India is trolling Pakistan with a giant flag

The Indian government has hoisted its national flag up a 360ft pole at its border with Pakistan.

The tricolour flag at Attari is the tallest in India and can be seen clearly from the neighbouring country. And at 120ft x 80ft it's also India's biggest flag. It was raised at a ceremony attended by India's local government minister Anil Joshi.

India Today reported that the new flag is tall enough to be seen from nearby Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city. And the Pakistani government is reportedly paranoid that the Indians will use the flag to spy on them, perhaps by putting a covert camera at the top of the pole. They accused the Indians of breaching international treaties.

India-Pakistan relations are notoriously sour. The pair, both nuclear powers, have been locked in territorial disputes – most notably around Kashmir – ever since the violent Partition of India in 1947 by the British Empire, which split them into independent nations.

There have long been fears that the two countries would someday have a nuclear war.

Pakistan has between 100 and 130 warheads to India's 90 to 110. A 2006 study by climatologists estimated that if India and Pakistan went to war and used 50 nuclear bombs – each as powerful as the weapons that hit Hiroshima in 1945 – at least 20 million would be killed in the first week from the blast and after-effects.

They also found that "the firestorms generated by these nuclear explosions would loft about 5m tons of black soot high into the atmosphere. The soot would block out sunlight, dropping surface temperatures across the planet by an average of 1.3 degrees Celsius."

But let's hope it doesn't come to that over a massive flag.