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To: Eashoa' M'sheekha who wrote (11757)	5/17/1998 9:48:00 AM
From: Alex	Respond to of 116893

Pakistan Ups the Nuclear Stakes Ready to Deploy Chinese-made M-11 Missiles Astrologers, not intelligence agencies, knew about tests ASIA'S nuclear arms race faces the prospect of a major escalation this week, with Pakistan threatening to respond to last week's Indian tests by deploying new batteries of Chinese-made missiles. The move would accompany strong hints from the Pakistani authorities yesterday that Islamabad looks set to ignore entreaties from world powers and detonate its own nuclear device. Pakistan's Foreign Secretary, Shamshad Ahmad, said yesterday that his country would determine the time and date of its "response". Throughout the week, Pakistan ministers have made it fairly clear that any "response" would be nuclear - while falling short of actually saying so. Diplomats in Islamabad now believe that Pakistan is "90 per cent certain" to test a nuclear device within the next three months. While the world's intelligence agencies attempt to monitor the probable site of Pakistan's test, the country's military high command plans to issue a further challenge to its giant neighbour by priming Chinese-made M-11 missiles. With the United States exerting intense pressure on Pakistan not to test, news of the deployment will come as a serious blow to Washington's attempts to stop India, Pakistan and China expanding their nuclear arsenals. The Pakistani missiles, previously reported to be lying in crates on the tarmac of an airbase near Rawalpindi, are now believed to have been assembled and awaiting deployment. In any conflict the M-11s could be used in the same way as Iraqi Scuds during the Gulf war - highly mobile, hidden by day and usually emerging only at night - except that these are designed to carry nuclear warheads. Deploying the Chinese missiles would be at least as serious a development as a full-scale nuclear test, showing that the Pakistanis had moved significantly closer to the goal of a missile-delivered nuclear strikeforce. While India's nuclear planners claimed that last week's tests would help to produce warheads small enough to fit on rockets, China is believed already to have given Pakistan blueprints for its own tried and tested nuclear devices. Western experts have previously assumed that neither India nor Pakistan had the technology to produce their own nuclear missiles and, in the event of war, would rely on more traditional delivery systems, such as aircraft. Now they are questioning that orthodoxy, convinced that one or both of the two could now build bombs small enough to form a missile warhead. Pakistan's access to "off-the-shelf" technology, most of it from China, has allowed it to hold its own against India, which has done much of the work required to produce a nuclear bomb itself. "In many ways the Pakistan programme is more sophisticated," said Prof Gary Milhollen of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. He said: "The end result is more effective and smaller, about the size of a soccer ball." Pakistan's recently-tested Ghauri missile was another example of foreign technology, in this case North Korean, closing the gap with India. With a range of about 1,000 miles the new missile, named after a medieval Muslim conqueror of India, would be able to strike at much of northern India and gives Pakistan rough parity with its much larger neighbour. Western intelligence services, already embarrassed by their failure to spot India's preparations for last week's nuclear tests, are redoubling efforts to penetrate the sub-continent's top-secret research institutes and nuclear power reactors. Whatever the two countries' technical potential, both now seem to have advanced from what in nuclear parlance is known as "near-ready" to "ready" status. India and Pakistan had been described as being at the "screwdriver level" of nuclear powers: they were both one turn of a screw away from actually assembling viable nuclear devices. But optimists believe that the escalating nuclear arms race may actually deter conflict between India and Pakistan, just as the US and the Soviet Union never used their formidable arsenals during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the West regards the Indo-Pakistan border as the world's most likely theatre of nuclear war. With so much attention focused on the area, the failure of Western intelligence to predict the Indian tests is all the more embarrassing. Perhaps the CIA and other intelligence services should pay more attention to India's astrologers, who, it emerged last week, were some of the only people outside the secretive military establishment to know of the forthcoming tests. They were consulted as to what the most auspicious date for the tests would be. * President Clinton's diplomatic mission left Islamabad yesterday, with no assurances that Pakistan will not detonate a nuclear device, writes Julian West. Gohar Ayub, a foreign minister, said the decision is being deferred until after this weekend's G8 summit, where Pakistan hopes to see the emergence of a united front against India. The London Telegraph, May 17, 1998