These days, solving the search problem is just one step on a long path to building valuable services that people enjoy and make use of every day. Deep nerds like tackling these issues because they have all the hallmarks of geek chic. They are difficult algorithmically, require massive planning from a scaling perspective, and require constant tweaking. Google was successful at attracting people to its search engine for two reasons: it had a cleaner interface (they hadn’t decided to become a Portal) and it had more accurate results (the other engines had become gamed). I’m sure Google has tons of patents around their search capability however I am too lazy to search for them because sifting through the results separating wheat from chaff would take way too much time.

And that, dear reader, is precisely the point. Google, too, has been gamed — as will every search engine that comes into common use. So what am I on about? Well, Jimmy Wales wants to open-source the search engine… and for the record I think it’s a great idea, and one that threatens GoOgle substantially.

My logic is this: If the value of a search engine is no longer the search engine itself, but instead the application to which it is applied, then why not accept its value as a generic must-have and open-source the thing? We can all benefit from the assumption that the search engine itself will always be gamed by spammers and sploggers and search engine marketers. Once we do that, creating a community that is invested in the efficacy of the search engine (because they’re making money from it) also creates a system by which that community is incentivized to keep the thing working properly as it’s gamed by persistent SEO gremlins. This is far more effectively done by a collective of companies than it is by a bunch of companies tweaking their own engines independently, pursuing near-term, interim, proximate advantages.

Wikia Search is nudging closer to existence, but I think it’s applying the brute-force labour at the wrong end. As Jimmy Wales becomes more and more assertive and aggressive with his crusade to fix search using an army of lemmings using the Wikipedia recipe, which means he’ll use the community at large to determine the merit of matches found by his search engine, he’s extending the Wikipedia model to searching. Users will “vote” matches to the top of the rankings.

interesting notion, but I think he has the right idea but might be missing the mark on execution. As anyone who’s watched Sanjaya on American Idol can attest, user-voting is not always the most expeditious method of ensuring quality. Wikipedia uses a broken-source (have I just coined this term?) publishing model: it achieves one thing very well (aggregating information and content from diverse sources) at the expense of the other (ensuring that information is trustworthy, balanced or factually correct is problematic). Applying this model for Search is therefore solving the easy problem (search engines already aggregate and index things quite well) with the wrong method (envision Wikia Search gaming teams in Bangladesh sweat shops “voting up” rankings for their customers on the engine).

So, right idea — wrong solution. Let’s create an engine that everyone can (and does) use, that everyone can tweak and repair, and that is policed by a foundation which has as its only goal the efficacy of the product. The Deep Thinker Nerds who like to fiddle with these kinds of problems will be attracted naturally to the project, and their incomes could easily be supported by the companies benefiting from the expansion of the technology. Jimmy’s in a position to lead this, to some degree, but he doesn’t evidently understand that the strength of Wikipedia will be the achilles heel of this project. He has claimed the high ground but I fear that he will inevitably fail.

-Ian.

-Ian.

—- http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0133/ridgeway.php

Mondo Washington by James Ridgeway with Ariston-Lizabeth Anderson and Sandra Bisin Manhattan’s Milosevic How You Can Do What the Government Won’t: Arrest Henry Kissinger August 15 – 21, 2001

You might have to be crazy. Or at least foolhardy. But you could try to bring Henry Kissinger to justice for crimes against humanity. Consider, though, what happened to the last people to talk even jokingly about plans for a citizen’s arrest of the real-life model for Dr. Strangelove.

It happened 30 years ago, when Kissinger was at his Strangelovian heights. A group of anti-war protesters sought to raise the spirits of that estimable Catholic priest Phil Berrigan, then in prison for destroying draft records. The group got drunk one night, as Daniel Ellsberg recalls, and dashed off a letter to Berrigan humorously suggesting they nab Kissinger for war crimes in Vietnam. Prison authorities intercepted the mail and the FBI swooped down, charging the writers with conspiracy to kidnap the secretary of state. Dubbed the Harrisburg 6, the friends soon found themselves in a knock-down drag-out to stay out of jail.

