The
Pakistani army mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India in
1999 - during the Kargil conflictwithout the knowledge of its
prime minister Nawaz Sharif, The Sunday Times reported
quoting a senior White House adviser at that time.
In a paper to be published shortly by the university of
Pennsylvania, Bruce Riedel, who was a senior adviser to then
US president Bill Clinton on India and Pakistan, recalls how
the president was told that he faced the most important
foreign policy meeting of his career.
"There was disturbing information about Pakistan preparing
its nuclear arsenal," Riedel writes. According to the report,
Riedel and other aides feared that India and Pakistan were
heading for a "deadly descent into full-scale conflict, with a
danger of nuclear cataclysm".
They were also concerned about Osama bin Laden's growing
influence in the region. Intelligence experts had told Riedel
that the flight times of missiles fired by either side would
be as little as three minutes and that "a Pakistani strike on
just one Indian city, Mumbai, would kill between 150,000 and
850,000 alone".
Riedel, the newspaper said, told Clinton not to reveal his
intelligence hand in the opening talks with Sharif, in which
the president handed the premier a cartoon that showed
Pakistan and India firing nuclear missiles at one another.
But in a second discussion, at which Riedel was the only
other person present, "Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how
advanced the threat of nuclear war really was. Did Sharif know
his military was preparing their missiles?" he writes.
While Clinton reminded Sharif how close the US and Soviet
Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over Cuba, Sharif agreed
it would be a catastrophe even if a single bomb was dropped.
Riedel does not state in the paper how the Americans gathered
their intelligence, nor what the mobilisation entailed. But
John Pike, director of the Washington-based Global Security
Oganisation, said intelligence channels could have become
aware of the trucks that carry Pakistan's nuclear missiles
being moved from their bases at Sargodha, near Rawalpindi.
"One scenario is that missile trucks were picked up parked
in a convoy," he said.
Clinton drove home the advantage that the intelligence coup
had given him, Riedel recalls. "Did Sharif order the Pakistani
nuclear missile force to prepare for action," the prime
minister was asked. "Did he realise how crazy that was?"
Riedel describes how an "exhausted" Sharif "denied he had
ordered the preparation and said he was against that, but
worried for his life back in Pakistan".
Soon afterwards Sharif, who now lives in exile in Saudi
Arabia, signed a document agreeing to pull back his forces
from Kargil. If, as Riedel implies, Sharif was kept in the
dark about this nuclear programme, he suffered a similar
embarrassment to that of his predecessor, Benazir Bhutto, who
is said to have asked the CIA for a briefing on Islamabad's
nuclear capability because that privilege was denied to her by
her own generals.
According to the newspaper, a recent report by the
CIAGlobal Trends 2015predicts that the threat of nuclear war
will remain a serious regional issue for the next 15 years. By
next year Pakistan is thought likely to have between 50 and 75
nuclear warheads, while India will have between 75 and 100,
the report said.
