By Arundhati Roy

When India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear tests in 1998, even

those of us who condemned them, balked at the hypocrisy of Western

nuclear powers. Implicit in their denunciation of the tests was the

notion that Blacks cannot be trusted with the Bomb. Now we are presented

with the spectacle of our governments competing to confirm that belief.

As diplomats' families and tourists disappear from the subcontinent,

western journalists arrive in Delhi in droves. Many call me. "Why

haven't you left the city?" they ask. "Isn't nuclear war a real

possibility? Isn't Delhi a prime target?"

If nuclear weapons exist, then nuclear war is a real possibility. And

Delhi is a prime target. It is.

But where shall we go? Is it possible to go out and buy another life

because this one's not panning out?

If I go away, and everything and everyone - every friend, every tree,

every home, every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved -

is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love? And who will love

me back? Which society will welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan

that I am here, at home?

So we're all staying. We huddle together. We realize how much we love

each other. And we think, what a shame it would be to die now. Life's

normal only because the macabre has become normal. While we wait for

rain, for football, for justice, the old generals and eager boy-anchors

on TV talk of first strike and second-strike capabilities as though

they're discussing a family board game.

My friends and I discuss Prophecy, the documentary about the bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fireball. The dead bodies choking the river.

The living stripped of skin and hair. The singed, bald children, still

alive, their clothes burned into their bodies. The thick, black, toxic

water. The scorched, burning air. The cancers, implanted genetically, a

malignant letter to the unborn. We remember especially the man who just

melted into the steps of a building. We imagine ourselves like that. As

stains on staircases. I imagine future generations of hushed

schoolchildren pointing at my stain...that was a writer. Not She or He.

That.

I'm sorry if my thoughts are stray and disconnected, not always worthy.

Often ridiculous.

I think of a little mixed-breed dog I know. Each of his toes is a

different color. Will he become a radioactive stain on a staircase too?

My husband's writing a book on trees. He has a section on how figs are

pollinated. Each fig only by its own specialized fig wasp. There are

nearly a thousand different species of fig wasps, each a precise,

exquisite, synchrony, the product of millions of years of evolution.

All the fig wasps will be nuked. Zzzz. Ash. And my husband. And his

book.

A dear friend, who's an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmada

valley, is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the fourteenth day of

her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening quickly.

They're protesting because the MP government is bulldozing schools,

clear-felling forests, uprooting hand-pumps, forcing people from their

villages to make way for the Man dam. The people have nowhere to go. And

so, the hunger-strike.

What an act of faith and hope! How brave it is to believe that in

today's world, reasoned, closely argued, non-violent protest will

register, will matter. But will it? To governments that are comfortable

with the notion of a wasted world, what's a wasted valley?

The threshold of horror has been ratcheted up so high that nothing short

of genocide or the prospect of nuclear war merits mention. Peaceful

resistance is treated with contempt. Terrorism's the real thing. The

underlying principle of the War Against Terror, the very notion that war

is an acceptable solution to terrorism, has ensured that terrorists in

the subcontinent now have the power to trigger a nuclear war.

Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease - these are

now just the funnies, the comic-strip items. Our Home minister says that

Amartya Sen has it all wrong - the key to India's development is not

education and health but defense (and don't forget the kickbacks, O Best

Beloved).

Perhaps what he really meant was that war is the key to distracting the

world's attention from fascism and genocide. To avoid dealing with any

single issue of real governance that urgently needs to be addressed.

For the governments of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is not a problem,

it's their perennial and spectacularly successful solution. Kashmir is

the rabbit they pull out of their hats every time they need a rabbit.

Unfortunately, it's a radioactive rabbit now, and it's careening out of

control.

No doubt there is Pakistan sponsored cross-border terrorism in Kashmir.

But there's other kids of terror in the valley. There's the inchoate

nexus between jehadi militants, ex-militants, foreign mercenaries, local

mercenaries, underworld Mafiosi, security forces, arms dealers and

criminalized politicians and officials on both sides of the border.

There's also rigged elections, daily humiliation, "disappearances" and

staged "encounters."

And now the cry has gone up in the heartland India is a Hindu country.

Muslims can be murdered under the benign gaze of the state. Mass

murderers will not be brought to justice. Indeed, they will stand for

elections. Is India to be a Hindu nation in the heartland and a secular

one around the edges?

Meanwhile the International Coalition Against Terror makes war and

preaches restraint. While India and Pakistan bay for each other's blood

the Coalition is quietly laying gas pipelines, selling us weapons and

pushing through their business deals. (Buy now pay later). Britain, for

example, is busy arming both sides. Tony Blair's "peace" mission a few

months ago was actually a business trip to discuss a one billion pound

deal (and don't forget the kickbacks, O Best Beloved) to sell Hawk

fighter-bombers to India. Roughly, for the price of a single Hawk

bomber, the government could provide one and a half million people with

clean drinking water for life.

