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The Pakistani army had mobilised its nuclear arsenal against India in 1999 - during the Kargil conflict - without the knowledge of its Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, London's The Sunday Times newspaper reported quoting a senior White House adviser at that time.
In a paper to be published shortly by the University of Pennsylvania, Bruce Riedel, who was a senior adviser to then US President Bill Clinton on India and Pakistan, recalls how the president was told that he faced the most important foreign policy meeting of his career.
"There was disturbing information about Pakistan preparing its nuclear arsenal," Riedel writes.
According to the report, Riedel and other aides feared that India and Pakistan were heading for a 'deadly descent into full-scale conflict with a danger of nuclear cataclysm'.
They were also concerned about Saudi extremist Osama Bin Laden's growing influence in the region.
Intelligence experts had told Riedel that the flight times of missiles fired by either side would be as little as three minutes and that 'a Pakistani strike on just one Indian city, Mumbai, would kill between 150,000 and 850,000 alone'.
Riedel, the newspaper said, told Clinton not to reveal his intelligence hand in the opening talks with Sharif, in which the president handed the premier a cartoon that showed Pakistan and India firing nuclear missiles at one another.
But in a second discussion, at which Riedel was the only other person present, "Clinton asked Sharif if he knew how advanced the threat of nuclear war really was. Did Sharif know his military was preparing their missiles?" he writes.
While Clinton reminded Sharif how close the US and Soviet Union had come to nuclear war in 1962 over Cuba, Sharif agreed it would be a catastrophe even if a single bomb was dropped.
Clinton drove home the advantage that the intelligence coup had given him, Riedel recalls.
"Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action?" the prime minister was asked. "Did he realise how crazy that was?"
Riedel describes how an 'exhausted' Sharif 'denied he had ordered the preparation and said he was against that, but worried for his life back in Pakistan'.
Soon afterwards Sharif, who now lives in exile in Saudi Arabia, signed a document agreeing to pull back his forces from Kargil.
Riedel does not state in the paper how the Americans gathered their intelligence, nor what the mobilisation entailed.
But John Pike, director of the Washington-based Global Security Organisation, said intelligence channels could have detected trucks that carry Pakistan's nuclear missiles being moved from their bases at Sargodha, near Rawalpindi.
If, as Riedel implies, Sharif was kept in the dark about his nuclear programme, he suffered a similar embarrassment to that of his predecessor, Benazir Bhutto, who is said to have asked the CIA for a briefing on Islamabad's nuclear capability because that privilege was denied to her by her own generals.
According to the newspaper, a recent report by the CIA, Global Trends 2015, predicts that the threat of nuclear war will remain a serious regional issue for the next 15 years.
By next year, Pakistan is thought likely to have between 50 and 75 nuclear warheads, while India will have between 75 and 100, the report said.
PTI
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