Only once in the past 20 years has the world found itself nearing the brink of nuclear war. In 1990, India and Pakistan rolled their air forces' bombers onto runways during a confrontation over the disputed region of Kashmir.

The potential for a military conflict between the two countries is considerable. The two South Asian powers, Pakistan predominantly Muslim, and India predominantly Hindu, have fought three wars since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.

India and Pakistan's recent detonation of nuclear devices illuminated a chilling fact of life in the post-Cold War era: The greatest danger of atomic warfare is not between the old superpowers but from a relentlessly growing list of "new" nuclear powers in Asia and the Middle East.

The United States and Russia still maintain thousands of frighteningly powerful nuclear missiles, and China, France and Britain control hundreds of their own.

But the biggest threat to the sometimes-precarious nuclear peace is no longer in those big-power stockpiles, which have been the focus of arms control efforts since the first atomic explosions in 1945.

Instead, the most acute modern dangers come from smaller sources in unstable places: the growing nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India, including India's brand-new hydrogen bomb, apparently compact enough to fit atop a medium-range missile; the one or two nuclear weapons that North Korea might still be hiding; and the more than 100 nuclear weapons Israel maintains.

Plus, there's the impossible-to-quantify danger of "loose nukes," of nuclear material falling into the hands of rebels, terrorists or gangsters. The former Soviet Union is the largest storehouse of nuclear weapons and fissile materials in the world, and it is a region in chaos.

For almost a decade, the United States has been funding programs to bring the former Soviet arsenal under strict control, but the effort is painfully inadequate to the task.

In one recent success story, U.S. officials arranged to remove 10 pounds of nuclear material from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The good news is that they got the 10 pounds out. The bad news is there's almost a million pounds left.

MOSCOW--At dawn on the morning of Jan. 25, 1995, a four-stage Norwegian-U.S. joint research rocket lifted off from an island off Norway's northwest coast. The rocket was designed to study the Northern Lights, but when it rose above the horizon, it turned into another kind of experiment--a test of the hair-trigger posture that still dominates the control of Russian and United States nuclear weapons.

The rocket was spotted by Russian early-warning radars. The radar operators sent an alert to Moscow. Within minutes, President Boris Yeltsin was brought his black nuclear-command suitcase. For several tense minutes, while Yeltsin spoke with his defense minister by telephone, confusion reigned.

These may have been some of the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age. They offer a glimpse of how the high-alert nuclear-launch mechanism of the Cold War remains in place, and how it could go disastrously wrong.

Russia and the United States still rely on a doctrine that calls for making rapid-fire decisions about a possible nuclear attack. If a Russian president wants to retaliate before enemy missiles reach his soil, he has about eight minutes to decide what to do.

Some Western experts say the Norway rocket episode may not be the last. The reason is that Russia's system of early warning of a possible attack, and command and control of nuclear forces, is suffering many of the same problems plaguing the entire military. The prospect of a mistake "has become particularly dangerous since the end of the Cold War," Vladimir Belous, a retired general and leading Russian strategist, wrote recently. He added that "a fateful accident could plunge the world into the chaos of a thermonuclear catastrophe."

From 1949 to the fall of its empire, the Soviet Union produced some 55,000 nuclear bombs--enough to annihilate all the major populated areas of the globe. About half of those weapons have been dismantled, but their plutonium (as well as most of their highly enriched uranium) "pits" still remain, stacked in ill-guarded warehouses all over Russia.

In their recently published book, One Point Safe (Anchor Books, $23.95), Andrew Cockburn and his wife Leslie summarize their two-year investigation of the Soviet nuclear stockpile. The book makes scary reading.

Cockburn: Russia has become totally criminalized. The resources are being systematically looted. You have a group of fiefdoms, each with its own army, involving both professional criminals and government officials. Yeltsin is not in control.

Igor Rodionov, former minister of defense, told us that the main question in the military is: What is your price? The general who was in charge of dismantling the chemical weapons system in Russia was caught selling the technology for binary nerve gas to Syria. And he got off because he had the right connections.

The custodians of the Russian nuclear weapons arsenal are the 12th GUMO [an elite unit attached to the general staff]. We asked a lieutenant colonel of the 12th GUMO how much he was paid. In theory an officer like that gets less than $200 a month, with months of delay. We asked: Do you get a bonus for your awesome responsibilities? And he said: Oh, yes indeed--4 pounds of sausage a month.

There's no indication that the Russian government has improved security, but they have improved their control of information. They've cracked down on people who talk.

Burns, Wyo. -- Awesome nuclear power still sleeps below the Great Plains in mid-America. Many of the weapons, and their keepers, still remain on watch.

It is easy to forget that the U.S. military still spends about $28 billion a year to keep about 7,500 nuclear warheads ready for use. This is roughly the equivalent of 145,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Bologoye, Russia -- Deep below ground in a hardened nuclear-command bunker, Cmdr. Alexander Kapryushkin of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces has his finger on Russia's nuclear button.

The days of Cold War confrontation are over, but down in the bunker, 34-year-old Kapryushkin still sees America as Russia's enemy. "We can clearly see that the imperialist world, led by the United States, is rapidly advancing toward us," he says with conviction. "Their goal is to destroy our state."

Russia's estimated 6,000 nuclear warheads are no longer aimed at the United States, but they are capable of being re-targeted in a few minutes. An SS-25 missile of the type that Kapryushkin controls from his bunker at the Bologoye rocket base north of Moscow can obliterate an American city just ten minutes after launch. And the ability to launch the missiles lies literally at the fingertips of low-level officers like Kapryushkin. There's no fail-safe system to prevent an accidental launch or keep a rogue commander from triggering nuclear Armageddon.