Scientists Bridge Political Divide
Shyam Bhatia
Some friendships defy the most testing times. In this case two scientists from India and Pakistan have snubbed convention and the logic of war by jointly highlighting the consequences of a nuclear exchange for their region.
U.S.-educated M.V. Ramana from India and British-trained Zia Mian from Pakistan both have an academic grounding in theoretical physics. What is so special about these men based at Princeton University in New Jersey is a brotherhood that transcends the political divide and invokes memories of an international fraternity of nuclear scientists that existed before World War II. As the military standoff continues between India and Pakistan, these two friends stand out as an all-too-rare example of hands-across-theborder professionals. Yet if they were back in their own countries the friendship between the two scientists from bitterly opposed neighboring nations inevitably would lead to accusations of treason. Indeed their relationship, and proven history of mutual support, would be comparable to an American and a Soviet scientist working closely with each other during the height of the Cold War.
Both men were born a generation after India and Pakistan secured independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Each sees himself as a science activist prepared to challenge prevailing orthodoxies.
Friends of 40-year-old Mian, an undergraduate at London University before he qualified for his doctorate at Newcastle, describe him as a dead ringer for the Mahatma Gandhi character portrayed by Ben Kingsley in Richard Attenborough's famous film about the father of the Indian independence movement. Ramana, a Boston University Ph.D. who is due to take up a research position in India later this year, is two years younger and the exact opposite of his bespectacled Pakistani friend. His tousled hair and fondness for denim belie his academic status and mark him as just another graduate student on an American university campus. He also has hidden talents as a published critic of Indian classical music.
Both men are respected for their academic competence by their scientist contemporaries, but their passionate opposition to nuclear weapons marks them as troublemakers to the ruling establishments in India and Pakistan. Neither man has been given access to the state-controlled media to argue their case before the courts of public opinion.
Ramana set the ball rolling with a paper he wrote when he was previously at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was entitled Bombing Bombay: Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and was a case study of a hypothetical explosion. His paper, published by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, was written before the last round of saber-rattling between Islamabad and New Delhi, but its relevance has been underscored by the continuing threats and counterthreats from both sides of the border to play the nuclear card.
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M.V. Ramana |
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"The purpose of this exercise is not to speculate on the probability of Bombay being attacked," Ramana wrote in his introduction. "Instead the aim is to further understanding of the consequences that result from a nuclear explosion." Taking as his starting point the size of bombs that were used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ramana comes to the chilling conclusion that the number of deaths in Bombay resulting from attack by a single nuclear bomb could range somewhere between 160,000 and 860,000.
"I wanted to be as conservative as possible," Ramana said in an exclusive interview. "The larger figure is entirely possible because the population density in some parts of the city is so high. Think of the morning rush at Churchgate or Victoria terminal [at the heart of Bombay] and you'll see that if something goes off there it will instantly kill huge numbers of people. Therefore I have good reason to believe that the final count could be at the higher end of the estimates."
Asked to describe what happens when a nuclear bomb explodes, Ramana says, "The first thing you will experience is the light and heat that comes out of the fireball. When the bomb explodes a huge amount of energy is created very locally, and that heats up the air around the point of explosion so high that it starts radiating enormous amounts of heat and light. Your skin just starts to burn."
During the course of his research Ramana studied the impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, as well as the World War II firebombings of the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden. He says the sheer heat released from a nuclear explosion is so intense – with temperatures reaching up to 800 degrees – that there is little chance of escape. Citing the experience of civilians in Hamburg and Dresden, he says even those who had access to bomb shelters could not escape the ovenlike effects created by bombings.
Temperatures reached such high levels that those inside bomb shelters either were asphyxiated or just charred to death. One image imprinted on Ramana's mind is of a German bomb shelter that was opened immediately after a raid and where all that was left of the people inside was a heap of ash.
"It's also very difficult to run away," Ramana explains, "because the heat is so high all the air starts to rise like from a chimney, and then, to replace the air, other air comes from the outside. It's like a circle with wind coming from the outside everywhere, like a suction pump. When you try to leave the circle you won't be safe because there's a very stiff wind, and the wind blows at 50 to 60 kilometers per hour [31-37.2 mph], and it's like trying to escape in the face of a cyclone or something like that."
Ramana's Pakistani colleague, Mian, agrees that the effect of a nuclear attack on Bombay is typical of what would happen to other cities in South Asia. A former member of the teaching staff at Qaid-eAzam University in Islamabad, Mian says, "The only variables are local population density – in other words, how many people per square kilometer. The only key variable to differentiate an attack on Bombay from an attack on Rawalpindi is what is the actual population density per square kilometer around the region where the bomb explodes."
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 Zia Mian | |
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Mian was a sounding board for Ramana while he was writing up his research. He since has participated in a separate study of nuclear bombing in South Asia, looking specifically at Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi and Madras in India, and Faisalabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi in Pakistan. "If we looked at just prompt fatalities it was 300,000 in Bangalore, 500,000 in Bombay, 350,000 in Calcutta, 365,000 in Madras and almost 200,000 in New Delhi," Mian explains.
For the Pakistani side, he continues, "it was 330,000 in Faisalabad, 150,000 in Islamabad, 240,000 in Karachi because it's spread out, about 250,000 in Lahore and about 180,000 in Rawalpindi."
These figures since have been dwarfed by U.S. intelligence estimates that as many as 30 million could be killed in a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. The discrepancy in the casualty figures is explained by the assumption of U.S. intelligence analysts that any nuclear-bombing raids would not be confined to five cities on either side of the border. Indeed, if nuclear war were prolonged, according to yet another estimate prepared by U.S. Air Force intelligence, casualties could reach 100 million.
Such doomsday figures serve to strengthen each scientist's determination to spread the word that nuclear weapons are bad news for their countrymen. Apart from pursuing their own research the two men also are doing what they can to empower the coalitions against nuclear weapons starting to take shape in their respective countries.
Ramana is a member of the New Delhi-based Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), which was formed in November 2000 and includes among its active supporters a former chief of naval staff. Mian is a founding member of the Islamabad-based Pakistan Peace Coalition (PPC), which is an umbrella organization for 500 civil-rights groups opposed to nuclear weapons.
They each lament the absence of a transborder scientific brotherhood that would permit more experts such as themselves to exchange information and influence opinion-makers. On the other hand, they believe they have at least made a start. "To be honest it's the only hope that one has in a sense," Ramana says.
"It's an uphill and gloomy situation," observes Mian, while noting that when the PPC was founded in January 1999 Indian peace activists from CNDP crossed the border to share a common platform with their Pakistani neighbors.
While it is tempting to see Mian and Ramana as South Asian pioneers of a widespread protest movement committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons, the parallels with mass protest in the West are not encouraging. Founders of that effort such as Bertrand Russell were able to rally some public support at a time when nuclear weapons still were young and long before arms-control theologians had rationalized them as a perfectly respectable and even desirable core of strategic deterrence.
So the possibility of building a mass-based movement that can be directly abolitionist – as such efforts were for a time early in the Cold War – becomes much harder "because there is this countervailing set of ideas and institutions which people see as being part of the common sense of the world now," Mian says. "Challenging that becomes a double challenge for the peace movement to which we belong."
This article was first published in Insight on the News, Oct. 15, 2003 (www.insightmag.com/news/268101.html); Shyam Bhatia is a free-lance writer for Insight magazine.
