Author: Shyam Bhatia and Tom Walker
Publication: The Sunday Times,
UK
Date: May 12, 2002
The Pakistani army mobilised its
nuclear arsenal against India in 1999 without the knowledge of its prime
minister, a senior White House adviser at the time has disclosed.
As the Indian army pushed the Pakistani
forces back across the so-called ''line of control'' dividing the disputed
territory of Kashmir, Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani prime minister,
asked for American intervention and flew to Washington.
In a paper to be published shortly
by the University of Pennsylvania, Bruce Riedel, who was a senior adviser
to 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.
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,
Bombay, would kill between 150,000 and 850,000 alone''.
He told Clinton not to reveal his
intelligence hand in the opening talks with Sharif, in which the president
handed the prime minister 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.
''The president reminded Sharif
how close the US and Soviet Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over
Cuba. Did Sharif realise that if even one bomb was dropped . .. Sharif
finished his sentence and said it would be a catastrophe.''
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
Organisation, 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.
Pakistan's uranium bombs are designed
to be dropped by plane or carried by Ghauri missiles, while smaller plutonium
warheads can be attached to Chinese-made M-11 missiles.
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.
If, as Riedel implies, Sharif was
kept in the dark about his 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.
A recent report by the CIA, Global
Trends 2015, predicts 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 to 100.
Riedel, a visiting member of the
Royal College of Defence Studies in London, said that during the same meeting
Clinton upbraided Sharif for his failure to rein in Bin Laden, who was
known to be colluding with the Taliban with the connivance of the Pakistani
intelligence service.
