Path To War

By Laura Bradford

More than 1 million troops stand toe-to-toe along the 1,800-mile India-Pakistan border, with both sides saying they will fight, if necessary. It would not take much to light this tinderbox. Experts believe another terrorist attack by Kashmiri separatists could lead India to retaliate against rebel training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Indian analysts fear that Pakistan almost surely would respond in kind, perhaps diverting Indian forces with strikes along the Pakistan-India border to the south. From there the battle could conceivably escalate to a nuclear conflict, with devastating consequences: a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report estimates that full-scale nuclear strikes could kill as many as 12 million and injure another 7 million