A disturbing report that Pakistan may be pushing forward to have the world’s third-largest Nuclear arsenal with as many as 350 weapons within a decade has prompted the United States to issue a call for restraint.
“We continue to urge all Nuclear-capable states, including Pakistan, to exercise restraint regarding furthering their nuclear capabilities,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
“We’ve just seen this report and we’re digesting it. I’m not going to have anything substantive to offer on the report’s findings. This is something, obviously, that we continue to focus on, I would say consistent with the President’s vision of a world without Nuclear weapons,” Kirby told reporters.
The spokesman’s comment came on a day when two reputed American think tanks — Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center — came out with a 48-page report warning the world on Pakistan’s big Nuclear expansion.
Kirby also disapproved of Pakistan’s loaded comments about its status as a Nuclear power in the wake of the collapse last weekend of its National Security Advisers-level talks with India.
Asked about Pakistani NSA Sartaj Aziz’s remarks flaunting Pakistan’s nuclear might, Kirby said: “What we want to see are the tensions decrease, and speculation about the potential use of Nuclear weapons certainly isn’t doing anything to help decrease tensions, if in fact those comments were made.”
“What really needs to happen (between India and Pakistan) is sitting down, dialogue, cooperation, talking through these things, and trying to work through some meaningful solutions,” he said, adding Secretary of State John Kerry has been repeatedly pushing for a “constructive dialogue” between the two countries.
After Pakistan called off the New Delhi talks, rejecting India’s red line that the only agenda for this round would be terrorism, Aziz attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for projecting India as a regional power and disregarding that Pakistan is a nuclear power in its own right.
“Modi’s India acts as if they are a regional superpower, but we are also a Nuclear-armed country and we know how to defend ourselves,” Aziz had said in comments to the media.
The Carnegie-Stimson report noted that the growth path of Pakistan’s Nuclear arsenal goes well beyond its assurances of credible minimal deterrence, stressing that Pakistan will not become “a normal, Nuclear state by competing with India or by harbouring groups that could spark a war with India”.