Fast-forward to this year, when Christopher Hitchens’s compact indictment, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, flares across the front cover of Harper’s and clings to a lower-tier spot among Amazon.com’s top-100 books. Hitchens builds a case against Nixon’s man for atrocities around the globe, from East Timor and Cambodia to South America and Washington, D.C. He shows just how frighteningly small the world of Kissinger has become, as one foreign government after another tries to get its hands on him, in the same way world courts have tracked down Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic. Chile. France. Argentina. Slowly, they’re closing in.

Suddenly, the Harrisburg 6 seem less like relics of a forgotten era and more like prophets of an age to come. Here in the U.S., where the official response has been cold silence, there is renewed behind-the-scenes preparation for legal action against Kissinger. And some are again calling for a citizen’s arrest, lobbying for the public to do what the government won’t.

But could an average person really collar Manhattan’s Milosevic? “It would surely be possible to do so, and to end up quickly in jail or a mental institution,” says the noted linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky. “A 17th-century English popular poet wrote that laws are like spider webs: ‘Lesser flies are quickly ta’en, while the great break out again.’ Not 100 percent true, of course, but a strong tendency, for reasons too obvious to discuss.”

Some suggest Kissinger, now an aging Manhattanite, is just too cuddly. “After all, he’s the darling of the establishment,” says the historian Howard Zinn. “These are all people who have had dinner with him. They don’t want to say they’ve had a war criminal for dinner.”

Others question why Hitchens—or his readers—would bother with busting Kissinger. “He was very much a No. 2 man, subordinate to Richard Nixon,” recalls Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. “It’s absurd to say he’s the principal architect. Of course he’s deserving of trial. But some people imagine that Nixon didn’t have the wit to think up those crimes on his own, and that’s quite mistaken. Kissinger was simply a very loyal, opportunist subordinate.”

Nonetheless, there is a growing movement to put him in the dock as the perp—or at least a witness—in crimes against humanity. The old Harvard professor has to watch his step. Though he still moves freely about the streets of New York, this “war criminal” had to slip out of Paris in May when French police tried to serve him with a court summons. Activists from the East Timor Action Network have repeatedly sought to question Kissinger during his book tours, but again the former secretary of state either didn’t answer or disappeared. Demonstrators have also hounded him at speeches around the country. This month, an Argentine judge ordered Kissinger to testify in a human rights trial concerning a plan by Latin American governments to kidnap and kill leftists during the 1970s.

And in July, a judge in Chile sent questions to Kissinger as a witness in a suit brought by Joyce Horman, the widow of Charles Horman, a young journalist killed during the Pinochet coup. Not amused, an administration source told the London Telegraph, “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way.”

Kissinger, who didn’t respond to Voice questions, shows some signs of knowing the heat is on. In his mounting campaign to protect his image, he recently agreed to release 10,000 pages of his papers kept under seal at the Library of Congress. Such goodwill gestures may not be enough to save the self-styled Dr. K. from a citizen’s arrest, in which he could legally be plucked off the sidewalk and deposited at a nearby precinct station for booking.

He keeps a fairly low profile these days, but he’s hardly invisible. Though it’s not listed on the midtown building’s marquee, the office for Kissinger Associates is located at 350 Park Avenue, on the 26th floor. Anyone can enter the lobby, passing a security guard and concierge unchallenged. Kissinger’s own receptionist sits behind a glass window. The spartan room contains a dark wooden table, upon which rest a white phone and an ashtray, a single couch and two armchairs, and a security camera mounted in one corner. The receptionist politely tells a visitor Kissinger is not in. Not expected. Who knows when he might drop in.

Don’t think you can just hang around and wait for him to show up. A citizen’s arrest is not so easy. While the laws differ from state to state, they generally allow for anyone who witnesses a felony, or knows which person committed one, to make an immediate arrest. That can include a “reasonable” amount of physical force. It would also normally involve some participation from the cops.

Back down on Park Avenue, across from Kissinger’s office, police officer John Vanasco explains the procedure. “We take the person and process the paperwork,” he says. “If it is a crime, we take the person in custody, but we need probable cause proving that the crime was committed.”

