The test firing of a Pakistani medium range missile is now the last image that the US Senate will have before voting on liberalizing nuclear trade with India. The long running tension over the entrance of South Asia as a deterent zone is about to be squarely in front of US policy makers.

India has already said that the deal being offered by Bush and being presented to the US Senate is "unacceptable", at least in part, and does not address India's security needs. Anti-proliferation advocates say that the deal goes to far. However, the real questions are orthagonal - the deal neither gives India a leg up in its attempt to hold Pakistan in check, nor does it reduce the very real and growing nuclear tension in the region. A tension that must be seen to include Iran, since Iran is also part of the sphere of nations that live within the shadow of the now contending arsenals.

As important as the new 800 mile range missile is the development of Pakistans Strategic Missile Group which is charged with running Pakistan's missile forces. It is an underappreciated component of strategic warfare - having a corps that will inflict megadeath on command. The internal turmoil of Pakistan's competing factions for power has provided a supply of raw material.

Part of the pressure to pass the Bush backed nuclear deal with India is, of course the fears that China and Pakistan are set to make their own nuclear trade deal which would be seen as putting India at a disadvantage.

Neither side, however, is well served by the arguments being made. The non-proliferation cat is out of the bag between these two nations, and while deals, or lack of them, might incrementally slow or accelerate individual actions, in the end all that will be accomplished is creating an incentive for Pakistan and India to develop whatever capabilities they lacked before. On the other hand, it is difficult to see what, exactly, is accomplished by opening trade in nuclear material with India, except, perhaps the conviction on the part of elements in Pakistan that proliferation is accelerating. This underlines the non-signatory status of both nations. As if to underscore this, India, which had been informed in advance, and intends to counter-test its own latest missile.

The bill is flawed and inconclusive, and, if it is not passed, would be set back to the beginning of the legislative process in a new Congress with a different mandate and reasons to want to assert their role in making policy. Since the bill accomplishes nothing urgent, and may well make the short term situation more unstable, letting it die is far from the worst of available options.

But what of those options? The clear road is to accept Pakistan and India as members of the nuclear club, and get them to accept the responsiblity of not proliferating further. There are a number of nations that could obtain atomic weapons quickly should they decide that they have the need for a nuclear umbrella. More over Pakistan is a proven proliferator - its equipment has shown up in North Korean, Iranian and Libyan programs.

The second realization is that normalization of strategic balance, that ugly process which the United States and Soviet Union stumbled through in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's, must continue. This is not the stuff of dramatic break throughs, but the evidence is that neither India, nor Pakistan, are led by people eager to have their molecules breaking the sound barrier on the way to the stratosphere any time soon. Warnings, dialog and meetings abound already. However, what has not happened is precisely what the fight over these agreements shows is needed: a detente between rival powers over the acceptable limits of competition. Test firings and photo-ops are not dangerous, but each side seeking to bring in aid from other nations in furthering their atomic ambitions is dangerous. Russia, China, the United States and Europe can all sell equipment into the region which would radically accelerate development of new, and more brutal, weapons complexes.

Pound for pound atomic weapons are the most environmentally destructive activity that human beings undertake, and one of the most dangerous. Atomic weapons corrupt civilian nuclear power industries, and create wastes which are nearly impossible to store safely. Encouraging acceleration of atomic programs with liberalization in return for not very useful inspections of civilian nuclear facilities, serves only to accelerate this structural risk from atomic weaponry. The nature of Chernobyl as a weapons type reactor is directly related to the disaster there. Even if not one more atomic weapon is used, there are already casualties from the technology.

The consequences of even the current arsneals being used run to 3 million dead and 1.5 million severely injured from a airburst exchange. These are death tolls which rapidly escalate into the 10s of millions should a war of extermination be launched by using "ground burst" detonators that create clouds of fall out. Pardoxically, if past experience is any guide, the most dangerous period is prior to the "MAD threshold" where both sides have the ability to destroy the other completely even after receiving a massive first strike attack. In short, right now, when there is the prospect of disabling the other nation with an attack, there is the strongest pressure to use weapons before the other side is capable of absorbing the blow. Several times during the first 20 years of atomic weapons, there was pressure to "use it or lose it", but after the Cuban missile crisis, these thoughts were gradually strangled - there was simply too much to lose.

Thus, on one hand, escalation of atomic programs is environmentally destructive, expensive and destabilizing. On the other hand, the only real islands of stability are less than zero - that is some long distance away from the first wepoan - or MAD.

The fatalist, who is often thought of as a realist, would say that the present agreement accelerates the reaching of MAD equilibrium. However, the realist points out that this threshold would only encourage other nations to undertake atomic weapons. Enough to MAD deter India is enough to bully Indonesia, or Iran, or nations in Africa.

This is not a new problem with India's program going back to the 1960's and Pakistans to the 1970's. It has however become acute in the last few years, and is on the verge of reaching the runaway point where only the fatalist's solution of a South Asia gone MAD will work. However, that point has not been reached yet. India and Pakistan are both still within reach of a strategic arms reduction program which would unwind their atomic arsenals, and leave them with the capability of matching a rearming neighbor. The benefit - being a declared atomic power - would be matched by the ability to mutually inspect facilities, along the lines of the SALT and START agreements.

It is this road, with India and Pakistan inspecting each other, not with the US inspecting a trading partner and China inspecting a trading partner, which places the adversarial interest in the correct direction. The next Congress should set aside the proliferation for profit approach, and instead press for an agreement with China not to proliferate or n-trade with South Asia, and then create multi-party talks with the avowed objective of having India and Pakistan create a Strategic Materials and Arms Removal Treaty. We've seen the good that stupid gets us, it is time to get smart.