Dragon Fire

Jabbar: You ask why? India must understand once and for all that the threats to our existence must stop.

President: And you want us to give you practical help. Perhaps, Ambassador, for the benefit of those who were not with us earlier in Zhongnanhai, you could explain the thinking behind your policy.

Jabbar: We are aware that Tibet could within days, even hours, become a flashpoint. Diplomatically it is your weakest area of policy. You also have the other vulnerability in the far-western Muslim region of Xinjiang, which has suffered a spate of bombings and riots. Islamic unrest on your western borders and a terrorist campaign in Tibet is your nightmare scenario. It would suck your resources away from development and the economy, wreck your nurtured friendships with the Western democracies and throw China itself into a separatist war.

I have told President Tao that Pakistan will use every means at our disposal to stop foreign insurgents operating in Xinjiang. By that I mean we will intercept them in their countries of origin, be it Afghanistan, Iran, Algeria or wherever. We will intercept them on their way to Xinjiang and, if you wish, we will offer our unique expertise to work with the Chinese security forces on the counter-terrorist operation in Xinjiang itself.

Leung: You’re saying you will encourage the holy war in Kashmir, but fight against it in Xinjiang. It seems an ideological contradiction…

Jabbar: You disagree with the policy, General?

Leung: Not at all, Ambassador. I think it is an admirable example of pragmatism.

Jabbar: My colleagues General Hussein and Dr Malik Khalid will explain in detail how we think you can help Pakistan.

Hussein: Until recently China used commercial SPOT and LANDSAT imagery surveillance, which was basic and unsatisfactory. Now, thanks to help from the French and the Russians, your new space surveillance system has just become operational. It’s outdated by Western standards, because you have yet to get real-time satellite reconnaissance. But with the launch of the new military photo-reconnaissance satellite two months ago, you are now receiving good intelligence around the Asia — Pacific region. We need constant guaranteed round-the-clock access to it.

You have been helpful in the past day in providing material about Indian troop movements along the Kashmir, Punjab and Rajasthan border. We need that to continue, together with imagery of Indian nuclear installations, air-bases for nuclear-capable aircraft, mainly the SU-30MK, and anything which could threaten the security of Pakistan.

Tang: The Indians get everything they want from the Israelis, who get it from the Americans. I see no problem with this.

President: Agreed.

Khalid: [Inaudible because of soft voice]… all know the areas I will be talking about well enough.

In any nuclear exchange, the Indians have two weapons of choice. The Agni is the intermediate-range missile. Agni, gentleman, means ‘fire’. The missile project began in 1979 at the Indian Defence Research and Development Laboratory in Hyderabad. The first successful launch was in 1989. The second test in 1992 failed, but tests in 1994 and 1999 were successes. Since then, three more tests have been carried out and we believe this is now a highly sophisticated weapons system. The first stage missile [sic] is solid fuel. The second is liquid. It can carry multiple re-entry nuclear warheads and its range is two thousand five hundred kilometres, meaning it can hit anywhere in Pakistan and a significant area of China.

In a limited exchange with Pakistan, they would choose the Prithvi, their short-range missile. The name means ‘earth’. Design started in 1983. The first test was in 1988 and it has three versions with ranges of a hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty and three hundred and fifty kilometres respectively. All three are now operational, launched vertically from an eight-wheel mobile truck. One Prithvi fired from Indian territory could destroy Rawalpindi within eight minutes of launch with a single 500 kilogram warhead.

Sarghoda, here, [Interpreter’s note: Khalid was using a map projected onto a screen] is our main airbase, command and control centre and assembly centre for our 500 kilogram uranium warheads. It is also just two hundred kilometres from the Indian border and vulnerable to attacks from both the Agni and the Prithvi. We have the Hatf series, capable of ranges of eighty, three hundred and six hundred kilometres. Hatf means ‘deadly’. We claim the design to be indigenous, but the technology as you may well know is Chinese and originally Russian. The Hatf 2 is a version of the M11 and the Hatf 3 is from the M9, which we also call the ‘Shaheen’.

Our counterpart for the Agni is the Ghauri, which we bought off the shelf from North Korea as the Nodong 11. Its range is one thousand five hundred kilometres against the Agni’s two thousand five hundred kilometres. But since we brought in the Ghauri, the Indians have modified the Agni to create a completely solid-fuel rocket. The first version of the Agni operated with the liquid-fuel engine design from the Prithvi. The test in 1999 was with a new second-stage solid-fuel booster. The third stage is the warhead re-entry vehicle capable of carrying a payload of a thousand kilograms.

Jabbar: Perhaps Dr Khalid could explain to us laymen the difference between a solid-fuel and liquid-fuel missile?

Khalid: Liquid fuel has the advantage of greater accuracy, The fuel tap, as it were, can be turned on and off to vary the firing distance. It has the disadvantage of mobility. We need at least fifteen vehicles to accompany a liquid-fuel rocket for maintenance and control and we need time to fuel the engines at the launch pad — several hours of preparation have to be allowed.

