
A nuclear exchange, which is a polite way of saying “hundreds of millions of people roasted and radiated alive,” between these two nations is already being treated with a lot of indifference over here, mostly because you could not have a nuclear war much further away from the US and still hold it on this planet.
It will have consequences for us, though—cremating India will mean the end of tech support forever, and, although few people are aware of this, Pakistan supplies the US with greatest number of people with advanced medical degrees who are nonetheless forced to drive Uber when they immigrate here.
But these losses may be out weighed by a major benefit--a minor nuclear winter that will put the brakes on global warming for decades. Scientists estimate that setting off maybe a hundred Hiroshima-sized bombs will splatter enough mud into the upper atmosphere to reverse climate change, at least for a while.
Keep in mind that this is not the ginormous nuclear winter that an atomic war between the US and Russia would produce, where shipping through the Panama Canal would occasionally be shut down by icebergs. It would be more like South Carolina having the same climate as Pennsylvania, while PA would have the weather now currently enjoyed by Maine, all the way up to the Arctic, where polar bears would once again frolic on the un-melted ice of summer.
The Gulf Stream would keep pumping and the coral would come back to life. This is not to say people, especially American people, would be entirely happy about this, because we seldom are completely happy about anything. I am sure my neighbors in San Diego would bitch about having their taxes raised so we could get us some snowplows. We couldn’t wait to start warming things up again. People who drive Priuses would start getting dirty looks, while people who bought two-and-a-half ton SUVs and used them primarily to take a 26-pound child to back and forth to daycare would be hailed as stewards of the environment.
But I need to stop here—my copy of Word has been extraordinarily buggy this morning, and I need to call tech support.
While I still can.