Pakistan’s Nuclear Program Budget was $10 Million per Year, Increasing to $20 Million per Year When at Full Capacity

Pakistan’s nuclear program has always been a target for Western propaganda and false accusations. I would like to make it clear that it was an Indian nuclear explosion in May 1974 that prompted our nuclear program, motivating me to return toPakistanto help create a credible nuclear deterrent and save my country from Indian nuclear blackmail.

After 15 years in Europe with invaluable experience in enrichment technology, I came toPakistanin December 1975 and was given the task of producing nuclear weapons by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

On Dec. 10, 1984, I informed Gen. Ziaul Haq that we could explode a device at a week’s notice, whenever he so desired.

We achieved credible nuclear capacity by the second half of the ’80s, and the delivery system was perfected in the early ’90s. For a country that couldn’t produce bicycle chains to have become a nuclear and missile power within a short span—and in the teeth of Western opposition—was quite a feat.

The question of how many weapons are required for credible deterrence againstIndiais purely academic.Indiais engaged in a massive program to cope with the nonexistent threat posed byChinaand in order to become a superpower.Indiadoesn’t need more than five weapons to hurt us badly, and we wouldn’t need more than 10 to return the favor. That is why there has been no war between us for the past 40 years.

I have little knowledge of the present status of our program, as I leftKahuta,Pakistan’s main nuclear facility, 10 years ago. As the pioneer of the program, my guess is that our efforts have been to perfect the design, reduce the size of the weapons to fit on the warheads of our missile systems, and ensure a fail-safe system for their storage. A country needs sufficient weapons to be stored at different places in order to have a second-strike capability. But there is a limit to these requirements.

Don’t overlook the fact that no nuclear-capable country has been subjected to aggression or occupied, or had its borders redrawn. HadIraqandLibyabeen nuclear powers, they wouldn’t have been destroyed in the way we have seen recently. If we had had nuclear capability before 1971, we would not have lost half of our country—present-dayBangladesh—after disgraceful defeat.

There is a total misconception about the money spent on our nuclear program. When we started, our budget was just $10 million per year, increasing to $20 million per year when at full capacity, including all salaries, transport, medical care, housing, utilities, and purchases of technical equipment and materials. This is but half the cost of a modern fighter aircraft. The propaganda about spending exorbitant sums on the nuclear program circulated by ignorant, often foreign-paid, Pakistanis has no substance.

India and Pakistan understand the old principle that ensured peace in the Cold War: mutually assured destruction. The two can’t afford a nuclear war, and despite our saber rattling, there is no chance of a nuclear war that would send us both back to the stone age. What pains me is that we gave Pakistan nuclear capability for its self-esteem and deterrence against adversaries. With our sovereignty thus secure, I urged various governments to concentrate on development to raise the people’s standard of living. Unfortunately, successive incompetent and ignorant rulers never bothered to work on the greater national interest. We are far worse off now than we were 20, or even 40, years ago when we were subjected to embargoes.

Our nuclear-weapons program has given us an impregnable defense, and we are forced to maintain this deterrence until our differences withIndiaare resolved. That would lead to a new era of peace for both countries. I hope I live to seePakistanandIndialiving harmoniously in the same way as the once bitter enemiesGermanyand France live today.

Kashmir Population Breakdown

Total population                12,548,926

Kashmir Valley                   7,198,110 (57.36%)

Jammu                                    5,350,816 (42.63%)

Female Ratio                         883 (-9)

Children Female Ratio      859 (-82)

Literacy                                   68.74% (+13.24)

Literacy Jammu                  68.79% (10 districts)

Literacy Kashmir                63.29%

Literacy Ladakh                  77.48

Srinagar district comes 6th amongst the Kashmir districts. The first five are Hindu majority districts, namely Jammu,  Samba, Leh, Kargil, and Kathua.

Contribution of Indian States to its Population

Uttar Pardesh             16%

Maharashtra                9%

Bihar                                9%

West Bengal                   8%

Andhra Pradesh           7%

Madhya Pradesh           6%

Tamil Nadu                      6%

Punjab                                2%

Chattisgarh                       2%

Haryana                              2%

Delhi                                     1%

Kashmir                               1%

Uttarnachal                        1%

Others                                   2%

How to Help the Repatriated Prostitutes?

Trafficked girls have few prospects upon their return home and often the family can push them back into leaving, warn aid workers.

Often someone in the village convinces them to leave and sometimes it’s one member of the family. So the risk is that when they go back home they end up going back to Thailand again.

According to statistics from the International Organization for Migration, 145 human trafficking survivors were returned to Laos in 2010. The majority returned from Thailand and 119 of those were younger than 18.

The country is a source, and to a much lesser extent, a transit and destination country for women and girls who are subjected to trafficking, specifically forced prostitution, the US State Department’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report [ http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/ ] stated.

Tet* was 14 when she was promised a job in a Thai restaurant. “My friend said we should go but when we got there they took us to a factory to make gloves,” she said.

For the next two years Tet was forced to work in dire conditions. “If I failed to reach the day’s production quota I would receive no food or drink and was sometimes beaten.”
Unable to escape, it was only until another girl managed to run away that the authorities were informed. After 12 months at a transit centre in Thailand, waiting for the judicial process to be completed, Tet returned to Laos.

Under a 2005 Memorandum of Understanding between the Thai and Lao governments, trafficking survivors are repatriated and housed in a government-run transit centre in the Lao capital, Vientiane, for up to seven days before returning to their communities.
Tet spent six months in the AFESIP shelter and learnt to sew. But on her return to her village in southern Laos, the problems began.

