Pak planned to nuke India during Kargil: Report

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>Title: Pak planned to nuke India during Kargil: Report

>Author: PTI >Publication: Times of India >May 12, 2002

>URL:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Articleshow.asp?art_id=9669321 >

>LONDON: Pakistan army had mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India during

the Kargil war in 1999, without the knowledge of its Prime Minister Nawaz

Sharif, The Sunday Times reported on Sunday 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 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. > >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 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. > >According to the newspaper,

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 and 100, the report said. >

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