Pakistan warns US of Asia arms race

Pakistan on Aug. 2 warned that the groundbreaking civil nuclear cooperation agreement between the US and India risked triggering an arms race in south Asia, in a statement likely to inflame already tense relations with Washington. The country's National Command Authority–a committee of top generals, government officials and nuclear scientists chaired by President Pervez Musharraf–warned that the deal would upset the strategic balance in the region. The statement said that the US-India deal would have "implications on strategic stability" because it would "enable India to produce significant quantities of fissile material and nuclear weapons from unsafeguarded nuclear reactors." "Strategic stability in south Asia and the global non-proliferation regime would have been better served if the US had considered a package approach for Pakistan and India… with a view to preventing a nuclear arms race in the region," it added. US officials say Islamabad's objections are based on a fundamental misreading of last week's deal, which places India's nuclear reprocessing facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. US officials are also careful to distinguish between the nuclear non-proliferation record of India, which they consider to be good, and Pakistan, which is seen as one of the worst proliferators. "We are not anticipating in any way, shape or form a similar deal for any other country," Nick Burns, the US undersecretary of state, who led the US negotiations with India, said after the deal was announced last Friday. "Obviously Pakistan has a past in terms of nuclear proliferation which, with the AQ Khan network, was very troubling. India has a very different past." The US remains concerned over the extent of the operation overseen by Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's one-time chief nuclear scientist, who in 2004 publicly admitted that he had traded nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea. Pakistan has consistently objected to being excluded from the special deal that Washington is offering India, but never warned so starkly of a renewed arms race between the two nuclear powers, who have fought three wars since 1947. The deal promises to end more than three decades of isolation for the Indian nuclear program, notwithstanding New Delhi's long-standing refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). The US has refused to extend the same nuclear cooperation to Pakistan. President Bush said during his visit to south Asia in March 2006 that the two countries had "different needs and different histories." Both India and Pakistan developed their nuclear weapons as non-signatories to the NPT, which recognized as nuclear weapons states only the five countries that had detonated devices before 1967. Washington is seeking to persuade the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 44-country body that regulates trade in nuclear commerce, to make an exception to the NPT by allowing the sale of fissile fuel and technology to India under IAEA safeguards. Pakistan argues that India will be free to allocate more of its scarce indigenous fissile fuel to its strategic weapons program once the majority of its civilian or electricity-producing nuclear reactors are able to import uranium from overseas. Analysts expect the burgeoning Indo-US relationship to push Pakistan into seeking even closer ties with China. Khurshid Kasuri, foreign minister, told the FT following Bush's visit that Pakistanis regarded China as a more reliable ally than the US. Experts believe Pakistan will seek assistance from China, which has already helped with the development of the nuclear facility at Chashma in the Pakistani province of Punjab.