By IANS
New York : Rejecting US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that the US and Britain help Pakistan secure its nuclear weapons, President Pervez Musharraf has insisted that the armaments are secure.
“They are very secure. We will ask if we need assistance. Nobody should tell us what to do. And I’d ask anyone who says such things, do you know how our strategic assets are handled, stored and developed?” Musharraf said in an interview with Newsweek.
There was no need either to tell the US government about the security of the nuclear weapons, he said, adding: “Why should we? We have said they are totally under control.”
Reacting to a suggestion by Graham Allison, security and terrorism expert at Harvard, that Pakistan’s weapons must be disbursed for them to have “survivability”, Musharraf said, “He doesn’t know anything – how disbursed they are, and he shouldn’t think that we don’t know these things. We are from the military, we understand how to handle things, whether they need to be disbursed or concentrated.”
Musharraf was also asked by Newsweek’s interviewer, Farid Zakaria, to react to the possibility that were the weapons disbursed, they could fall into wrong hands due to a weak local command structure and that such concern is justified by past episodes in Pakistan.
Pointing out that there was a difference between the past and now, the president said, “Before we became a declared and overt nuclear state, we had to hide everything – everything was covert. Now there is a national command authority. It is the top body, headed by the president and the prime minister, and there are members from the military and the civilian side.”
Musharraf also gave details of the strategic planning division (SPD), the secretarial arm of the national command, responsible for development and employment of the weapons.
“The now-retired [Lt. General Khalid] Kidwai is in charge of the SPD. Then we have army, navy, air force, the strategic force command. If anything happens, indeed it’s a failure of everyone from myself to SPD to the army strategic force command,” he said.
Musharraf agreed that the command structure needed the collusion of several people, up and down the chain, but that was not worrisome. “It’s like an army unit. Can one rifle be taken away from an army unit? Can the bullet of a rifle be taken away from an army unit? I challenge anyone to take a bullet, a weapon, away from an army unit?” he said.
Musharraf reiterated that he was opposed to the idea of the US launching CIA operations in Pakistan with or without Islamabad’s approval to hit Al Qaeda targets.
“We are totally in cooperation on the intelligence side. But we are totally against [a military operation]. We are a sovereign country. We will ask for assistance from outsiders. They won’t impose their will on us,” he said.