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India, Pakistan demonstrate their missile power

	March 21, 2005

Though India and Pakistan are currently engaged in a “composite dialogue” and often announce confidence building measures, both have so far failed to generate true confidence in each other. In fact, both are suspicious about each other and are engaged in strengthening and modernising their arsenal to guard against each other.

On Saturday (March 19), while Pakistan test-fired its longest-range, nuclear-capable Shaheen-II missile, India test-fired its warhead-loaded Nag missile. Both claimed their tests were successful.



Pakistan’s Saheen-II

According to a Pakistani military statement, the test of the long-range surface-to-surface missile Shaheen-II (Hatf-VI) was ‘successfully’ carried out, it said, without mentioning where it took place. The missile system can carry all types of conventional and nuclear warheads to a range of 2,000 km, it said. “The test was carried out to verify some of the refined technical parameters”, the statement said.

President Pervez Musharraf, who witnessed the test, congratulated the scientists and engineers for developing the missile. The test comes two days after the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Pakistan to encourage Pakistan’s peace process with India.



Minimum level of deterrence crossed

Describing test-firing of the long-range Shaheen-II missile as a ‘milestone’ achieved by Pakistan, President Musharraf, without naming India, said with this achievement the country has crossed a minimum deterrence level.

“Our scientists have achieved a milestone with today’s successful test-firing as it involved two-stage motor separation”, Gen. Musharraf told reporters.

Without directly referring to India, he said on the military front Pakistan had crossed the minimum deterrence level. “We have assessed the threats and quantified deterrence level in nuclear and conventional areas. Today we have crossed the minimum deterrence level.”

The surface-to-surface ballistic missile is capable of hitting targets deep into the Indian territory as well as West Asia and elsewhere. ‘We were expecting 0.1 accuracy and we achieved 0.05 per cent accuracy. It’s a big milestone,’ he said adding that with this achievement Pakistan could ‘move’ into space technology and Space Launch Vehicle (SLV) programme.

India and several other countries in the region had been notified about the missile test in advance as per the existing practice as a confidence-building measure, an official statement here said.

There was no immediate reaction from New Delhi to the test. South Asia’s nuclear rivals Pakistan and India routinely test-fire their missiles.



The Indian Nag

From the Indian side, Saheen-II test was responded by anti-tank guided missile Nag. Army sources in Hyderabad said the test which was carried with a warhead was “successful.”

This is the first time that the anti-tank guided missile was fired with a warhead. In the two demonstrations on Saturday, the warhead carrying missiles destroyed Army tanks moving at a distance of four kilometers.

“Army officials were given a demonstration of the capability of Nag and they were satisfied.” said Director Prahlada of Defence Research and Development Laboratories. Nag, the third generation fire-and-forget anti-tank missile travelled at subsonic speed of Mach 1.



Global missile-race will hot up

Meanwhile, the United States has warned that the global missile race is likely to hot up with China building more and more inter-continental missiles and nuclear warheads. In its report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby warned that by 2015, the number of warheads capable of targeting continental United States will increase several fold.

China, he said, is developing and purchasing ASCMs (Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles) on a big scale and they will present significant challenge to the US Navy if it goes to Taiwan’s aid.

China and North Korea continue to sell weapons of mass destruction and missile technologies for revenue and diplomatic influence to other countries like Iran and Pakistan, Jacoby stated. Russia or ‘entities within Russia’ support missile programmes in China, Iran, India and Syria, he noted.

In the next ten years, he said, “we expect other countries to join Russia, China and France as major exporters of cruise missiles. For example, India in partnership with Russia will begin production of the PJ-10, an advanced anti-ship and land attack cruise missile, this year. Pakistan and Iran too are developing Land Attack Cruise Missiles.”

Iran too will have the technical capability to develop an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) by 2015, according to Jacoby.



US helping Pakistan protect nukes

A US congressional report suggests that America may have been assisting Pakistan to help protect its nuclear sites since October 2001.

According to the report, since India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in May 1998, the US had been debating whether it should provide assistance in making those weapons safer and more secure.

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US, “interest in this kind of assistance has grown for several reasons”, said Dawn in a Washington datelined report, quoting the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

According to the report, the reasons were the increased possibility of terrorists gaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, the US military forging new relationships with both Pakistan and India in the war on terrorism and the heightened tension in Kashmir in 2002 that threatened to push both states closer to the brink of nuclear war.

“In October 2001, media reported that the US was providing assistance to Pakistan to keep its weapons safe, although those reports have not been confirmed,” the report said.

Suggested measures for securing Indian and Pakistani weapon sites have ranged from “guards and gates” around nuclear facilities to “permissive action links,” which act as locks, on nuclear weapons to prevent unauthorised use.

The report said most types of assistance the US can feasibly provide would probably focus on helping secure nuclear materials and providing employment for personnel, rather than on security of nuclear weapons.

The report observed that extreme sensitivity in India and Pakistan about their nuclear weapons and programmes would also likely restrict access to facilities, which in turn will limit how well assistance can be tailored to potential problems.

“Pakistan, because of its location, the nature of its relationship to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and its weapons of mass destruction programmes, has generated particular concern,” it said.

“Revelations in 2004 that Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea also helped to renew interest in making, in particular, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme more secure from exploitation,” CRS, which provides policy guidelines to US lawmakers, said in the report on nuclear threat reduction measures for India and Pakistan.

It goes on to note that repeated assassination attempts on President Pervez Musharraf, the Khan network’s sale of nuclear technology and a continuous battle with terrorists within the country have made “Pakistan the most crucial node of the nexus of terrorism and WMD proliferation”.

A combination of doctrinal preference, such as first use of nuclear weapons, and a weaker conventional force has given Pakistan strong incentives to forward-deploy its nuclear forces, leading many observers to conclude that assistance to secure Pakistan’s nuclear warheads could be critical, the report added.

Another concern for the US, according to the report, is that technical measures to make weapons safer from unauthorised use may make those weapons more deployable or usable and thus inadvertently undermine the goal of reducing the nuclear threat.

The report said the situation of Pakistan and India is different from that in Russia, where US assistance helped reduce the nuclear threat.