An Open Letter to: Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan

We send this appeal based on long experience in struggling for peace and nuclear sanity in order to sustain life and promote health. A nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would be an unmitigated catastrophe, not only for the people of India and Pakistan but for all humankind. No society can survive even a modest nuclear attack. No civil defense preparation can mitigate the dreadful consequences. An overwhelmed health care system could not cope with the massive numbers of casualties seeking help. The fatally injured would die in the solitude of their unrelieved agony. In Hiroshima, a primitive nuclear bomb—less than the magnitude you have recently tested—killed, in a split second, more than 100 000 people and maimed and injured a like number. A majority of the health workers were among the victims and could not respond to the unspeakable suffering. People were incinerated without a trace. Now, 50 years later, survivors are still burdened with enduring nightmares. Noxious radiation effects are continuing to exact a toll in malignant disease. Nuclear weapons are the deadliest technology science has ever devised and differ from all other military hardware. Given a crisis, there is a compelling incentive for preemption. The fear of losing the nuclear stockpile from a first strike is an incentive to launch on warning or initiate a nuclear attack during the time of intense political confrontation. In fact, military policy of both superpowers during the cold war was to strike first in time of crisis. Pakistan and India, sharing a border, have inadequate time for crucial decision making and, with human reaction time being too slow for hair-trigger readiness, these life-and-death judgments will increasingly be relegated to automated computer systems. Ultimately, the bomb takes command of a country’s destiny. These weapons are capable of simultaneously inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the attacker. The frequent malfunction of technology is a lesson oft documented. During the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, both countries had to remove substantial numbers of military personnel assigned to their nuclear forces for reasons of drug abuse, alcoholism, and serious mental and psychological problems. In fact, nuclear war is an accident waiting to happen.