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The Tsunami disaster has claimed well over a hundred and twenty thousand lives, and we are still counting. But a single nuclear weapon, even a modest one of 20 kiloton yield dropped on a major city, will kill more people. If the televised images of Tsunami victims laid out across half a dozen countries have shocked and horrified us all, one can imagine the scene after a nuclear attack, when all hundred thousand of them would be packed within a few square miles.

It may seem inappropriate to bring up the subject of nuclear attacks when we are still reeling from the havoc wrought by the Tsunami. But learning lessons from the Tsunami tragedy involves not only planning a better network of underwater sensors, earthquake detectors and so on, but also reviewing our preparedness to face other potential calamities. For, disasters come in all forms and shapes and the next big one, whenever it comes, is unlikely to be another Tsunami. In India, coherent plans to deal with a nuclear attack are essentially non-existent. The probability of a nuclear bomb dropping on one of our cities, whether through an act of war or by accident, is admittedly small, but it is certainly not zero. A month ago, the probability of a massive Tsunami wave killing over a lakh of people would have also been considered small. Low probability disasters have to be taken very seriously if they can cause mammoth damage.

Anguished cries have been raised as to whether the Tsunami tragedy could have been averted. But the Tsunami itself is a natural phenomenon. It cannot be prevented from happening-at least not with our existing technological prowess. The best that one could have done is to lower the casualties through adequate warning and preparedness.

By contrast, a nuclear attack when it happens (and it has happened twice already) will not be a natural disaster. It would be entirely man made. Unlike the Tsunami, the existence of nuclear weapons is not forced on us by immutable laws of geology. They are there because of the failure of statesmanship, imagination and courage on the part of the supposedly wise men and women who run the affairs of major nations. They have been unable to find ways of coping with international conflict without resorting to building arsenals of these extraordinarily lethal weapons.

Just as any nuclear holocaust would be a man made one, by the same token averting a nuclear disaster is also entirely in human hands, unlike the case of the Tsunami. What it requires is a commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. But, sadly, any commitment from nuclear nations towards total disarmament has lacked urgency. People seriously concerned with the dangers of nuclear weapons generally form a minority, often derided as naïve peaceniks.

This attitude characterizes all nuclear powers including those in our subcontinent. We too justified nuclearisation by pointing to threats from one another. Pakistan is said to have started building its nuclear arsenal to counter the (conventional) military superiority of India, while the latter in turn points to the Pakistani and Chinese nuclear programs to justify its own. As with the rest if the world, this justification in terms of external threats has found acceptance here too. The Indian public is by and large quite comfortable with, and indeed proud of the fact that we have gone nuclear. In the Indian political arena one hears hardly any serious discussion about our having gone nuclear, either in the parliament or in election campaigns. Our nuclear weapon program has become the holiest of holy cows, which no political party wants to question. In our security and strategy circles nuclear weapons are hailed not just as military weapons but also as important instruments of international diplomacy and power politics. People who influence and make policy decisions seem to feel no compulsion to even slow down the growth of the country's nuclear arsenal, let alone get rid of it.

The nuclear danger therefore is here to stay at least in the near future. In the case of the Tsunami numerous measures have been suggested in recent days that would contain the damage it does. What is the status of corresponding steps in the event of a nuclear tragedy ? Some of us have analyzed in detail the prospects of both Early Warning systems and Nuclear Civil Defense measures in the South Asian context. Without going into details, the conclusion is that neither is feasible in India or Pakistan to any significant extent. For one thing, a missile launched , say, from some airbase near Lahore towards New Delhi will take only 5-6 minutes to reach its target. Even if the launch is detected instantly, these few minutes will give no time for the government to make any meaningful decisions or for the civilian population to escape from attack.

You cannot empty a targeted Indian city of its population in a few minutes, or for that matter , in a few hours or even days. How will you transport them out ? Where would you locate all the people evacuated from some potentially targeted large city ? Do we possess the wherewithal to house 10 million people even temporarily in tents and shacks, with minimal water, food and sanitation ? And do we have the necessary civil discipline to conduct such a massive evacuation without creating panic and stampedes, which can kill thousands before even a bomb is actually dropped.

In fact none of the major nuclear powers have any plans of urban evacuation in the event of a potential nuclear attack. At one time the erstwhile Soviet Union did have serious plans of evacuation as a civil defense strategy, because it had the system of government that might conceivably have enforced the orderly movement of millions of people. But subsequently these evacuation plans were abandoned by the USSR too.

Another option is to build shelters that can withstand the fury of a nuclear blast. This is feasible on a small scale to shelter just the apex leadership and is presumably being done in India too. But it would be absurd to think of providing such shelter to the public at large when so much of our urban population does not even have normal housing. The homeless would simply occupy those shelters permanently ! Even in the U.S. individual home owners were initially encouraged to build nuclear shelters in their basements. But those plans soon fizzled on a nationwide basis.

However, there are a few of these measures we could take in India, which might save some lives. This is not the place to list them but they will require, to start with, educating officials and volunteers all the way from the central government to local municipal levels about the thermal, blast and radiation of effects of nuclear explosions. Withholding such information from the public ostensibly to avoid creating panic, or on grounds of national security is not the way to save lives in the event of a nuclear disaster.