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Raves/Rants about the goings-on on a little blue inconsequential planet in a small and relatively uninspiring solar system which is on the far end of a small and wholly unspectacular galaxy in the large universe.

India, Nukes and Neighbors (Also post #1)

Category: , , , By El Subliminal
A good friend suggested that instead of sending emails with links and commenting on them, I should instead start blogging for the benefit of mankind and all.

If nothing else, this would presumably save the otherwise innocent bandwidth.

Anyway as a first topic, I decided to take up something slightly controversial - India, with its nukes and the precarious situation it is in with its neighbors. As a catalyst, here is a recent editorial in IHT which largely echoes my thoughts.

The basic problem is India has China on one side, Pakistan on the other. Both have nukes.
The question is - should India have gone nuke in the first place knowing that someday it'll be surrounded by nuke-toting countries?

While the pseudo-official line is that India went nuke because of China, surely someone should have thought of the ramifications - it ain't pretty surrounded by nucular countries.

Is this a case of a country applying a greedy heuristic at the given time (going nuclear in the 70s), only to be left in a local minima decades later (now).

Perhaps a dynamic programming approach might have been more fruitful..
 

4 comments so far.

  1. Seetal May 1, 2008 at 6:34 AM
    Well el subliminal, looks like you finally have evoked a response. I just hope your "dynamic programming approach" is a sarcastic solution to a very fragile South Asian regional situation, where tensions will forever exist; mainly due to bogus political policies and back stabbing insurgencies by China. You have to understand that India absolutely needed to develop its nuclear program. I mean look elsewhere where you have communist nations like North Korea, or terrorist camps like Iran developing their own nukes supposedly for their self defense. Ultimately though, as a complete side-note, the one way to explain this is by studying Mayan Theology. The essence of this theology is that the world as a whole organism is dictated by cycles, and dependent on where you are the energies of a particular region influence individual's conscious decision making. It's based on an ancient 260 day calendar that describes how the energies are associated with birth, death, re-incarnation and so on. This ancient calendar has accurately predicted the rise and fall of the Roman Empires, the British world-wide occupations, and the Nazi regime. But the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012; implying that some extraordinary collapse of the world is near. And coincidentally, this date is around the time of the end of the would be President of the USA's first term in office. Complete nuclear annihilation?
  2. El Subliminal May 3, 2008 at 12:13 PM
    hmm.

    either you are drunk or i'm too mentally exhausted to make sense of your mayan spiel. The only thing I can conclude about the world ending in 2012, is I better get laid more often.

    So I agree that hindsight is always 20/20. And I agree that tensions will always persist. But just because there are tensions doesn't mean one goes nuke.
    Look at Greece and Turkey - they have a much longer and bloodier history than India and any of its' neighbors.
    I also fail to see the point of comparing ourselves with fascist regimes like Iran and NK.
    If anything you are undermining your own argument by pointing out that these countries are either terrorist camps or commie/fascist regimes.
  3. harjot May 16, 2008 at 11:36 PM
    This comment has been removed by the author.
  4. harjot May 16, 2008 at 11:41 PM
    The most complete and definitive source information on nuclear proliferation in south asia is this book:
    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deception-
    Pakistan-Nuclear-Weapons-Conspiracy
    /dp/1843545330

    This is a very well researched book and pays a lot of attention to even the minutest of detail.The focus is on Pakistan and how it subverted every rule in the book to go nuclear,how and from where it procured components for its Kahuta enrichment facility, and how America looked the other way every single time.
    Worth a read.
    -Harjot

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