LONDON- She came to the world’s attention three years ago with her prize-wining novel, “The God of Small Things”. Now the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy dares to lecture the government of her country on nuclear weapons, a rather lonely voice in a sub-continent consumed with an almost fatal overdose of self-destroying hatred. “It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreck more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep into the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”

We have already seen her forebodings come true. In Pakistan, the world’s first military coup in a nuclear weapons state. In India, a budget in which defense spending is increased by a phenomenal 28%. (It’s far easier to make a bomb than educate 400 million people, continues Ms Roy.) Sabre rattling that makes Khrushchev’s shoe banging look tame- “We are being threatened with nuclear weapons”, says India’s prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee. “Do the Pakistanis understand what this means? If they think we will wait for them to drop a bomb and face destruction, they are mistaken”. To which, adds Lieutenant-General Kamal Matinuddin of Pakistan, a widely read defense commentator, “if there’s a war, we are likely to respond earlier rather than later in the use of nuclear weapons. With Pakistan’s economy as it is, what else can we do?”

And a quite ridiculous, irresponsible way of playing with nuclear matches- the decision by Pakistan last summer in which the soon-to-be military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf played a major, if not dominant, role, to infiltrate guerrillas into the Indian side of divided and disputed Kashmir in a futile attempt to dislodge the Indian army. Only some extraordinary naive, if not perverse, misreading of nuclear deterrence theory as it evolved during the Cold War could lead a country’s leadership to believe it could solve a long-standing duel over territory in a positive and productive manner by such a ploy.

“Though we are separate countries, we share skies, we share winds, we share water. Any nuclear war will be a war against ourselves,” Ms Roy’s soliloquy continues.But even she underestimates the dangers. The Soviet Union and the U.S., bitter though their Cold War feud became, never lost a soldier to the other side in anger, had no territorial dispute and, never in their centuries of history had been to war with each other. Indeed, they were allies who defeated Hitler. India and Pakistan are at the opposite pole. In the short fifty three years of their independent existence they have fought three full scale wars. Hardly a day goes by without one of their soldiers losing his life to the other side and their continuing territorial dispute over the gloriously beautiful Himalayan state of Kashmir is a well from which the cup of bitterness is drawn every hour as the clock strikes.

How and why President Bill Clinton thinks he can contribute anything useful to this situation on his visit next week is almost beyond words, simply extraordinary.

American policy has connived since Nixon, with a brief respite under Carter (his was the last visit by a U.S. president, 22 years ago), to relegate India to some remote corner of the geopolitical map. Nixon in the early days of his opening-to-China policy made it unambiguously clear that a reason for taking China so seriously was its possession of the nuclear bomb. India regarded this as the worst possible snub. Even under Carter the tendency was to lecture and punish India for keeping its nuclear option open. Yet at that time India had as prime minister the near pacifist Moraji Desai. If the U.S. had used more carrot and less stick it could have won from Desai a formal renunciation of nuclear weapons.

Under Nixon, under Ford, under Carter and under Reagan the U.S. steadily dug itself into the Pakistani pit. Irritated by India’s Fabian tendencies and closeness to Moscow it appreciated Pakistan’s close relationship with anti-Soviet China. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed Washington over the edge. It gave a license to the Pakistani military and intelligence services to help the Afghani resistance by any means necessary, however far they went. That this led to the Taliban, the extremist Islamist militia that now rules most of Afghanistan, harbours Osama bin Laden, Washington’s number one bete noir, controls three quarters of all heroin reaching the West and, to boot, has provided the Islamist fighters who now set Pakistan’s agenda over Kashmir, is barely acknowledged. How could Washington, in the circumstances, expect to have much influence over Pakistan’s bomb-building ambitions?

Belatedly, the U.S. has woken up to the allure of democratic India. The big bang of its nuclear test penetrated where all the good journalism, books and diplomatic missives failed to reach. The U.S. now sees that, if war does not intervene, the Indian tortoise is likely to overtake the Chinese hare and become the leading economic colossus of Asia. But war is likely to intervene. Everyone has woken up too late. India should have honoured prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s promise shortly after independence was won from Britain to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir and none of this would have come to pass.

Whichever way you look, it is a story of missed opportunities. “It could end in an afternoon”, writes Arundhati Roy. There’s nothing much that Bill Clinton can now do. Yes, he is right to try. We have to believe it’s never too late, even when we think it is.