The 81st anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima passed on August 6 without many in India noticing. But Indians should be particularly concerned, and not just because the use of nuclear weapons has been threatened (implicitly, if not explicitly) one too many times in recent years. More importantly, the world today seems to tolerate the aggregate toll from ongoing wars, which could parallel the death and destruction from a nuclear attack.

Data on civilian casualties are mysteriously unavailable, and every theatre of war is seeing the use of conventional missiles. Suddenly, it is no longer clear where red lines lie for nuclear powers. This raises important questions about what constitutes deterrence for Indian security against two almost entirely different threats.

Let’s first talk about the mounting casualties. The Hiroshima bomb killed some 353,639 people. In Ukraine, British intelligence indicates some 500,000 Russian soldiers have died since 2022, while Kyiv claims some 1.4 million were killed. Ukraine’s own casualty data, however, remains classified, as does Russia’s. Curiously, the West doesn’t provide firm data on Russian civilians killed, though an analysis by the American think-tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies pegs total Russian deaths in the ongoing war as being nine times greater than all Soviet/Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II. That may just be point-scoring; after all, no such data on US casualties in the war against Iran or damage to US infrastructure is provided. On the other hand, there are claims of 36,000 people killed by the Iranian regime in just two days, during the January 6-8 crackdown on protests. Nobody seems to........

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