A top Pakistani Foreign Ministry official visiting the U.S. has issued his government`s first formal acknowledgement that it has the capacity for making an atomic bomb.
But the official, Foreign Secretary Shahryar Khan, insisted that Pakistan had not built such a bomb and did not intend to, and that it would not transfer the nuclear technology it has developed to any other country.
”There was a capability in 1989 when the present government came to power, and that means we could have moved forward in an unwise direction,”
Khan said at the United Nations Friday. ”But we didn`t. Instead, we froze the program.”
Khan was winding up a two-day visit that included talks with State Department officials in Washington.
The reason the trip and for acknowledging that Pakistan could build a bomb, Khan said, was not just to obtain a resumption of the $570 million in American aid that Congress cut off last year because of Pakistan`s nuclear program.
Rather, he said, Pakistan wanted to improve relations with the United States, convince the Bush administration that the present government has frozen the country`s nuclear program and make clear that Pakistan sincerely wants to negotiate a regional nuclear disarmament agreement with India, as the U.S., Russia and China have proposed.
”We are deeply concerned about the nuclear race in Southeast Asia, which none of us can afford, and we sincerely want the five-nation non-proliferation initiative to take off,” Khan said. ”Aid or no aid, we want good relations with the United States.”
In the past Pakistan has denied having any secret nuclear program, despite growing evidence that it was moving closer to developing a bomb.
Khan said it would be politically impossible for Pakistan to dismantle its nuclear program without a similar move by India, which exploded a nuclear device in 1964. He also called on India to agree to mutual inspections of each other`s nuclear plants.
Like Pakistan, India has refused to sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear installations to international monitoring.
Another country suspected of developing a nuclear weapon, Iran, has invited officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for talks in Tehran and is offering to show them some of its nuclear
installations.
