Britons rush to get out of India as fear of nuclear war grows

Expatriate families thronged Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport last night amid intensifying fears that an attack on Pakistan by India might escalate uncontrollably into nuclear war.

France and Japan yesterday advised their nationals to leave India, following similar warnings from the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. The UN prepared to evacuate the families of staff from Pakistan.

The warnings came as shelling by India and Pakistan continued in many places across the Line of Control in Kashmir, the long de facto border between Indian and Pakistani territory. About 750,000 Indian troops have been confronting 250,000 Pakistanis along the Line of Control and the international border for the past six months.

Since a terror attack in Indian Kashmir on 14 May by Islamic radicals, which took more than 30 lives, shelling by both sides has been a daily occurrence. Deborah Wise, a British mother of two, doing last-minute packing, said: "I'm nervous. I'm glad I'm leaving tonight. I don't like leaving my household behind, but I can't pack it all up in two minutes."

A member of staff with the American embassy, who declined to be named, was getting ready to leave with his children on Monday. He played down the anxiety. "A lot of people are going off on their holidays, anyway. There's a natural siphoning off of people ... this gives me a couple of weeks extra vacation."

Others, however, believe the danger is real and urgent. "My wife and children left this morning," said one British company employee. "I'm very glad they're out of here. If I have to stay I may move somewhere safer than Delhi."

At any one time there are about 20,000-36,000 British nationals in India, many of Indian origin. The recent tensions are thought to have cut sharply the numbers of backpackers and other tourists.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who visited Islamabad and Delhi last week, planned constant telephone diplomacy over the holiday weekend in an attempt to urge India and Pakistan to find the "will to pull back from the brink". A senior Foreign Office source added, however: "Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be the will."

This week Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State, will follow the same well-beaten path to add their own assessments of the perils of war and of how it may be avoided.

But there is widespread recognition that the political and military chemistry of the region has become terrifyingly unstable, to the extent that even if Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and India's Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, want to avoid a conflict, it may already be beyond their power to halt it.

Mr Straw stressed after his visit that war was "not inevitable", but the Foreign Office said talks were difficult because India was "incredibly untrusting" of any apparent shifts in Pakistan's position. "At times it is at the mercy of a single incident," said the British source.

India's frustration is the continued infiltration, from Pakistan into Indian-controlled Kashmir, of Islamic radicals bent on attacking the Indian security forces. Last Sunday, General Musharraf denied infiltration was taking place, a position that contradicted assessments by security experts, both Indian and Western.

The Pakistani leader is now under intense Western pressure to stop these incursions. But he has already alienated Pakistan's sizeable community of Islamic militants by backing the West against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Islamic terror groups, such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (Mohammad's Army) and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (the Army of the Pure), long nurtured by the Pakistani state, may now be so angry and disaffected they will be happy to provoke a war between the countries.

Indian politicians, meanwhile, have repeated frequently that India has been patient for too long. One more terrorist attack like that of 14 May and India will almost certainly throw its forces across the Line of Control.

The fear then is that fighting could escalate rapidly. And if Pakistan feels its territorial integrity is threatened, it could respond with a nuclear attack on the Indian capital. While India has a nuclear no-first-use policy, Pakistan does not.