In the case of someone accused of being a war criminal, Vanasco says, city cops refer the matter to federal agencies, then hold the suspect for them.

A spokesperson for the NYPD puts it slightly differently. “Citizen’s arrest has nothing to do with us,” he says. “You make the arrest on your own. We do nothing more than transport the person. We are not making the arrest. We are not involved in this.”

Kissinger also keeps a home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where state police say citizen’s arrests are not allowed. If you tried to capture him en route, you’d get to deal with the New York State police. “It’s all based on what the citizen says,” a spokesperson reports. “They may sign paperwork, but they don’t go out and physically arrest someone. It’s not like it is in the movies. It doesn’t happen a lot.”

The legal details of a citizen’s arrest are downright confusing. “It’s a tricky issue,” says Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and current candidate for public advocate. For misdemeanors, he says, cops usually just write the accused a ticket. Felonies are another matter. When approaching a person you intend to pick up, you’re supposed to explain that you’re about to make an arrest, and tell the suspect why. That’s when the situation can turn ugly. What if the person tries to run away while you’re calling the cops from your cell phone? “Do you tackle them?” asks Siegel. “Cuff them?” The tables could quickly turn, and you’d be the one violating the law.

And if cops have reason to doubt the merit of accusations, they don’t have to follow through with the arrest. “A citizen’s arrest doesn’t really work,” says attorney Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has tried to nail various war criminals, from the contras to Haiti’s Tonton Macoutes. “They have to be committing a felony in front of you.”

Still, despite all the hassles, citizen’s arrests are used in New York City. The unarmed New York Guardian Angels make about two a year. “Basically every citizen has the right to make a citizen’s arrest,” says Mark Moore. “You physically restrain a person and hold them until the local cops come. We’re trained in restraint holds, arm bars, and different locks.”

Since Hitchens and others go after Kissinger for war crimes against civilian populations—like killing 200,000 Timorese, one third of the population—one might think the big human rights organizations would weigh in on this subject. But when it comes to Dr. K., these groups tread lightly.

Alistair Hodgett, Amnesty International’s American media director, says his agency can do little until the government declassifies reams of information. Even then, Amnesty wouldn’t necessarily take aim at Kissinger. “We would put the emphasis with the U.S. government to look at significant information,” Hodgett says. “I don’t believe or suggest that that’s likely to occur.”

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights likewise barely dips a toe in the water. “The international justice system shouldn’t be about any one case,” says Raj Purohit. “If there is someone who has solid evidence, then he [Kissinger] should be held accountable.”

As for a citizen’s arrest of Kissinger, Purohit says, “That’s not something we would support. When it comes to these most serious crimes there has got to be a proper [order] from a tribunal or indictment. I think under any of these tribunals none of these would apply to Kissinger.”

Human Rights Watch is similarly reluctant to style Kissinger in prison stripes. “If Henry Kissinger signed off on bombing targets in Cambodia and Laos knowing that they included civilian areas, as accounts have suggested, then he could be charged with war crimes, by his victims or by the victims’ families,” says Reed Brody, an attorney who has gone around the world prosecuting human rights crimes. “But I think that it’s difficult not to confuse legal, political, moral, historical responsibility on the one hand, and criminal liability on another.”

Despite such gloomy prognoses, there are other hopes. Ratner thinks you could bring a civil action in Washington against Kissinger on behalf of the children of General René Schneider, the Chilean general who was shot during the Pinochet coup. And it might be possible to file a racketeering complaint in New York arguing that Kissinger and others conspired using the interstate communications—i.e, phones, faxes, etc.—to murder American citizens.

Another country could order him brought to trial on their soil. “Under the extradition laws, we do not have any exceptions for American nationals,” argues Alfred Rubin, a professor of international law at Tufts University. “The U.S. has extradition treaties with many countries, including Spain, and we do not except American nationals from their operation. If any countries in Europe or elsewhere would like to extradite Henry Kissinger, they can bring a case right now in an American court—and I’ll bet you that Henry Kissinger knows all about that.”

