Islamic Nuke

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<b>LOTASTAAN THREATENED TO GIVE NUKES TO IRAN : FORMER PENTAGON OFFICIALS</b>

<b>WASHINGTON: Two former Pentagon officials have said that Pakistan had warned the United States as long as 14 years ago that transfers of nuclear weapons technology might be made to Iran.

The threat was conveyed in January 1990 from the Pakistani army chief to the administration of President George W Bush’s father, but the information doesn’t appear to have made its way to President Bill Clinton’s administration when it took office three years later, according to interviews by The Associated Press.</b>

“We knew they were up to no good,” said Henry Sokolski, the Pentagon’s top arms control official in 1990.

Henry S Rowen, at the time an assistant defense secretary, said former army chief Gen ® Mirza Aslam Beg issued the warning in a face-to-face meeting in Pakistan.

<b>“Gen Beg said something like, ‘If we don’t get adequate support from the US, then we may be forced to share nuclear technology with Iran’,” said Mr Rowen, now a professor at Stanford University. Gen Beg said he never authorised nuclear transfers to Iran or made threats to the United States. “I have said many times it’s all pure lies,” Beg said in a telephone interview. “Am I a fool, to tell the US what to do or what not to do?”

Mr Sokolski and Mr Rowen said former president George HW Bush’s administration did little to follow up on Gen Beg’s warning. “In hindsight, maybe before or after that they did make some transfers,” Mr Rowen said.</b>

Ashton Carter, an assistant defence secretary from 1993 to 1996, said he doesn’t remember even being told about the problem when he joined the Pentagon.

Mr Rowen said he told Gen Beg that Pakistan would be “in deep trouble” if it gave nuclear weapons to Iran. Rowen said he was surprised by the threat because at the time Americans thought Pakistan’s secular government dominated by Sunni Muslims wouldn’t aid Iran’s Shiite Muslim theocracy.

“There was no particular reason to think it was a bluff, but on the other hand, we didn’t know,” Mr Rowen said.

<b>Former US officials say Pakistan never cracked down on its scientists when former President Clinton and other US officials shared their suspicions with Pakistani leaders.

“The response was, ‘Yes, we’ll examine your concerns, but we don’t believe they are well founded’,” said Robert Einhorn, who was the head arms control official in the State Department from 1999 to 2001.</b>

A decade earlier, President Ronald Reagan’s administration had looked the other way on Pakistan’s nuclear programme, said Stephen P Cohen, a State Department expert on the region from 1985 to 1987. Back then, “they (the Pakistanis) were covering up our involvement in Afghanistan, pretending we played no role in Afghanistan, so they expected us to cover up their role in procuring a weapons system they saw as vital to their survival,” said Mr Cohen, now with the Brookings Institution think tank.

<b>He said American officials scolded Pakistan repeatedly for buying nuclear technology from sources in Europe, Asia and the United States but often those warnings were with “a wink and a nod” that Washington would tolerate those activities. A declassified State Department memo from 1983 says Pakistan clearly had a nuclear weapons programme that that relied on stolen European technology and “energetic procurement activities in various countries.”

Mr Cohen said the US suspected Pakistan was helping Iran in the late 1980s, in part because Pakistan had cooperated with Iran on nuclear matters before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. The evidence, however, was murky, Cohen said.</b> —AP

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