‘Pak wanted to nuke India during Kargil, Clinton held Sharif back’

The Pakistani Army mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India in 1999 — during the Kargil conflict — with the full knowledge of i...

The Pakistani Army mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India in 1999 — during the Kargil conflict — with the full knowledge of its then prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the Sunday Times reported today, quoting a 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 the 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.

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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’’. 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. 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.

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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.