US: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday he was prepared to share with leaders of India and Pakistan US intelligence on the consequences of a nuclear war.
"It's the millions and millions and millions of people who live in those two countries who would be damaged by a conflict," he said.
In a signal of mounting US concern over the confrontation between the two nuclear-armed rivals, the White House said it was sending Mr Rumsfeld to the region next week for talks.
Mr Rumsfeld said he would be happy to provide intelligence to both sides on the consequences of a nuclear war.
"We've done a lot of thinking about that here, having had nuclear weapons for 55, 57, 58 years now," he said. "So we've given a lot thought to their use, what the immediate effects are, what the lingering effects are, and what the secondary effects can be with respect to other problems," he said.
Meanwhile, the military stand-off between the two countries escalated sharply yesterday after Islamabad reinforced its military deployment along the Indian border and once again threatened to use nuclear weapons in the event of war.
India also reported the heaviest artillery and mortar fire in the disputed Kashmir state since relations between the states reached flash-point two weeks ago following the massacre of soldiers' families by Muslim militants at a garrison in the Himalayan principality. Army officials said at least 14 people, including three soldiers and 11 civilians, had died in the intense shelling that was concentrated on the border town of Poonch.
To further exacerbate tension between the two armies massed along their common border, two Islamic guerrillas attacked a police post at Doda, 100 miles north-east of Kashmir's winter capital, Jammu, on Wednesday, killing four policemen before being gunned down after a 17-hour firefight.
Pakistan has moved troops from its western border with Afghanistan to India's frontier states of Rajasthan and Punjab, where two of the three previous wars between the neighbours have been fought since independence in 1947. Islamabad also said it would ask the UN to release around 4,000 of its soldiers serving with peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone.
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan reiterated that his army would take the fight to India in the event of war. "If India comes one inch across the line of control [which divides Kashmir between the two\], it will create a crisis in which Pakistani armed forces will fight across the border," Gen Musharraf said in his address at an air base outside Islamabad.
Pakistan has also threatened to use nuclear weapons even if India stuck to conventional arms in any conflict. "India should not have the license to kill with conventional weapons while Pakistan's hands are tied regarding other means to defend itself," Mr Munir Akram, Islamabad's ambassador to the UN, said.