WASHINGTON, June 1: Between nine and 12 million people would die, and close to six million would be injured in a “worst-case” nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a US defence official said, citing a classified Pentagon assessment.

That projection does not take into account subsequent deaths from disease, famine and contaminated water supplies — only the immediate casualties of a nuclear conflagration between the two states, the official said.

The assessment was updated last week by the Defence Intelligence Agency amid soaring tensions between the two over the Kashmir issue.

“Long-term you would be talking about starvation, pollution of the water tables and birth defects,” the official said.

The scenario took the number of nuclear weapons each side was believed to have, and matched them to their most likely target list, then assumed all weapons would be successfully delivered and all would burst on the ground, sending up clouds of radioactive fallout.

Because of the greater fallout, such ground-burst nuclear explosions would likely produce several million more casualties than if weapons were detonated in the air.

An air-burst nuclear explosion produces “more damage on structures but it doesn’t produce the fallout that a surface burst does,” the official said.

Jane’s Strategic Weapons Systems estimates that India has between 50 and 150 nuclear weapons, and Pakistan between 25 and 50.

The US defence official said the Indian nuclear weapons were estimated to be in the low 10-kiloton range while the Pakistanis’ were in the 20-kiloton range.

The atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima at the end of World War II was approximately 14 kilotons.

Pakistan would likely deploy the weapons using US made F-16 fighter aircraft. Pakistan also has two nuclear-capable ballistic missiles — the Shaheen and the Ghauri, with ranges of 700 kilometres and 1,500 kilometres respectively.

India, for its part, was most likely to use Soviet-made MiG-27 fighters to deliver its nuclear weapons. It also has nuclear-capable British-made Jaguar aircraft.

India only has one nuclear-capable ballistic missile, the Prithvi-I, with a range of only 150 kilometres, the official said. It is testing a longer range Prithvi-II missile.—AFP