When China nukes India
Dragonfire by Humphrey Hawksley, Macmillan, London, 2000
Styled as India's Nostradamus, the BBC recently showcased Vimal Singh predicting a Confederation of India and Pakistan by the year 2015. Practising the publishing idiom of 'future history', Humphrey Hawksley in Dragonfire casts a line to the year 2007 when the idea of Confederation is being mooted as a survival option. It is after a catastrophic nuclear war: Pakistan has been obliterated as a nation state; India's metropolitan centres have become contaminated graveyards of a nuclear holocaust; and China has emerged from the rites of nuclear-strike passage as a superpower. In Dragonfire, the Indian strategic nightmare of a Pakistan and China pincer strike becomes a reality. The flashpoint is Tibet, with Kashmir and Taiwan as sideshows.
It is an impressive spinning of expert fact and fiction, imparting the adrenaline rush of virtual reality video war gaming. Dragonfire is indeed a worthy successor to Hawksley & Holberton's remarkably well-researched and chillingly-insightful Dragonstrike, about China's war for control of the South China Sea. The defining character of the publishing idiom pioneered in the bestseller, The Third World War, is "authority, relevance and topicality", hinging on the possibility and probability of a catastrophic event. Dragonfire, too, is based on formidable interview-based research, and comfortable expertise about a battery of weapons systems and operational strategy, enough to delight a military buff. It is a world driven by neo-realism, without any space for morality, values or ethics. The cynicism of China agreeing to a ceasefire and simultaneously nuking New Delhi, is seen as awesome; the ethical restraint of India nuking only military targets although New Delhi is about to be flattened, seems out of sync with the game of military hardball. This is a world where war is inevitable, 'exciting, evil…but intended for the strong and active—mainly men'—to paraphrase peace researcher Johan Galtung. This is a world where force, including nuclear power, is seen as a legitimate instrument of policy. There is awe, even admiration, of China, the lead protagonist, which "obtained power by force which would have taken it generations to obtain through peace".