Finally, it is conceivable that the widow of Charles Horman, the young journalist who was killed in the Pinochet coup and was made famous by the film Missing, could bring a suit under the civil rights statutes on grounds that Kissinger and others conspired to deprive her husband of his rights. Since the conspiracy took place in the U.S., the suit might have standing in federal court.

Kissinger also might be prosecuted under the Alien Tort Claims Act. There has been considerable talk among lawyers about bringing such a suit on behalf of Chilean parties. Here the prospects are dicey, save for an opening granted by the courts to sue CIA officials for torture in Guatemala. In another case, lawyers argued in a Miami federal court that contra leaders conspired in Miami to kill Ben Linder, a young American engineer in Nicaragua.

The Chilean judge sitting on a case against Pinochet is asking Kissinger to come as a witness. Georgia Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney recently wrote Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for help in persuading Kissinger to take the stand. She said Milosevic’s arrest should allow the public to concentrate on Kissinger now; if she desires, McKinney is in the position to open a forum on the subject.

But heading to Chile to testify would place Dr. K. in the position of discussing—in public and under oath—decisions he’d just as soon forget. Still, Horman’s widow thinks he should do what’s right. “I don’t see why Henry Kissinger would not want to answer the questions,” says Joyce Horman. “He’s not a defendant in our case; he’s a witness. Considering that he has said several times that he has no knowledge of the death of Charles Horman, he should have no reason not to answer these questions.”

One of the strongest calls for an investigation into Kissinger stems from the violence in East Timor, where he stands accused of supporting Indonesia’s 1975 bloody occupation of the recently freed Portuguese colony. In 1999 East Timor once again exploded into violence, which U.S. troops attempted to quell. A subsequent human rights commission proposed that the UN itself set up a war crimes tribunal.

The U.S.-based East Timor Action Network would like the tribunal to extend back to the original invasion. It could become a tool to find out what actually happened, and a mechanism for trying Kissinger. “I believe a criminal case can be made against him,” says John Miller, a spokesman for the group. “One country invaded another. He aided and abetted genocide. He provided a political go-ahead and was instrumental in continuing the flow of U.S. weapons.” As for supporting a citizen’s arrest, Miller says that would depend on how it was done. “We are not into assaulting people,” he says. “It would be mostly as a way of furthering public education.”

No doubt Kissinger is a disappearing symbol of the Cold War in general and Indochina specifically. During a recent forum sponsored by Harper’s magazine at the National Press Club in Washington, a group including journalists and former government professionals questioned why Kissinger should be singled out when an entire administration ought to take the blame.

“These were not unique actions,” said Scott Armstrong, whose National Security Archive has consistently dug up and published America’s dirty laundry. “They were not covert. They were not Oliver North-type government out of control. These were deliberate manipulations of the levers of power. And Henry Kissinger was—is—very much in the loop. He defined the loop. And [Hitchens’s] indictment is of an entire administration. And those who served with him, above him, across the Potomac, and even in Congress bear similar measures of responsibility.”

In a Voice interview Noam Chomsky seconds that idea. “Kissinger observes, correctly, that he was conducting the foreign policy of the U.S.,” he says. “The U.S. is a powerful state, overwhelmingly powerful, in fact. It follows that its leadership can make mistakes, but it cannot commit crimes in the technical Orwellian sense. Only enemies, or those who are weak and defenseless, can commit crimes in the literal sense. Accordingly, it is inconceivable that there would be an effort to bring Kissinger to trial.

“And even if it were done, he could correctly plead selective prosecution,” Chomsky adds. “After all, it was the Kennedy administration that escalated the war against South Vietnam from Latin America-style terror to outright aggression, and the Johnson administration that escalated the attack sharply, also extending it to the rest of Indochina.”

Roger Morris, best known for his scathing biography of Bill Clinton, worked under Kissinger in the National Security Council during the Nixon era. At the Press Club forum, Morris said he personally worked on a covert effort (unknown to either the secretary of defense or state) to reach a peace agreement in Vietnam. “There was on the table in the early spring of 1970 a negotiated withdrawal of American forces by the end of 1970,” he said. “That was interrupted by the dementia, not, alas, of Henry Kissinger, but of the man he worked for—Richard Nixon—and the ensuing Cambodian invasion. And you know the sequel: Several thousand Americans died in the years that followed as a result.” He concluded, “Henry’s transgressions would not have been possible without the active intellectual and substantive support of his aides.”

