Pakistan agencies ‘caught unawares’ by India's nuke tests: AQ Khan

[sonicboom]

Pakistan agencies ‘caught unawares’ by India's nuke tests: AQ Khan

Wednesday, Dec 8, 2010, 17:39 IST


Pakistan's intelligence agencies were "caught unawares" by a series of India's nuclear tests in May 1998 despite claims of having informants in "almost every house" near the test site at Pokhran, Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan has said.

In a column written in The News daily, Khan said he had "voiced my criticism of the performance of our intelligence agencies" when then premier Nawaz Sharif held a meeting of the defence committee of the Cabinet on May 13, 1998 to discuss Pakistan's options in the wake of India's first three nuclear tests two days earlier.

"Despite their claims of having informants in almost every house in Pokhran, and their promises that they would inform us if India made any preparations for tests, we were caught unawares," Khan wrote in the piece titled "Intelligence agencies and law."

"If we had had as little as 10 days' notice, we could have prepared a matching response and could have detonated our devices in as little as an hour," he wrote.

During the meeting on May 13, 1998, Khan said he, then foreign minister Gauhar Ayub Khan and then foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmed Khan were "quite vocal" about conducting nuclear tests.




Pakistan agencies ‘caught unawares’ by India's nuke tests: AQ Khan - India - DNA