Pakistan Rush To Build Up Uranium Stocks
May 29, 2002
Pakistan may have more warheads than previously thought as scientists have been working three shifts for three years
LONDON - Pakistani scientists have been working secretly round the clock for the past three years to accelerate production of weapons-grade uranium, press reports said suggesting that Islamabad may have more nuclear warheads than previously believed.
The Times newspaper quoted a leading Pakistani nuclear physicist, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy of Quaid-e-Azam university in Islamabad, to have said there were clear indications that nuclear warheads were in place on missiles.
| Warheads: |
Pakistan
|
India
|
|
48
|
35
|
|
| SRBM (less than 1,000 km range): |
110
|
100
|
| MRBM (1,000-3,000 km range): |
12
|
20
|
| SRBM = Short-Range Ballistic Missile MRBM = Medium-Range Ballistic Missile |
||
We are much closer to a nuclear confrontation with India than at any other time,' he warned.
The professor said scientists had been working in three shifts over the past three years.
His disclosure raised the possibility that Pakistan could assemble more nuclear warheads than the estimated 30 to 50 it is generally thought to have.
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and The Heritage Foundation, however, Pakistan has 48 warheads while India has 35.
Each warhead would have the same explosive power as the atomic bomb dropped over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.
Tensions between India and Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir have reached boiling point, with both countries having mobilised more than one million troops.
Pakistan has test-fired several nuclear-capable missiles in the past five days.
It was a back-to-back series of bomb tests in 1998 that announced to the world that Pakistan and India, enemies in three wars since 1947, were now both nuclear powers.
India has since declared a policy of no first use of atomic weapons, but Pakistan, whose army is half the size of India's, has not forsworn 'going nuclear' first in a war.
'We have to have the option, otherwise there would be no deterrence,' former Foreign Ministry official Khalid Ahmed told The Guardian.
'This is Pakistan's trump card,' Indian analyst Miriam Rajkumar at Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.
Those who follow the Asian powers' emerging strategies however doubt they will come to nuclear blows. But ultimate weapons force consideration of ultimate scenarios, and of miscalculation even by the coolest heads.
Last week Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rallied his troops with words of war, urging them to prepare 'for a decisive victory against the enemy'.
'Vajpayee could drive the Pakistanis up the wall' and into threatening a nuclear strike, said United States nuclear-proliferation specialist David Albright.
'The Pakistanis know they're outgunned in conventional forces and weapons.'
Mr Albright said that as the crisis deepened, 'I think both may be mounting warheads now'.
Pakistani physicist Zia Mian of Princeton University said the scenario likeliest to provoke a Pakistani nuclear strike would be a 'last stand' in which national survival is threatened by a deep Indian military thrust or by a strangling naval blockade. --AFP, AP
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