Hussein: Not much of a deterrent.

Khalid: The solid-fuel Agni can be launched within fifteen minutes of an unexpected alert. Several missiles are kept permanently inside specially modified goods trains. From the outside they look like regular trains. The missile itself is twenty metres long and for the launch it would slide out of the back of one rail car, then be raised by a hydraulic piston. The first-stage rocket motor burns out in less than a minute at an altitude of around twenty-five kilometres. The second stage motor goes a minute later at just over a hundred kilometres. The missile keeps going up to around four hundred kilometres before re-entering the atmosphere. It is built to withstand heat of up to three thousand degrees Celsius. The total flying time to its target two thousand five hundred kilometres away is thirteen minutes.

Hussein: We would have less than thirteen minutes to react, but it would take us twenty times that long to prepare the Ghauri.

Khalid: We had been relying on the North Koreans, who were developing a solid-fuel rocket known as the Taepo Dong. But since rapprochement has come to the Korean peninsula, the missile project has stopped.

Jabbar: In other words we have been left high and dry.

President: Your aim is to neutralize the Indian threat against Pakistan totally. Am I right in thinking this? No half measures.

Jabbar: I think we all agree that if our borders are secure and power is balanced, Asia will be a more peaceful place.

Tang: What is it you need?

Hussein: The East Wind DF-21 missile and launchers and the KS-1 theatre-defence missile.

Tang: The technology?

Hussein: The products themselves. We don’t have time to make them.

Khalid: The DF-21 is a two-stage solid-fuel missile which we need to match India’s Agni-11 missile. The KS-1 is a short-range ground-based theatre-defence missile, which can engage air-launched tactical weapons — in other words a strike by Indian aircraft carrying nuclear bombs. We would want to import complete batteries of twenty-four missiles, the phased-array radar-guidance station, four missile launchers on trucks and associated vehicles.

Song: It would surely violate the Missile Technology Control Regime — the MTCR. We have agreed not to sell missiles or technology that can carry a payload of more than five hundred kilograms a distance of more than three hundred kilometres. What are the specifications of the missiles we are talking about?

Khalid: The KS-1 has a range of forty-five kilometres and the warhead could be well under five hundred kilograms. The payload of the DF-21 is five hundred kilograms and the range is eighteen hundred kilometres.

Song: Impossible, then.

Tang: No. Not impossible. We have not signed a treaty, but merely agreed to adhere to the provisions of the MTCR. We will be breaking no international law and any sanctions put upon us will hurt the governments imposing them as much as they do us. A year after we adhered to the MTCR in 1987 we sold six DF-3s to Saudi Arabia. Range two thousand seven hundred kilometres.

Hussein: Price three billion dollars.

Leung: I am not completely happy. The idea that India and Pakistan can replicate the nuclear safeguards set up between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War is unworkable. The cost to America of maintaining a nuclear arsenal to match the Soviet Unions was five and a half trillion dollars. The cost to the Soviet Union was the disintegration of its economy. It seems that no one in India or Pakistan has thought through the sophistication needed to manage the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, where both parties come out of it intact.

Jabbar: No, General Leung. We know that if it comes to all-out war — either conventional or nuclear — Pakistan will lose. We are not seeking a Cold War scenario. And we would, naturally, pass on to you all our intelligence on India’s own nuclear weapons programme. It is far easier for a Pakistani to infiltrate than for a Chinese.

Hussein: We also want to put a tactical air-burst bomb onto our Hatf short-range missiles and possibly on the DF-21, if you give it to us. Or an enhanced-radiation warhead.

Tang: Neutron bomb.

Hussein: Correct. You tested the neutron bomb in November 1988 and we understand it became fully developed in the late 1990s — thanks to stolen American technology. If you remember, gentlemen, the most dangerous time that Pakistani and Indian tank forces faced each other was during India’s Operation Brass Tacks in 1987. India fielded a quarter of a million troops and thirteen hundred tanks and we genuinely thought they were going to invade. It was the first time that it seriously dawned on us that we needed the bomb.

Khalid: The deterrent effect of a neutron bomb against tank and infantry formations on the battlefield is very high. It is a small thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, which produces minimal blast and heat, affecting an area of less than three hundred metres in radius. Everything within that area will be incinerated. But a massive wave of neutron and gamma radiation is thrown out over a larger area. Tank crews would be disabled immediately — although some might take days or weeks to die. But buildings would survive, as could civilians living only a few kilometres away.

Jabbar: If we have a tactical nuclear weapon or neutron bomb, we are convinced that any war between us can be confined to the battlefield. If we do not, we would be forced to escalate straight from artillery exchange to nuclear exchange with no in-between.

President: You will give unconditional assistance against Islamic fundamentalism and all intelligence on India’s military activity against Tibet and its nuclear weapons development?

Jabbar: That is correct, sir.

[Interpreter’s note: Long silence. Deferring to the President.]

President: Then we have an understanding.