Moreover, there’s the whole question of what international law is intended to accomplish. “International law does not involve personal crimes,” argued Rubin, the Tufts professor. “I would emphasize that immorality is not illegality, and illegality is not personal criminal liability.”

But a court hearing could do more for a nation than punish its most visible villains. “I think it would be good to have a trial,” says Zinn, the historian. “I wouldn’t want to put him in jail. I don’t want to put any of these people in jail. I don’t believe in that. I think it should be more like the truth commission in South Africa. Hold them up to the world, shame them, and ban them from dinner parties.”

There may be no tracking down of every powerful figure who has ever broken the rules. Trace it right back through history, says former White House candidate Ralph Nader. “Do you know any president who hasn’t violated international law dozens of times?” Nader says. “If Kissinger is a war criminal, what about Clinton, who killed citizens in Iraq? You can’t pick one person out. It doesn’t have credibility. International law is known primarily for violating it. Is there anything the U.S. won’t do abroad in violation of international law?”

For now, the way Kissinger’s world keeps shrinking may have to be punishment enough—at least until someone takes action. “Maybe if he makes a mistake and travels abroad where he doesn’t expect to be apprehended, then that country could arrest and try him,” concludes Zinn. “He doesn’t want to set foot in France because he’s afraid of that. I think that’s a very nice little punishment that doesn’t allow him to see Paris ever again. Apprehending him in the U.S., with the judicial system and friends—even so-called critics? Nothing is going to happen to him unless someone makes a citizen’s arrest.”

Harms and the Man

An indictment of Henry Kissinger for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes would include (but not be confined to) the following.

VIETNAM: Kissinger scuttled peace talks in 1968, paving the way for Richard Nixon’s victory in the presidential race. Half the battle deaths in Vietnam took place between 1968 and 1972, not to mention the millions of civilians throughout Indochina who were killed.

CAMBODIA: Kissinger persuaded Nixon to widen the war with massive bombing of Cambodia and Laos. No one had suggested we go to war with either of these countries. By conservative estimates, the U.S. killed 600,000 civilians in Cambodia and another 350,000 in Laos.

BANGLADESH: Using weapons supplied by the U.S., General Yahya Khan overthrew the democratically elected government and murdered at least half a million civilians in 1971. In the White House, the National Security Council wanted to condemn these actions. Kissinger refused. Amid the killing, Kissinger thanked Khan for his “delicacy and tact.”

CHILE: Kissinger helped to plan the 1973 U.S.-backed overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende and the assassination of General René Schneider. Right-wing general Augusto Pinochet then took over. Moderates fled for their lives. Hit men, financed by the CIA, tracked down Allende supporters and killed them. These attacks included the car bombing of Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, and an aide, Ronni Moffitt, at Sheridan Circle in downtown Washington.

EAST TIMOR: In 1975 President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger met with Indonesia’s corrupt strongman Suharto. Kissinger told reporters the U.S. wouldn’t recognize the tiny country of East Timor, which had recently won independence from the Dutch. Within hours Suharto launched an invasion, killing, by some estimates, 200,000 civilians.

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-Ian. —– http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,726488,00.html

Nuclear neighbours teeter on brink of Armageddon

India and Pakistan could be just hours away from a fight feared by the entire planet

Jason Burke and Peter Beaumont Sunday June 2, 2002 The Observer

Tonight, in the forests of Kashmir, figures will be moving in the darkness. They are fighters using terrorism to overthrow Indian rule in the disputed state.

New Delhi says these militants take their orders directly from Islamabad. The Pakistanis say they are independent. Neither claim, according to inquiries by The Observer, is accurate. And it is through the gap between these stories that 1.25 billion people could fall into a nuclear nightmare.

This weekend tens of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces are being readied for war. The Pakistanis have withdrawn troops from their western frontier, where they were deployed against al-Qaeda, and sent them to face the Indians.

