Two Guys That DO Have Nukes
Here’s one to put on your radar: India is now semi-officially blaming Pakistan for the bomb attacks in July in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 200 people. This isn’t just a quarrel between two unfriendly neighbors: both countries have nuclear weapons. And not the kind that Iraq supposedly had before we invaded Iraq (i.e., nothing) or the kind that Iran is supposedly trying to develop, but the real thing.
The country India is blaming for the attack, Pakistan, is the same one whose secret intelligence service, the ISI, supported the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and which may still support the Taliban. Earlier this month, Pakistan signed a deal for a truce with the Taliban in a remote border region of Pakistan, despite evidence that Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are using Pakistan as a base of operations. With each passing day, it’s becoming clearer that Pakistan is a festering sore that hosts Islamist militants by the bundle.
So — just in case you have nothing else to worry about, start worrying that Pakistan and India might blunder into a nuclear war. (They’ve come close in the past, and they’ve fought several wars since Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947.) Now India says it will share its evidence about the Mumbai attacks with Pakistan, and Pakistan — hotly denying it was involved — says it will cooperate if the evidence is convincing. But things don’t look good.