Presidents Bush and Vladimir Putin interrupted their tour of St. Petersburg to warn against it. Colin Powell has already been to India and Pakistan to prevent it. Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, is now heading off to Delhi and Islamabad as well. Yesterday Pakistan promised to respond "with full might" if attacked by India—and today it tested another ballistic missile. But should we really be worried about nuclear war on the subcontinent?

Or perhaps I should put it differently: Is India's nuclear rivalry with Pakistan completely unlike the old nuclear rivalry between United States and the Soviet Union—is it so unique, in fact, that Cold-War-style nuclear deterrence between the two rivals is destined to fail? Consider the arguments as to why it is and it will—or maybe not.

1) India and Pakistan share a common border, along which minor conflagrations might easily turn into a major war—indeed, there has been shelling across the border for some days now. The United States and the USSR did not.

In fact, even though the United States and the USSR did not have a common border, NATO and the Warsaw pact shared many common borders, along which there were many minor conflagrations, some of which seemed, at the time, just as likely to develop into nuclear war—the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Berlin airlift, for example.

2) The Indians and the Pakistanis have built up fewer confidence-building measures—hotlines and so on. Therefore, the chances of accidents and misunderstandings leading to nuclear warfare are greater.

In fact, the U.S.-USSR hotline—a direct telephone link between the White House and the Kremlin—was created only in 1963. Both before then and after misunderstandings arose constantly. At the height of the Suez crisis in 1956, NATO radar picked up Soviet aircraft flying over Syria and Turkey. These turned out to be a routine escort for the Syrian president and a flock of swans, respectively. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, a Soviet satellite accidentally exploded, leading the United States briefly to believe the USSR had launched a massive missile attack. Similar incidents were far more frequent than is usually realized—you can read  a list of the 20 most famous "mishaps that might have led to nuclear war"—yet none actually did lead to nuclear war.

3) The Indians and the Pakistanis have less experience with nuclear weapons and do not fully understand the consequences of a nuclear war.      

This argument, which strikes me as borderline racist, appeared in the British Guardian newspaper, of all places. "The trouble is," a South Asia military analyst told the paper, "both sides imagine that a nuclear bomb just makes a bigger bang. They have got no concept of the sheer magnitude of the disaster of a nuclear exchange. Radioactive fallout in the Himalayas would mean the death of the subcontinent." But presumably, if India and Pakistan are technologically sophisticated enough to build bombs, then at least their scientists are technologically sophisticated enough to understand the environmental consequences of the bomb. Indeed, some Indian scientists now lobby against the bomb; so do anti-nuclear movements in both India and Pakistan. Perhaps only a relatively tiny elite understands the full consequences—but only a tiny elite makes decisions about whether to drop bombs anyway.

4) The Indians and the Pakistanis are crazier than the Americans and the Soviets (this argument, an extension of the previous one, is usually put more delicately, but you know what I mean).

To this there is one response: Richard Nixon. He may have conducted a diplomatic breakthrough in China, he may have known a thing or two about foreign policy, but the man was mad as a hatter. As this is not the time and place to discuss his paranoia or his inferiority complexes, I will leave you with one salient fact about him: From time to time, Nixon would suddenly put U.S. forces around the world on high-security alert, scramble the planes, ratchet up the coded transmissions just to keep the Soviets on their toes. Crazy, yes—but even he managed not to destroy the world.