Artillery duels rage along the length of the line of control that splits Kashmir, the only state with a Muslim majority in predomi nantly Hindu India. American officials say the situation is as dangerous as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The world watches in fear.

Indian military planners know that if war comes, a crushing victory is essential. ‘War is one game that you cannot lose or draw, especially if you are the bigger country,’ retired General Ved Prakash Malik, the former Indian army chief of staff, said. The Indian options, however, are limited.

Air strikes against militant training bases or headquarters in Pakistan have been ruled out. In previous conflicts the Pakistanis have picked off India’s warplanes and, as one Indian defence analyst, said, ‘such strikes would only have symbolic value… these camps are ramshackle structures … and can be rebuilt easily.’

Commando raids to destroy the militants’ Pakistan-based infrastructure are out too. There is no guarantee of success, and casualties could be prohibitively high.

Instead India is considering two options. The first is a ‘salami slice offensive’. After a 48-hour bombardment Indian jets would try to establish air superiority before troops attacked along a 100 miles of frontier between the city of Muzaffarabad and Mirpur. The aim: to secure high ground and mountain passes that allow militants to cross into India. The territory could be used as bargaining chips in any negotiations.

Both sides have been preparing for such an operation since the last full-blown war between India and Pakistan 30 years ago. Instead, says retired Air Marshal Kapil Kak, an Indian defence analyst, something ‘unexpected, innovative, inconceivable which pays fast dividends’ is more likely. Speed is of the essence. Indian planners reckon they have only 72 hours before a Pakistani leader, his defences collapsing, reaches for the nuclear button.

So the second option is far more ambitious and dangerous: to teach Pakistan a short, sharp lesson and then move swiftly to negotiations. After an artillery bombardment and air strikes, Indian paratroops would seize points on a long salient stretching deep into Pakistan from the border near to the northern Indian town of Kargil. Ground troops would push down valleys to link the seized positions up to 50 miles into Pakistan. Talks could then start from a position of strength.

The world now wants to know: will war happen? And if it does, how fast could it go nuclear?

In the past seven days the sense of impending catastrophe has deepened exponentially in London and Washington, driven by Pentagon alarm over ‘unusual Indian troop movements’ which US Defence Intelligence Agency analysts believe signal that Indian forces are all now in position for an imminent assault.

Sources in London said concern within Whitehall was ‘white hot’. In recent days Cabinet ministers have met in the ‘Cobra’ war room beneath Whitehall – reserved for wars and national emergencies – as a chilling realisation dawned that despite a threatened nuclear ‘cataclysm’, Indian may still risk waging war against Pakistan.

‘Dates for a possible Indian attack have been mentioned,’ said one Foreign Office source. ‘The time of greatest risk has been assessed as the beginning of the second week of June. You cannot believe the level of concern.’

Senior officials of MI6, the Defence Ministry, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development and MI6 ‘are working 18-hour days’, said one civil service source. ‘They are working flat out right through the jubilee weekend.’

The MoD and the Foreign Office officials are drawing up a contingency plan for an ‘ordered’ emergency evacuation of British citizens, using British Airways jets.

‘We are talking about the risk of war breaking out not within weeks but days,’ said one senior diplomatic source. ‘Anything could trigger it now. When you have a million and a half men under arms, you have a tinder box.’

‘It’s like the First World War, with both sides mobilising on automatic,’ said retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who frequently dealt with Pakistan when he headed the US Central Command in the late Nineties. ‘When they see an action on one side, there is a pre-programmed counter-reaction.’

Most chilling of all is the verdict of intelligence analysis from Washington and other European capitals that any Indian attack over the line separating Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir could rapidly escalate into a nuclear exchange.

‘We do not think you could talk of a limited conventional war here,’ said a senior Foreign Office source last week. ‘India’s two-to-one military superiority in ground and air forces would rapidly lead to Pakistan being very tempted to use nuclear weapons.’

Western intelligence analysis suggests India has factored this into its calculations. ‘The Indians believe they can absorb whatever pain is inflicted on them by Pakistan in any coming war and win, including a Pakistani first use of nuclear weapons,’ said one source. ‘They know millions will die but they believe India will still be there afterwards.’

