Newspaper headlines are filled with words like "unthinkable," "Armageddon," and "nightmare." But as India and Pakistan continue their downward military and diplomatic spiral in a threat of nuclear war American military analysts consider at least as credible as the Cuban missile crisis 40 years ago, official Washington, D.C. seems considerably less aghast than the rest of the world. In fact, you can almost see the wheels turning as White House officials weigh the costs and benefits of a nuclear war on the Indian subcontinent.

As with previous crisis in the last year -- notably the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Israel's invasion of the West Bank -- global media accounts of this crisis, and its risks, are differing starkly from U.S. accounts. This time, however, the differences are less in the reporting of what is actually happening, and more in the sense of its significance. Elsewhere, possible war between India and Pakistan is daily, front-page, multiple-story fodder, and the accounts are pulling no punches. Consider this segment from a story in the Sunday, June 2 London Observer:

The U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency calculates that the first hour of a full-scale nuclear exchange could kill as many as 12 million people and leave up to seven million injured. Millions more would die in other fighting or from starvation and disease.

And it is not simply the fate of the combatant nations that frightens the planners. "In a worst-case scenario," said a senior Foreign Office source, "we would be looking at contamination affecting Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, even China."

It's easy to rationalize the difference in media tone as one of distance; in North America, half a world away from the Indian subcontinent, such talk seems fantastical, and far removed from American concerns or influence. But the United States is, in fact, knee-deep in this crisis in a variety of ways, one of the most obvious of which is revealed by another, subtler difference in news coverage: in the U.S., the interviews and perspective seem to be coming largely from the Pakistani side of the disputed "Line of Control" dividing Kashmir and defining the conflict.

There seems little doubt that the Bush Administration has cast its lot with the terrorism-sponsoring military dictatorship of Pakistan, rather than democratic India, and that it has done so purely out of self-interest. While Secretary of Empire Donald Rumsfeld was noisily announced last week to be shuffling off to the subcontinent at some presumably immediate time -- his counterparts from most of Europe have already made the trip -- much of his message is likely to be for Pakistan's military dictator, er, General, er, "President" Musharraf -- not concerning Kashmir, but demanding that Musharraf stop redeploying troops from Pakistan's western border regions with Afghanistan, where they are reinforcing the American snark hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Reports out of Pakistan last week suggested that the majority of those fighters aren't in Pakistan's mountainous west at all -- they're in the cities. And this is Musharraf's dilemma, and what makes the current face-off with India so treacherous. After casting his lot with the Americans, and at least symbolically breaking with the Islamic extremists that Pakistan has long trained and deployed in its effort to "liberate" the largely Muslim Kashmir from Indian control, Musharraf's grip on power is tenuous at best. The White House is committed to keeping Musharraf in power; the alternative, at this point, is a seizing of power, and access to nuclear weaponry, by those same fundamentalist movements. And if the much more powerful Indian military attacks -- as its 750,000 mobilizing troops, numerous intelligence reports, and two weeks of border skirmishes suggest may happen in a matter of days, not weeks -- the one fallback a desperate Musharraf has available is nuclear war.

Most terrifyingly, by all accounts political and military leaders on both sides are sanguine about the prospect of a nuclear exchange, relying on the two countries' enormous populations to absorb even large casualty figures. It's an extraordinary act of arrogance -- political leaders willing to consign millions to death or worse, in order to either make an ideological point or hang onto power. Just like in Washington.

In several ways, the Bush Administration's response to the attacks of last September helped put this crisis in motion. First, there was the Bush doctrine -- reiterated in a speech this past weekend in which Dubya essentially promised to invade 60 countries around the world, where the U.S. would "uncover terror cells," by striking before anything had actually provoked an attack. India -- which has suffered not only repeated terror attacks by Islamic operatives penetrating into Indian territory, but a terrorist attack last December on its Parliament building in New Delhi -- has far more cause for preemptive attack than Washington, and is citing Bush's precedent in justifying its prospective attack along the 450-mile-long Kashmir border.

At the same time, India has a marked distrust of Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials -- exacerbated by an incident in Clintontime, in which a 1999 U.S. entreaty convinced India to hold its fire and send an envoy to Pakistan seeking peace talks, and Musharraf used the opportunity to seize several mountainous passes overlooking Indian supply lines near Kargil. Beyond that more recent history, India remembers -- if most Americans do not -- that the Islamic extremist movement now wrangling over Kashmir was, in large part, originally trained, armed, and encouraged by the U.S. (both directly and through Pakistani and Saudi intelligence) in its 1980s campaigns against the Soviet Union.

Most strikingly, both sides seem to have inherited George W. Bush's cavalier attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons. The U.S. will officially pull out of the 1973 ABM treaty on June 13; Pentagon and White House officials (as well as any number of prominent Congresspeople) have not only talked openly about development and use of "tactical" nuclear weapons as a desirable battlefield strategy, but have been pushing hard for the development of new generations of weapons that can strike instantly and kill millions. Recall that similar Clinton Administration intransigence over arms control negotiations -- essentially, the U.S. wanted to permanently lock in nuclear superiority over the world -- prompted both India and Pakistan to bring their secret nuclear programs out into the open with testing four years ago.

Now, with the Bush Administration both declaring open season on developing weapons of mass destruction and explicitly threatening military operations in scores of countries, open season on buying or developing such weapons will have been declared for militaries all over the world. And if there is any sort of nuclear exchange in South Asia, the world will be demanding the prohibition of such weapons -- at the exact time the U.S. will be championing them.

The prospect of nuclear exchange may or may not be a bad thing, in the minds of some of the hawks Dubya has put in positions of power. They don't see a nuclear exchange as providing the impetus for a ban -- they see it instead as legitimation of future use of such weapons, especially the smaller "tactical" ones. They also see it as a sales opportunity for militaries around the world wanting to buy American weaponry (if only to defend themselves from America).

Most importantly, given India's military superiority, the Americans seem to be banking on some sort of a confrontation that will keep Musharraf in power, keep a prospective theocracy away from Pakistan's nukes, and allow either the Pakistani dictator or his Indian military foes to severely damage the capabilities of the Muslim militants' movement -- which, in the eyes of the Pentagon and the Bush White House, is far more important than the fate of, say, 12 million people.

Repeat these sorts of rationalizations--to oneself or to each other--often enough, and they begin to sound reasonable. And if the leadership of Pakistan and India seem crazy for being willing to consider that sort of nightmare scenario with equanimity, recall that only a few months ago the Pentagon was willing and ready to let several million Afghans starve to death rather than interrupt its bombing campaigns. Weakening the Islamic extremist movement, at the cost of more people than live in all of New York City, really isn't all that different.