Pakistan Nuclear Proliferation - 22 Jan 2004

[Rudradev]

AJay: think Ngo Dinh Diem. In the grand scheme of things, Mush and his political career will be far more short-lived than even Noriega, leave alone Saddam.

[SSridhar]

Eric Margolis trying to bale-out TSP.

[Umrao]

Mushy must stay, then he will be lightening rod for the Jihadis while he is made to arrest all the ISI Santists working for KRL etc and also good for unkils GUBO skills.

Uncle busy chela busy, we busy with elections..

[Rich]

Originally posted by Mani T.:

Originally posted by narayanan:
[qb]
This week, Pakistani opposition figures told rediff.com that Khan, who is compared by his well wishers to Albert Einstein

<img src="http://india-forum.com/forums/html/emoticons/pakee.gif" alt="" /> ?

[Rich]

Originally posted by muddur:
Headline: A trap is laid for Pakistan - By Palvasha von Hassell -- Detail Story

What is to be made of Pakistan’s latest problem? Having strongly denied any transfer of technology between North Korea and Pakistan last year, the government of Pakistan has now been forced by the IAEA and American pressure to clamp down on its nuclear scientists for having possibly assisted not only North Korea through barter transactions, but also Iran and Libya in acquiring nuclear weapons. As if this weren’t bad enough, American authorities are investigating the case of an Israeli man charged with having tried to illegally export trigger devices from the US that can be used to detonate nuclear devices to Pakistan. This throws up some questions about the nature, weight and timing of the allegations that are worth going into.

Okay, who the fik is Palvasha von Hassell?

Also, did Al quolin really say this?:

Colin Powell has publicly said that the world should not worry about the "little bit of proliferation" on the sub-continent.

[jrjrao]

Pakistan's nuclear hero throws open Pandora's box
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1135937,00.html

While on a tour of eight Asian countries in the summer of 2002, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, arrived in Islamabad with a special request.

Mr Powell asked Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, to arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan, the mastermind of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme and a hero in the country. His demand was extraordinary but so were the allegations which went with it.

He said Mr Khan needed to be questioned over the alleged secret trading of Pakistan's nuclear technology to North Korea and he had evidence.

An American spy satellite had recorded images of a Pakistani transport plane being loaded with missile parts in North Korea. It was, the US believed, part of a barter deal trading Pakistani nuclear know-how for missiles.

According to sources in Washington, Mr Powell offered Gen Musharraf assistance for an inquiry into Mr Khan's activities. The Guardian has learned that money, equipment and lie detectors for interrogations would be made available. Gen Musharraf rejected the overture but the case against Mr Khan has been building up inexorably since.

Gary Milhollin, head of the Wilson Project, a counter-proliferation group, said: "In all three places [North Korea, Iran and Libya], it's the same designs and technology. It was pilfered by A Q Khan. It's old but it works. The Pakistanis used it to make 30 bombs."

It remains unclear how tainted Gen Musharraf's government is. The political imperative for both Islamabad and Washington is to maintain that Pakistan's role was limited to that of a few rogue scientists acting without state authorisation and that in any case the nuclear deals preceded Gen Musharraf's takeover in 1999 and have been suppressed since then.

The latter claim is called into question by the alleged sighting of the Pakistani plane in North Korea in 2002 and by some of the supplies to Libya which have taken place since 1999. Because of the Pakistani leader's importance to the Americans in the war on terror, <u>"there is," says one of the diplomats, "a high need to protect Musharraf. That's politics. Musharraf may not have wanted to know what was going on for reasons of plausible deniability". </u>

But even if the Pakistani channels are being closed down and Gen Musharraf escapes international censure and survives the domestic fallout, the damage may well already be done.
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