Dragon Fire

PROLOGUE

In a perfect world, communities aspiring to development should not go to war. But time and time again common sense is turned on its head. Even societies whose standards of living are rising rapidly use the excitement of nationalism to balance either the treadmill of economic growth or the weakness of corrupt leadership. Yugoslavia, Iraq and swathes of Africa at once come to mind and danger signals are now flashing in Pakistan, India and China.

In May 1998, both India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests, elevating hostilities to a new, more menacing level. Asia, still wracked with poverty and conflict, now has three declared nuclear-weapons powers.

India and Pakistan have been in conflict for half a century. Pakistan and China have a long-standing military alliance. India and China have already fought one war and disagree on how to handle restless nationalism in Tibet.

But a far more forceful momentum is also sweeping across those two enormous countries, a sense that as empires come and empires go, at some stage the power of the United States will wane and another great power will rise up to move into the vacuum. This ambition, and an impatience to force events, has made Asia an unpredictable and dangerous place for all of us.

China’s naval advances into the Indian Ocean and occupation of islands in the South China Sea are evidence that it is willing to anger its neighbours in order to test its military reach. India’s determination to press ahead with its nuclear programme and name China as its main long-term threat suggests a deeper degree of hostility than at first realized.

Both countries have weak conventional military systems and only minimal nuclear forces. But that is no guarantee that either country will not make a military bid for regional leadership in the years to come.

In Dragon Strike: The Millennium War (Sidgwick & Jackson 1997), Simon Holberton and I described a scenario in which China takes control of the South China Sea. It attacks its long-standing enemy, Vietnam, occupies the Spratly and Paracel groups of islands, and deploys submarines in the sea lanes to the Indian Ocean. When the United States intervenes by sending a warship into the area, it is sunk by a Chinese submarine with heavy loss of life.

Pacifist Japan reacts by carrying out a nuclear test, uncertain that it can continue to count on American military protection. Much of South East Asia, looking to the long-term future, gives tacit support to China.

American, British, Australian and New Zealand warships fight their way into the South China Sea. As China’s fleet faces destruction, American satellite imagery shows nuclear missiles being prepared for launch.

The prospect of a nuclear attack on an American city is enough to force a rethink in Washington about how to deal with China.

Simon Holberton and I described Dragon Strike as a future history. Dragon Fire is even more so. Developments in Asia are moving so fast that on several occasions my writing was overtaken by events. What was fiction one day became historical fact the next.

The characters of the novel are more the individual countries than the people who run them. Loyalties, betrayals, aspirations and scars of history are played out on a political and military stage through the eyes of India, Pakistan, China and others.

If China and India’s security aspirations for Asia converge with each other and with those of the United States and Japan, there is no cause for alarm. That, however, would be an ambitious formula. If either China’s or India’s intentions are being underestimated and the danger signs are swept under the carpet, the impact on world peace could be the most catastrophic since the end of the Second World War.