weapons deployed in Inner Mongolia were leaked deliberately — just to let the U.S. and India know what they were up against — before they were removed from sight.
So China has the ability to strike all over India and India has no effective missile defence. And, let’s not forget, China has nucleararmed Pakistan as an ally at India’s rear.
This increases the risk that India might feel pressured to strike first before its bases could be knocked out by China and Pakistan, triggering massive Chinese retaliation.
Aggressive
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic — for which, with good cause, the country is blamed — China has been adopting a more aggressive global policy, be it socalled ‘wolf-warrior diplomacy’ with the West, or pressuring developing countries to sign up to its global development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, in return for investment.
It has boosted its naval presence in the South China Sea and around the breakaway island of Taiwan. In Hong Kong, it has introduced draconian security laws that trash the territory’s constitution and the ‘one country, two systems’ style of government that allowed democratic freedoms unheard of in mainland China.
And it has relentlessly increased troop numbers in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas, even as India has been investing in new roads to facilitate rapid military deployment to challenge the threat.
Last month, China upped the ante when patrols crossed the border — catching India off guard — to take up strategic positions on its rival’s territory.
Now we have the most serious confrontation since the two nations went to war over Ladakh in 1962. Not only would such an all-out conflict be devastating for billions of people in Asia, it would force the West — and Russia — to choose sides. Deterrence would go out of the window and the law of the nuclear jungle would prevail.
The disputed border in the high Himalayas is not just symbolic for chest-beating patriots on both sides. Its glaciers provide water to hundreds of millions of Indians. New Delhi fears China and its ally, Pakistan, which confronts India on another ill-defined border in Kashmir, are planning to use their control of headwaters to blackmail India downstream.
China certainly has form on this. Its dams on the Mekong River which rises in Tibet have dramatically cut the water’s flow through Laos and Cambodia to Vietnam, leaving Beijing in effective control of its neighbours’ water supply.
Crisis
Oil has caused wars in recent history, but the battle for control of Asia’s water could trigger nuclear conflict.
Nor is it any coincidence that Beijing’s close ally, North Korea, has become aggressive once more towards the South.
It is highly unlikely Kim Jong-un and his powerful sister, Kim Yojong — a nuclear-armed Bonnie and Clyde — would this week have blown up a ‘liaison office’ in the tense demilitarised zone that divides their tyranny from the South without China’s nod.
China and India will always rub up against each other. But New Delhi and Beijing must take a step back from the brink and wind back the nuclear clock ticking close to midnight.
Europe can’t separate itself from this crisis — given the millions with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Nepalese family backgrounds who will be highly concerned at events.
But the West in general needs to shift its focus from the coronavirus momentarily to help. Our democracies must show solidarity with India — possibly the only way to head off what would be the worst war in the world’s history.