‘US offered $5bn to refrain from N-tests’

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The US had offered Pakistan $5 billion asking it to refrain from conducting tit-for-tat nuclear tests in response to India’s Pokhran explosions in 1998 or else it warned of economic sanctions, the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif claimed on Friday.
Addressing a function here to mark “Youm-e-Takbir” or the 12th anniversary of nuclear tests conducted by Pakistan on May 28 in 1998, Mr Sharif said that the entire nation was united in favour of the nuclear tests.
Mr Sharif said the then US President Bill Clinton had offered him either to accept a package of $5 billion or face economic sanctions over nuclear tests. “I told him (Clinton) that we are not among those people who are sold for a few dollars,” Pakistani media quoted him as saying at the function.
Mr Sharif, also PML-N chief, said that Mushahid Hussain, who was the information minister at the time, was the first person who advised to go ahead with the nuclear tests in response to the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. The former Prime Minister said that it was the democratic government that took this bold decision.
“No dictator would have gone that far,” he said, referring to former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who ousted him in a bloodless coup in 1999 and ruled for nine years.