For weeks now new evidence has been mounting about nuclear weapons proliferation from and by Pakistan to North Korea, Iran, Libya, and possibly other countries. This does not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Pakistan’s nuclear policies over the years. After all, no country of its capabilities can afford to run two parallel programmes for nuclear weapons to make a plutonium as well as an uranium-based bomb, while also pursuing two parallel programmes for ballistic missiles separately for those of China-origin and the ones from North Korea. But this is exactly what they have been doing for two decades. And obviously there have to be costs. Besides this, the US needs to recognise the difference between how India and Pakistan deal with nuclear weapons and technology rather than slide into an India-Pakistan hyphenation.Pakistan must believe the world to be either really naive, or they are so confident of being able to confuse it, that they have adopted a public stance that only a handful of “rogue” nuclear scientists were responsible for transferring what the UN watchdog agency for nuclear non-proliferations has treated as the biggest challenge to nuclear non-proliferation efforts in decades. The top military leadership, especially General Pervez Musharraf, have been at pains to repeatedly assert that Pakistan’s nuclear weapon programme has been, and is, tightly controlled. It has been no secret that that all aspects of the nuclear programme have been completely under the army’s control. Making a few scientists into scapegoats may make it easier for the US to turn the proverbial blind eye on Pakistan, but would not alter the reality of proliferation and its accompanying risks.Pakistan’s status as a frontline state for the US would no doubt impact on how far it would go in pursuit of its non-proliferation policy in the present case. In the eighties the US had side-stepped its policy, disregarding its clandestine nuclear programme after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Its numerous post-1990 sanctions for Pakistani missile proliferation rarely lasted two years with Islamabad continuing to press its programmes further without any serious disruption. This in a way also explains the logic of parallel programmes for nuclear bomb and missile delivery systems. It should not come as a surprise to anybody, therefore, to see the White House actually playing down the massive proliferation from Pakistan by simply stating that this is “part of the past, and the past is past”.
