Securing Pakistan's nukes - PART-I.

The current global geopolitical and geostrategic environments are on the boil. The US is stridently on the move to reassert and stamp its pre-eminence and unchallengeable hegemony worldwide. It has enmeshed Russia in Ukraine/Europe and is embroiling China in the Indo-Pacific and the Himalayas.

The European strategic environment has been further vitiated by Russia's assertion that it will not be averse to using (tactical?) nuclear warheads against Ukraine. The US-led West has threatened Russia unabashedly with untold devastation (retaliatory nuclear strikes?) were it to exercise such an abominable option.

Of late, both belligerents have claimed that the other was preparing 'dirty bombs' for use in false flag operations against the other. The strategic environment in Europe is thus threatening to degenerate fast into the nuclear domain. Ominously, President Joe Biden dragged South Asia into the nuclear debate too by characterising Pakistan as a dangerous nuclear weapon state that lacked cohesion. Why at this point in time? Whatever POTUS says is never without meaning, import or implication!

On independence Ukraine held one-third of the erstwhile USSR's nuclear arsenal including ICBMs, heavy bombers, 1700 warheads, command and control infrastructure etc. Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the US, UK and Russia persuaded it to give up all of its nuclear arsenal and vowed to guarantee its safety and territorial integrity (Geopolitics sans morality, by this scribe, The Nation, 12 March 2022).

Ukraine concurred then and now must be roundly ruing and repenting its decision to 'denuclearise itself'. Had it held on to its nuclear arsenal it would have never met this horrendous fate. It could have easily deterred Russia's military adventure against it and simultaneously warded off pressures from NATO to join it. It could have genuinely retained and upheld its independence, liberty and freedom of action.

Now, as the US-led West continues to stoke the war, it finds a third of its territory under Russian occupation, a large part of its population as refugees, its industry and economy more or less destroyed. Yet, the use of nuclear weapons/dirty bombs is still being contemplated over its territories and peoples.

Pakistan must critically analyse the Ukraine war, draw the relevant deductions and lessons while focusing on Ukraine's crucial and almost fatal inability to deter this war.

Pakistan's needs for a nuclear deterrent stem from the very adverse...