"Why isn't there a peace movement?" western journalists ask me

ingenuously. How can there be a peace movement when, for most people in

India, peace means a daily battle for food, for water, for shelter, for

dignity? War, on the other hand, is something professional soldiers

fight far away on the border. And nuclear war - well that's completely

outside the realm of most people's comprehension. No one knows what a

nuclear bomb is. No one cares to explain. As the Home minister said,

education is not a pressing priority. Part of me feels grateful that

most people here don't have any notion of the horrors of nuclear war.

Why should they, on top of everything else they go through, have to

suffer the terror of anticipating a nuclear holocaust? And yet, it is

this ignorance that makes nuclear weapons so much more dangerous here.

It is this ignorance, that makes "deterrence" seem like a terrible joke.

The last question every visiting journalist always asks me is Are you

writing another book? That question mocks me. Another book? Right now?

When it looks as though all the music, the art, the architecture, the

literature - the whole of human civilization means nothing to the fiends

who run the world - what kind of book should I write?

It's not just the one million soldiers on the border who are living on

hair-trigger alert. It's all of us. That's what nuclear bombs do.

Whether they're used or not, they violate everything that is humane.

They alter the meaning of life itself.

Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate these men who use nuclear

weapons to blackmail the entire human race?

Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi. She is the author of The God of Small

Things and Power Politics (South End Press).

By Norman Solomon

American media outlets roused themselves from outright denial in

early June, spurred by belated warnings from top U.S. officials that a

nuclear war between India and Pakistan would kill millions of people.

The tone of news coverage shifted toward alarm. Meanwhile, atomic

history remained largely sanitized.

"Even one military move by either of these nuclear-armed

neighbors," USA Today's front page reported in big type, "could set off

an unstoppable chain reaction that could lead to the holocaust the world

has feared since the atomic bomb was developed." The June 10 edition of

Newsweek includes a George Will column with a chilling present-day

reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis "The world may be closer to a

nuclear war than it was at any time during the Cold War -- even October

1962."

Yet when it comes to nuclear weapons, the mainstream American press

has scant emotional range or professional zeal to scrutinize the

progression of atomic perils. From the start of the nuclear era, each

man in the Oval Office has carefully attended to public relations, with

major media rarely questioning the proclaimed humanitarian goals.

Making an announcement on Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry Truman did

his best to engage in deception. "The world will note that the first

atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base," he said. "That

was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as

possible, the killing of civilians."

But civilians populated the city of Hiroshima -- as well as

Nagasaki, where an A-bomb struck three days later. Hundreds of thousands

died as a result of the atomic bombings. American military strategists

were eager "to use the bomb first where its effects would be not only

politically effective but technically measurable," Manhattan Project

physicist David H. Frisch recalled.

For U.S. media, the atomic bombings of the two Japanese cities have

been pretty much sacrosanct. So, in 1994, a national uproar broke out

when the Smithsonian Institution made plans for an exhibit marking the

50th anniversary.

Much of the punditocracy was fit to be tied. "In the context of the

time ... the bombing made a great deal of sense," Cokie Roberts said on

network television -- and, she added, raising critical questions a

half-century later "makes no sense at all." On the same ABC telecast,

George Will sputtered "It's just ghastly when an institution such as

the Smithsonian casts doubt on the great leadership we were blessed with

in the Second World War."

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, denouncing "the forces of political

correctness," wrote that the factual display on the museum's drawing

board "promises to be an embarrassing amalgam of revisionist

hand-wringing and guilt."

Such intense media salvos caused the Smithsonian to cave in rather

than proceed with a forthright historical exhibition. Even five decades

later, a clear look at the atomic bombings was unacceptable.

This summer, as the leaders of Pakistan and India ponder the

nuclear-weapons option, they could echo the punditry. After all, "in the

context of the time," they might conclude, an atomic bombing makes "a

great deal of sense," without need to question their "great leadership"

or engage in "hand-wringing and guilt."

Back in 1983, a statement by U.S. Catholic Bishops perceptively

called for a "climate of opinion which will make it possible for our

country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945.

Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to

repudiate future use of nuclear weapons."

But American officials and leading journalists continue to be

highly selective with their repudiations. In medialand, a

red-white-and-blue nuclear warhead is not really a "weapon of mass

destruction."

Three months ago, the U.S. government's new Nuclear Posture Review

caused a nearly incredulous response from Pervez Hoodbhoy, a peace

advocate who is a professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in

Islamabad "Why should every country of the world not develop nuclear

weapons now that America may nuke anyone at any time? The Bush

administration has announced that it views nuclear weapons as

instruments for fighting wars, not merely as the weapons of last resort.

Resurgent American militarism is destroying every arms control measure

everywhere. Those of us in Pakistan and India who have long fought

against nuclearization of the subcontinent have been temporarily

rendered speechless."

What goes around has a tendency to come around. Washington's

policymakers keep fortifying the U.S. nuclear arsenal with abandon while

brandishing it against many other countries -- declaring, in effect, "do

as we say, not as we do." But sooner or later, such declarations are not

very convincing.