Fire In the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age
By Paul Bracken
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About this ebook
On May 11, 1998, India began testing nuclear weapons.
The world will never be the same.
The Indian test of five atomic bombs, and the Pakistani tests that answered a few weeks later, marked the end of the arms control system that has kept the world from nuclear war for half a century. As Paul Bracken, professor of management and political science at Yale University, explains in this landmark study, they signal the reemergence of something the world hasn't seen since the sixteenth century-modern technologically adept military powers on the mainland of Asia.
In Fire in the East, Professor Bracken reveals several alarming trends and secrets, such as how close Isreal actually came to a germ warfare attack during the Gulf War, why "globalization" will spur the development of weapons of mass destruction, how American interests are endangered by Asian nationalism, and how to navigate what he names the second nuclear age. Fire in the East is a provocative account of how the Western monopoly on modern arms is coming to an end, and how it will forever transform America's role on the stage of international politics.
Paul Bracken
Paul Bracken is a professor of management and political science at Yale University and a well-established expert in the field of international politics. He has served as a consultant to nearly all of the post-cold war government reassessments of national security, including those for the Department of Defense and the CIA. He is the author of Command and Control of Nuclear Forces.
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Fire In the East - Paul Bracken
1 NO ROOM ON THE CHESSBOARD
The world is moving at warp speed. A button pushed at a trading desk in New York affects prices around the world in seconds and ripples through the world’s economy in a matter of days or weeks. Transfixed by twenty-four-hour news broadcasts and by real-time financial data around the clock and the mountains of information flickering continuously across the Internet, Western leaders in the 1990s have devoted themselves to detecting and responding to short-term phenomena.
But the world is also moving at slow speed. Slow-motion change is barely perceived. When India and Pakistan tested their atomic bombs in 1998, Western leaders were transfixed by a stock market collapse in Indonesia. The twin bomb programs had been under way for fifteen years, but Western leaders, and certainly the media, were absorbed in the breaking story—a financial panic! hurried conferences of central bankers aimed at restoring confidence! statements! leaks! denials!—right up until the video of the blasts showed up on CNN. Only then did the nuclear arming of South Asia, overlooked for years, commandeer the world’s attention.
In Slowness, the novelist Milan Kundera draws a connectionbetween change and forgetfulness. We are caught up in the spiral of events, lost in its energy, blind to the accumulation of slow changes remaking our world. Without our noticing, the political and military map of Asia—one-third of the earth’s landmass, with almost two-thirds of the world’s population—is being redrawn. The Asia of the cold war, a disjointed collection of subregions and military theaters, no longer exists, not even notionally. Instead, the West must adopt a new paradigm, a geography of strategic interactions, in which the old barriers of distance and terrain have lost their meaning. These are some of the factors shaping it:
Europe, called the cockpit of the world because it has been the locus of so many major wars, is now more secure than it has been in ages. As a result, European armed forces have been cut back to the point where Europe is no longer a serious military power. The British navy takes to the seas with centuries of proud tradition behind it, but with fewer submarines than India has. The French armed forces are so technically backward that they are virtually irrelevant except for low-intensity peacekeeping missions. European armed forces are hopelessly unprepared when it comes to the kind of modern fighting the United States engaged in during the Gulf War. Between nuclear retaliation and peacekeeping, they have few