WASHINGTON: An American thinktank has raised the bogey of a runaway Indian nuclear weapons programme even as a former CIA analyst has blasted the United States for giving a free pass to Pakistan, without whose help he says Iran and North Korea would not have gone down the nuclear route.
The new reports come amid a fresh bout of nuclear sabre-rattling against India by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was reported as saying a fourth war between the two nuclear powers could take place if the Kashmir issue was not resolved, inviting a sulfurous response from the usually placid Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh who said Pakistan "will never win a war in my lifetime."
The exchanges are perfect grist for Washington's thinktank mills, some of which make a living from dire, and often exaggerated and tendentious projections, about a nuclear Armageddon in the region. On Wednesday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reported that a second gas centrifuge facility it suspected of being constructed at theRare Materials Plant (RMP) near Mysore, India, "could significantly increase India's ability to produce highly enriched uranium for military purposes, including more powerful nuclear weapons."
ISIS' conjecture was not based on any hard intelligence about centrifuges or their output at the plant, but merely on the pace and size of building construction at the RMP complex. The report spoke of commercial satellite images showing the doubling in the size of a building under construction and speculated, "If this new facility is indeed a new centrifuge plant, it is plausible to assume that it will house a much greater number of centrifuges."
"Consequently, India could have more than doubled its enrichment capacity, if the original building continues to function as an enrichment plant. If not, the new building would still represent a net growth in India's enrichment capacity," it added.
The Indian nuclear community typically treats such reports with contempt and derision, noting that the principal author of the report, David Albright, who campaigned against the US-India nuclear deal, has a long history of making exaggerated and conflated claims about India's nuclear programme.
A former UN weapons inspector, Albright was also among the proliferation experts who were hopelessly wrong about WMDs in Iraq. "This is the same crowd that was asleep on the watch when Pakistan went nuclear and the US administration and Congress winked at it," a senior Indian government official once told this correspondent during a discussion on the issue.
Indeed, Washington's so-called nuclear non-proliferation pashas were given a rude reminder of their duplicity and perfidy in the past when a former CIA analyst who blew the whistle on Pakistan crossing the nuclear threshold in the late 1980s resurfaced this week. The analyst, Richard Barlow, told Newsweek magazine how he was marginalized and hounded out of the government for exposing both Islamabad and Washington, which chose to wink at Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme because of its obsession with communism, which required enlisting Islamabad to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
"If they (the United States) had busted those [Pakistani] networks, Iran would have no nuclear programme, North Korea wouldn't have a uranium bomb, and Pakistan wouldn't have over a hundred nuclear weapons they are driving around in vans to hide from us," Barlow said, in a vivid account of the US-Pakistan shenanigans.
In interviews with this correspondent in the 1990s, Barlow described how his testimony in Congress on Pakistan's nuclearization was suppressed, and his life wrecked because he challenged the perfidy of the Washington establishment. "They painted me out as a psychotic and destroyed my career," Barlow said in a 1997 interview from Santa Fe, where he was rebuilding his life after working as a $6 an hour tour guide. According to the latest Newsweek account, Barlow now wanders the mountains from Montana to Arizona in his motorhome, hunting and fishing with his three dogs, haunted by the idea of what might have been.
"I used to hunt Pakistanis," he says. "Now I hunt birds." TOI
The new reports come amid a fresh bout of nuclear sabre-rattling against India by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was reported as saying a fourth war between the two nuclear powers could take place if the Kashmir issue was not resolved, inviting a sulfurous response from the usually placid Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh who said Pakistan "will never win a war in my lifetime."
The exchanges are perfect grist for Washington's thinktank mills, some of which make a living from dire, and often exaggerated and tendentious projections, about a nuclear Armageddon in the region. On Wednesday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reported that a second gas centrifuge facility it suspected of being constructed at theRare Materials Plant (RMP) near Mysore, India, "could significantly increase India's ability to produce highly enriched uranium for military purposes, including more powerful nuclear weapons."
ISIS' conjecture was not based on any hard intelligence about centrifuges or their output at the plant, but merely on the pace and size of building construction at the RMP complex. The report spoke of commercial satellite images showing the doubling in the size of a building under construction and speculated, "If this new facility is indeed a new centrifuge plant, it is plausible to assume that it will house a much greater number of centrifuges."
"Consequently, India could have more than doubled its enrichment capacity, if the original building continues to function as an enrichment plant. If not, the new building would still represent a net growth in India's enrichment capacity," it added.
The Indian nuclear community typically treats such reports with contempt and derision, noting that the principal author of the report, David Albright, who campaigned against the US-India nuclear deal, has a long history of making exaggerated and conflated claims about India's nuclear programme.
A former UN weapons inspector, Albright was also among the proliferation experts who were hopelessly wrong about WMDs in Iraq. "This is the same crowd that was asleep on the watch when Pakistan went nuclear and the US administration and Congress winked at it," a senior Indian government official once told this correspondent during a discussion on the issue.
Indeed, Washington's so-called nuclear non-proliferation pashas were given a rude reminder of their duplicity and perfidy in the past when a former CIA analyst who blew the whistle on Pakistan crossing the nuclear threshold in the late 1980s resurfaced this week. The analyst, Richard Barlow, told Newsweek magazine how he was marginalized and hounded out of the government for exposing both Islamabad and Washington, which chose to wink at Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme because of its obsession with communism, which required enlisting Islamabad to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
"If they (the United States) had busted those [Pakistani] networks, Iran would have no nuclear programme, North Korea wouldn't have a uranium bomb, and Pakistan wouldn't have over a hundred nuclear weapons they are driving around in vans to hide from us," Barlow said, in a vivid account of the US-Pakistan shenanigans.
In interviews with this correspondent in the 1990s, Barlow described how his testimony in Congress on Pakistan's nuclearization was suppressed, and his life wrecked because he challenged the perfidy of the Washington establishment. "They painted me out as a psychotic and destroyed my career," Barlow said in a 1997 interview from Santa Fe, where he was rebuilding his life after working as a $6 an hour tour guide. According to the latest Newsweek account, Barlow now wanders the mountains from Montana to Arizona in his motorhome, hunting and fishing with his three dogs, haunted by the idea of what might have been.
"I used to hunt Pakistanis," he says. "Now I hunt birds." TOI
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