{"id":19502,"date":"2016-04-04T11:31:19","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T16:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19502"},"modified":"2016-04-04T11:31:19","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T16:31:19","slug":"tomgram-dilip-hiro-flashpoint-for-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19502","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Flashpoint for the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/post\/176123\/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro%2C_flashpoint_for_the_planet\/#more\" target=\"_blank\">Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Flashpoint for the Planet<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"byline\">Once upon a time, if a war was going to destroy your world, it had to take place\u00a0<em>in<\/em>\u00a0your world. The soldiers had to land, the planes had to fly overhead, the ships had to be off the coast. No longer. Nuclear war changed that equation forever and not just because nuclear weapons could be delivered from a great distance by missile. To use a term that has become commonplace in our world when discussing commerce, the prospect of nuclear conflict has globalized war and it\u2019s a nightmare of the first order.<\/div>\n<div class=\"meat\">\n<p>In the post-Cold War world, Exhibit A in that process would certainly be the unnerving potential for a nuclear war to break out between India and Pakistan. As\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/post\/175975\/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro,_afghanistan's_china_card\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>TomDispatch<\/em><\/a>\u00a0regular Dilip Hiro, author most recently of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/1620971305\/ref=nosim\/?tag=tomdispatch-20\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Age of Aspiration: Money, Power, and Conflict in Globalizing India<\/em><\/a>, makes clear today, there is no place on the planet where a nuclear war is more imaginable. After all, those two South Asian countries have been to war with each other or on the verge of it again and again since they were split apart in 1947.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, a major nuclear war between them would result in an unimaginable catastrophe in South Asia itself, with casualties estimated at up to 20 million dead from bomb blasts, fire, and the effects of radiation on the human body. And that, unfortunately, would only be the beginning. As Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/climate.envsci.rutgers.edu\/pdf\/RobockToonSciAmJan2010.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">wrote<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0<em>Scientific American<\/em>\u00a0back in 2009, when the Indian and Pakistani arsenals were significantly smaller than they are today, any major nuclear conflagration in the region could hardly be confined to South Asia.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Flashpoint for the Planet Once upon a time, if a war was going to destroy your world, it had to take place\u00a0in\u00a0your world. The soldiers had to land, the planes had to fly overhead, the ships had to be off the coast. No longer. Nuclear war changed that equation forever and not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[13277,4036,422,13278,581,2583,6082,1745,11829,7413,862],"class_list":["post-19502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-dilip-hiro","tag-global-war","tag-india","tag-nuclear-missile","tag-nuclear-war","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-nuclear-winter","tag-pakistan","tag-south-asia","tag-tomdispatch","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19503,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19502\/revisions\/19503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}