The Indian agenda, say diplomatic sources, is driven by its generals’ belief that this may be their last chance finally to secure Kashmir. ‘Indian intelligence believes that although Pakistan has viable nuclear devices it does not have a properly weaponised ballistic system to deliver them. The judgment is that Pakistan is at least 12 months away from having missiles which can reliably carry nuclear weapons.

‘At best, India believes, Pakistan can field a fairly crude air-delivered device. The judgment is that if it is to do anything about Kashmir, it has to do it now.’

Yet what alarms seasoned observers of South Asia most is a belief that both sides are now psychologically committed to conflict. ‘There is an incredible sense of imminence,’ said one Foreign Office source last week. ‘They have both entered a war mindset. Neither can see any sense. This makes the risk so cataclysmic.’

The experts are alarmed too about how either side would respond to a real nuclear threat. There is no hotline warning system between them and, worse, neither has clear rules for using the weapons. They are equally vague about how a conventional war might turn into a nuclear one.

If one side suspects a first use of nuclear weapons, there is little time for manoeuvre or margin for error. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, which had as much as 30 minutes to react between a suspected missile launch and impact in the Cold War, India and Pakistan are so close geographically that they would have less than eight minutes.

Thoughts are now turning to the unthinkable: how the world would deal with the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe.

The US Defence Intelligence Agency calculates that the first hour of a full-scale nuclear exchange could kill as many as 12 million people and leave up to seven million injured. Millions more would die in other fighting or from starvation and disease.

In Britain government experts calculate that all Pakistan’s water and food would be contaminated by even a limited exchange, with large areas of India rendered practically uninhabitable.

‘We don’t even know where to start in thinking about how to deal with a humanitarian crisis on this scale,’ said one source. ‘There are simply no models for it. We don’t even know how we would get aid in in the immediate aftermath. No one has any experience of a humanitarian operation on this scale on a nuclear battlefield, and India and Pakistan have no mechanisms for coping with this.’

And it is not simply the fate of the combatant nations that frightens the planners. ‘In a worst-case scenario,’ said a senior Foreign Office source, ‘we would be looking at contamination affecting Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh even China.’

The fear is global but the problem – and any solution – is local. The critical factor is the militants. A major attack by them could start a war. A genuine end to their activity could be enough for peace. But, in all the brinkmanship and sabre-rattling, it is very difficult to tell what is really happening.

Sources close to Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the main militant group, told The Observer last week they had been ordered by Musharraf to cease all cross-border activity immediately at least three days before the Pakistani President made a bellicose speech last Sunday that enraged the Indians .

‘Concessions on the ground by Pakistan tend to be matched by strong rhetoric on the Kashmir issue,’ said Alexander Evans, a Kashmir analyst at Centre for Defensive Studies, London.

‘There is a nationalist cage in both countries within which Kashmir policy can rattle around but no political leader on either side would risk the wrath of public opinion by unlocking the door.’

There are other pressures on Musharraf. He needs support within the army, and many senior generals are hawkish. Some see helping the Muslim Kashmiris as a religious duty. Musharraf even faces assassination.

And, as India points out, his own sympathies are unclear. He, after all, orchestrated the 1999 ‘Kargil’ operation in which 1,000 Pakistani troops occupied a tactical ridge inside Indian Kashmir. Hundreds died in the fighting.

And there are militant groups that even Musharraf cannot control. The aggressive Jaish-e-Mohammed (the Army of Mohammed) is unlikely to obey his orders to cease fire. Other, ‘home-grown’ Kashmiri militants have stockpiles of weapons and funds independent of Pakistani support.

One man with a Kalashnikov and some dynamite could set off a blast that will make the entire world tremble.

India Nuclear warheads: 100 to 150, including up to 20 nuclear bombs that could be dropped from Jaguar or Mirage 2000 aircraft. The rest could be fitted to Agni or Prithvi missiles.

Pakistan Nuclear warheads: 25 to 50, including up to 20 bombs deliverable by F-16 fighter jets. Remainder could be fitted to Shaheen, Ghauri or Hatf missiles.

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