Pakistan and India will resume talks on confidence-building measures (CBMs) regarding nuclear and conventional weapons on Monday. Senior Indian diplomats, Yash Sinha and Venkatesh Varma, will lead the Indian delegation to Islamabad for the two-day talks. The Pakistani side will be led by Munawar Saeed Bhatti, former deputy high commissioner to India.
The talks, which are resuming after a gap of four years, indicate that the dialogue process between India and Pakistan is back on track.
CBMs on conventional weapons will be discussed on Monday, while nuclear weapons will be discussed the next day.
The talks are not ambitious in their scope, and the two sides are expected to talk about expanding conventional CBMs to include incidents at sea. This was necessitated after Indian and Pakistani ships brushed past each other in 2010, which could have gotten ugly. There will be more talks on facilitating trade and movement of people across the Line of Control, and some military issues. Pakistan has moved over 100,000 troops from its border with India to fight the war on terror along the border with Afghanistan.
On nuclear CBMs, while India and Pakistan notify each other on ballistic missile launches, cruise missiles remain outside this arrangement. Secondly, the two countries may even discuss the issues of nuclear safety, especially in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which has prompted a safety rethink all over the world. On January 1, India and Pakistan will again exchange lists of nuclear installations, probably the oldest India-Pak CBM that has survived.
This is the way forward, there is no other way. There was a time when nuclear threat (covert or overt) after the 2001 Parliament attack in Delhi, was the order of the day. A decade later the world has moved on, No sane person, government or a country can contemplate (let alone talk) about using nuclear weapons. Both sides need no convincing that the first to use the weapon, will meet massive retaliation not only from the other side, but also by the big five, who have enough nuclear arsenal to anhilate the planet.
India – Pakistan nuclear talks are utterly vital. The results of an India-Pakistan nuclear conflict include potentially the complete destruction of both as functioning entities, the immediate deaths of up to 150 million by some estimates, and global climatic effects involving a 'year without a summer', in which widespread crop failure might bring about the deaths by starvation of up to a further billion people (See article in Scientific American by Professors Toon and Robock.)
Anything that makes such an outcome less likely must be welcoed, not as a political gesture that looks nice, but as an urgent survival imperative for both societies.
John Hallam
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