No one on the subcontinent, called the world's most dangerous place, takes anti-nuclear activists seriously — certainly not A P J Abdul Kalam, India's main candidate for president and architect of India's very own strategic defence initiative, which includes missiles, nuclear warheads and satellites.

At a well-attended press conference on Wednesday, the day after he filed his nomination for a job he is certain to get, Kalam's advice to peace activists was to ''go and do something'' about the nuclear weapon stockpile on the other side of the Atlantic — and leave India to pursue its own path as its leaders see best.

In Kalam's view, the reason behind the now de-escalating military confrontation with neighbouring Pakistan, defused by intense British and American shuttle diplomacy, did not actually erupt into war was the South Asian neighbours' possession of nuclear weapons.

''If we did not have a nuclear weapon war would have taken place,'' he said.

That is precisely the ''deterrence theory'' that leading peace activists on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border, which is still bristling with a million troops and their missile batteries, have been trying to shoot down with little success.

''India and Pakistan's eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation, which has still not ended, highlights the special danger of a catastrophic nuclear conflict breaking out in South Asia,'' said Achin Vanaik, founder-member of the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament (MIND), which issued on Tuesday an appeal for nuclear risk-reduction measures (NRRMs).

Greatest difficulty

Vanaik complained that the greatest difficulty for anti-nuclear groups like MIND was that nobody — policymakers, ordinary people and worst of all, the media — seemed to be taking them seriously.

MIND is loosely formed of eminent people from different fields such as medicine, academics, and journalism.

In fact, Vanaik and other members of MIND were accused at a press conference they hosted on Tuesday of being ''part of lunatic fringe''. The charge was made by a well-known television journalist, who seemed to endorse the deterrence theory that possession of nuclear weapons would bring peace between the South Asian neighbours that have been struggling over possession of Kashmir for 55 years.

As Vanaik, along with anti-nuclear activists in Pakistan have pointed out repeatedly, the May 1998 tit-for-tat nuclear tests conducted by the two countries did not prevent them from fighting an undeclared but nevertheless ferocious war at Kargil on the Line of Control (LoC), which divides Kashmir into Indian and Pakistan-controlled parts.

Former US President Bill Clinton, whose intervention helped defuse the Kargil crisis after it threatened to turn into a nuclear war, said in 2000, before undertaking a visit to the sub-continent, that it was the ''most dangerous place on earth''.

Unambiguous evidence

''The evidence is unambiguous — since the nuclear tests of 1998 we have witnessed two full-blown Indian-Pakistan confrontations,'' Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of Pakistan's leading nuclear physicists said in an interview to a forthcoming edition of the well-respected fortnightly magazine Frontline '.

''During the Kargil crisis in 1999, we now know, the Pakistan Army — without the knowledge of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif — had mobilised its nuclear-tipped missile fleet. Presumably the Indians were also in a high state of nuclear readiness,'' Hoodbhoy told the Frontline interviewer at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

Hoodbhoy went on to say that historians will record the Kargil war as the first that was actually caused by nuclear weapons: ''Possession of nuclear weapons gave Pakistan a false sense of confidence and security, encouraging it into adventurism in Kashmir and initiating a war.''

Hoodbhoy added that the anti-nuclear lobby was far stronger in India that in Pakistan, going by the protests in major Indian cities following the 1998 tests. ""I wish we (Pakistan) could mobilise a fraction of that. India has a more dynamic and vibrant civil society than ours.''

But Vanaik said that in India, anti-nuclear activists are often accused of being unpatriotic, and ungrateful that its leaders are working to secure for the country membership in the nuclear club and big power status.

In contrast to what peace activists like Vanaik and Hoodbhoy are saying, Kalam's reason for why Indian needs nuclear weapons is deceptively simple. ''For the last 3,000 years India has been invaded by the Portuguese, the Dutch and even the Afghans. When those guys (invaders) were holding guns, you were holding swords.''

Principles and doctrines

He added: ''When India's neighbour (Pakistan) was having nuclear weapons, the country could not afford to do tapas (sit in prayerful meditation).

Answering questions on the accidental use or misuse of nuclear weapons, Kalam said India's nuclear weaponisation programme is bound by ''principles and doctrines'' under which this country was committed to a ''no first use'' of nuclear weapons.

But MIND activist Satyajit Rath says the history of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union showed that the risks were considerable — doctrine or no doctrine. ''Between 1977 and 1984 alone, there were 20,000 false alarms, of which 1,000 were serious enough to put bomber and missiles on full alert.''

Rath said while the world repeatedly came close to the brink of disaster despite the billions invested by Washington and Moscow in command control systems, ''the India-Pakistan situation is much, much worse''.

MIND activists believe that South Asia's potential for a nuclear catastrophe is the highest anywhere in the world since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, partly because of the primitiveness of their weapons. ''The two countries' first-generation weapons lack adequate safeguards such as authorisation locks and insensitive explosives (that set off a nuclear reaction in a bomb),'' Vanaik said.

India and Pakistan have a notoriously poor safety culture and the rate of accidents in both countries is about 10 times higher than the world average.

Major accidents, caused by negligence often cited by peace activists, include the 1984 cyanide gas leak from a pesticide factory in the central Indian city of Bhopal, which killed more than 3,000 people and the Ojhri Camp tragedy in Rawalpindi, Pakistan where the explosion of an ammunition dump in 1987 killed more than a thousand people.