POLITICS-PAKISTAN: Domestic Pressure Forces Nuclear Tests

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nasim Zehra

ISLAMABAD, May 28 1998 (IPS) - Two weeks after India blasted its way into the exclusive nuclear club, Pakistan showed off its own capability to the world by detonating at least five nuclear devices on Thursday.

The underground tests conducted in the southwestern region of Baluchistan, close to the border with Iran and Afghanistan, were triggered by security concerns in Pakistan following the Indian testing, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in a televised address.

Addressing the nation within hours of the underground tests, he said that Islamabad weighed the pros and cons of the effect of the tests by India and decided that since it had forever changed the “equilibrium” in the region, Pakistan had no other option but to go ahead with the tests.

“We did not want to participate in the nuclear race … We wanted that our countries should not start a nuclear arms race … but India has changed the equilibrium in the region,” he said.

Sharif’s government has been under tremendous domestic pressure to reply to the challenge from arch-rival India after it had conducted a series of five tests over two days, on May 11 and 13 that altered the power equation in the region.

India’s new weaponised nuclear status was seen here as directly threatening Pakistan’s security, government officials told the international community which urged Islamabad to exercise restraint, and sought to sweeten the offer with offers of bigger aid packages and financial assistance.

Obviously that was not tempting enough for the government. Prime Minister Sharif in his address reproached the international community for not condemning India strongly enough, and not giving Pakistan the assurance it was seeking about its own security.

Pakistan, according to officials, has watched with alarm the aggressive posturing by the two-month-old right-wing Hindu government in New Delhi about its intention to retake ‘Azad’ (free) Kashmir (an area called Pakistan Occupied Kashmir by India), a sensitive issue here.

The disputed state has been a bone of contention between the two countries for 50 years, ever since the subcontinent was divided to create Pakistan, and the cause of two of the three wars the two neighbours have fought, the last in 1971.

Pakistan has been demanding a referendum by all Kashmiris to decide whether a united Kashmir should join Pakistan or India, a demand that New Delhi will have nothing to do with.

Their intransigence has pushed the two into an arms race which with India’s nuclearisation earlier this month meant that it was inevitable that Pakistan would match it with its own. As one commentator in Islamabad said: “Pakistan’s strategic and defense needs demanded that it opts for a nuclear Pakistan.”

“At a time when India had established a proven capability for a weaponised nuclear programme catering to different delivery systems, no response from Pakistan would have been militarily, strategically and politically an illogical response,” the commentator said.

The government’s decision to test took into consideration only domestic interest. The threat of economic sanctions and loss of foreign aid, that the international community used to punish India, were clearly not reason enough for Pakistan to hold back.

Prime Minister Sharif called on Pakistanis to tighten their belts and prepare for an “austerity package” that the government would have to announce in the changed situation.

The likely freezing of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans to Pakistan is likely to widen its trade deficit, raise debt servicing burdens and lower foreign exchange reserves. Pakistan will have to turn to higher-rate borrowing from commercial banks.

Anti-nuclearists in Pakistan had urged the government not to test because the economy would not be able to absorb the sanctions shock. Even without conducting a nuclear test, Pakistan can retain the nuclear option, they argued.

Neither Pakistan nor India, which have been nuclear threshold states for decades, have signed either the Nuclear Non- proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), saying the other was not a signatory.

The CTBT binds signatories not to carry out nuclear weapons tests, and also prohibits and prevents any nuclear explosion at places under its jurisdiction or control.

But Pakistani hawks have always been dismissive of the

arguments for signing, saying that these international laws are no guarantee against a situation in which nuclearists gang up against a country, like the time when Israeli fighters destroyed Iraq’s nuclear complex just outside Baghdad in 1981.

Over the last two weeks, with the changed situation after India’s overt weaponised nuclear programme, the deterrence value of Pakistan’s nuclear programme had drastically reduced, they argued, urging the government to test.

Now, Pakistani commentators say that if Pakistan had not gone ahead with its five nuclear tests to match the Indian challenge, then it might have been forced by international pressure to give up its nuclear option and sign the CTBT.