The United States wants to create a crisis in Pakistan and eventually seize the county’s nuclear weapons, a media report said.
NBC News reported that US military and intelligence operatives are debating, strategising, gaming, and potentially even conducting drills on entering Pakistan and seizing the nation’s nuclear weapons during the crisis. The former White House deputy counter-terrorism director, Roger Cressey, confirmed the planning and termed the scheme as “the highest priorities of the US intelligence community and the White House”.
He disclosed that the planned operation would be to “snatch and grab” the nuclear weapons and that US Special Forces would try to dismantle or eliminate them. A US Congressional Research Service report debated the case and justified it, claiming that Pakistan has to be deprived of its 90-110 nuclear weapons. Princeton University Pakistani academic Zia Mian disclosed that the CIA and US defence department frequently conducted preparatory exercises to snatch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. “They’ve exercised attacking Iran, hence Pakistan should be ready for such an episode,” he said.
In his 2009 book Defusing Armageddon, intelligence scholar Jeffrey T. Richelson wrote that the then US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, five years ago outlined two kinds of situations: “elimination operations” and “interdiction operations” by the US to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. He said the operations’ aim was to be able to locate, secure, disable and/or destroy Pakistani nuclear weapons. According to the New York Times, American intelligence assessments have concluded that Pakistan has steadily expanded its nuclear arsenal since President Barack Obama came to office in the US, and that it is building capability to surge ahead in the production of nuclear-weapons material, putting it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth-largest nuclear weapons power.
For the Obama administration, the assessment poses a direct challenge to a central element of the US President’s national security strategy: the reduction of nuclear stockpiles around the world.
Pakistan’s determination to add considerably to its arsenal — mostly to deter India — has also become yet another irritant in its often testy relationship with Washington, particularly as Pakistan seeks to block Mr Obama’s renewed efforts to negotiate a global treaty that would ban the production of new nuclear material.