Kumar Sundaram | From the Editor’s Desk  

No other region on the planet but South Asia has the unenviable distinction of hosting two nuclear-armed countries with a proximate and volatile border that has shown a penchant for flaring up intermittently.

Even as armies compete to redraw borders, arbitrarily drawn across geographies, and leaders attempt to rewrite history to fit their ambitions, nuclear weapons remain unparallelled inscription devices – they etch death and destruction into our collective futures, and inscribe enduring ecological traumas.

Annihilation and perpetuity are written into the very fabric of nuclear time. As Derrida once observed, nuclear weapons threaten not just lives, but memory itself — they are capable of obliterating the entire human archive in an instant. On the other hand, Plutonium, the first completely artificial element produced in the process of making the bomb, will likely outlast our species, ominously glowing in the dark long after we are gone. The radioactive isotopes from the first nuclear test in New Mexico still lingers—and will, for millennia— serving as a human signature on the planet into the deep future.

On a horizon of 10,000 years, a timescale that nuclear semiotics often uses to speculate planetary futures, today’s nations, borders, armies, people, and even geographies start to blur— they become perilously hazy if not entirely strange and unknowable.

Not far from today’s troubled borders lie the edicts of Mohenjo-Daro. Still undeciphered, this script of the Indus Valley civilization casts a wry smile both at the cultural continuities that majoritarian political projects claim, and, the techno-optimist audacities of the nuclear-military apparatus. Thus, the cultural and technocratic arrogance holding together the edifice of nuclear jingoism across the border crumbles at the altar of Mohenjo-Daro.

A Pakistani minister recently declared that their nuclear weapons were not meant for display in museums. The Indian Prime Minister made a similar quip a few years ago, during either a flare-up or an election campaign—these days, it is hard to tell the difference. If anything, neither country has shown any genuine love for museums. In Pakistan, histories that do not align with the rigid narrative of the religious-state are often erased. In India, a growing obsession with monochromatic national identities has dulled our instinct to preserve the plural, the nuanced, the uncomfortable.

Perhaps both countries would do well to learn something from Hiroshima. The peace museum there doesn’t just memorialise the horrors of the atomic bomb—it also confronts Japan’s own brutal militarist past. In the face of the unspeakable trauma of nuclear violence, sane voices within Japan found ways to embrace complex pasts and presents, something that South Asia sorely lacks.

Beyond such complex histories and imperilled futures, people in India and Pakistan should also pay heed to the threat of irreversible environmental damage that an intentional or accidental nuclear conflict could unleash. Yesterday, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group ICAN released a statement calling for an urgent de-escalation in South Asia, referring to a 2022 study that suggests that even a limited nuclear exchange “could trigger a nuclear winter, drastically disrupting global agriculture leading to famine that could kill more than two billion people”.

South Asia is home to one-fifth of humanity. It cradles fascinating histories, traditions, music, food, and vibrant cultures. It also has the planet’s most fragile and biodiverse ecosystems.

May sanity prevail. May we fearlessly cherish this chaotic, beautiful, and diverse living museum that is South Asia.