“I fulfilled my dream of opening a small sewing shop but after three months there were no customers because people bought ready-made clothes.”

This as a pivotal problem in the reintegration process. After vocational training they might not be able to do what they wanted to and/or they could not manage their business. Sometimes they go back to Thailand and are re-victimized.

Some families rely on income from their children, which is often more lucrative when trafficked than what they can earn in their community.

“She goes back home, opens a shop and the money from the business is not enough for the family. Everything that the family uses has to come from the money that she makes.”.

But Tet’s problems were not just confined to money. On return to her community she also faced possible stigmatization. “I met with my friends… they saw that other people were not talking to me so they thought I wasn’t a good person,” she said.

Such social stigma, according to Tornaghi, can also push women back again.

“But it is a result of a lack of knowledge, people just don’t have information about human trafficking and how traumatic it can be for the victim,” she said.

“If they’ve been trafficked for a long time, of course they change. When she gets back she’s not the same person. That’s a hard thing for the family to accept and for her to accept the family.”

The Military Will Have to Review its Policies

by Yousaf Nazar

That Pakistan Army has been humiliated and has failed to control terrorists is stating the obvious. But the question is what needs to be done and where do we start. We seem to be polarized between two extreme narratives, namely, it is all the work of foreign elements AND it is establishment protecting its assets. This has assumed the dimensions of an almost ideological debate. Rationality and Truth are often the casualties of ideology and dogma. These issues have been compounded by agenda-driven journalism.

I am puzzled by 30,000 feet high discussions and more the same motherhood and apple pie TV talks and our failure to ask some elementary questions and take basic steps.

A few basic questions:

1. How two terrorists managed to escape when the PNS Mehran was surrounded by hundreds of security personnel beats me? Maybe the media can start by focusing on tracing the identify of the killed terrorists with full public disclosure of the results and how two managed to escape. There should be a relentless pursuit of hard facts and evidence with full public disclosure. There is no other way to fight the menace except with the full support of the people.

For starters let us encourage the Deep State to look under its own bed. Secondly, never underestimate the Deep State’s brilliance!! I mean, for one, which organisation in its right mind would have done, in recent memory: Jalalabad and Kargil? Which would keep Dawood Ibrahim in its motherly lap?

2. Why don’t our security officials announce on TV that next time a Taliban spokesman calls a media person, that media person should immediately inform the security services on another line or through alternative means so that the call can be monitored and traced. There should not be any protection of “journalistic sources” when it comes to the protection of lives and nabbing terrorists.

3. While the security establishment is widely believed to be protecting the Haqqani network, this does not explain why the groups that are being protected by the establishment, although it is denied strongly, would strike the deep state itself?

4. If the groups striking at our strategic locations are the rogue ones and are not the ones being protected by our establishment, then in how many instances the identities of the perpetrators of crimes were revealed and efforts to track them were successful and made public since 2002? We need a white paper on this. But even before that, does the government have a list of the most wanted? Can it publish that list, if it has one, in all major newspapers? We have had a lot of general discussion and statements but not enough detailed facts. Why?

5. In other countries, whenever such big incidents took place, the leadership came on TV and took the people in confidence, boosted morale, and shared what strategy was being adopted to face the challenge. We are treated with silence except the routine statements like we will fight terror or bizarre statements from Rehman Malik. Yesterday, he said the attackers looked like Star Wars characters? What was that? This cannot be taken seriously anymore.

Stability to the US Means Obedience by Pakistan

“Stability to the US means obedience. As long asPakistan is obedient it will be considered a stable ally,” said MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky on May 25, 2011 at Café Bol in Gulberg’s Main Market in Lahore.

Chomsky said the moment Pakistan stopped cowing down to the US, the talks of nuclear threat and jihadi movements would start making headlines in theUSmedia. He said while the threats existed, but they would merit action only when they threatened US interests.

“We’ve all heard the term ‘to stabilise the region’ from the US government. Whenever the term is used it actually means that the US will destabilise the region but ‘stabilise’ any threat to its interests,” he said.

Chomsky spoke via skype from his academic offices at MIT in the US. He spoke on several subjects during the one-and-a-half hour lecture. These included a brief history of the World War II,USimperialism and involvement in Latin America over the past three decades and the consequences as well as a more recent take onPakistan.

One of the most interesting subjects Chomsky elaborated upon was the situation in the Middle East and the parallels that one could, and could not, draw from it forPakistan. “TheUSand its imperial allies will always prevent a functional democracy in theMiddle Eastbecause that places the region beyond its control. They like democracy on paper but the fear of ‘real’ democracy in other parts of the world is cemented in the US psyche. It would mean a severe lapse of control where they are involved,” he said.

With regard toPakistan, Chomsky said that the country’s leaders severely lacked commitment to the land and to its people. There can be no revolution or change without a genuine commitment to the cause and that is lacking inPakistan. Many don’t care if the country goes down the drain as long as they can profit from the fall out,” he added.

During the question and answer session that followed, the MIT professor was asked to address the recent allegations against him and others such as Tariq Ali for being ‘Taliban sympathisers’. “I don’t like to answer such questions because it tends to give them weight,” he said. “It’s like saying I’m in favour of child abuse. It’s so insipid and without basis that it doesn’t merit a response,” he said.

With regards to the US-Pak relations post Osama bin Laden, he opened with a ‘Freudian slip’. “US-Pak relations post Obama or Osama? The fact is that not much will change from the present or at least it wont change quickly. Whether or not theUSlikes it,Pakistanis all it has got to keep control in the region. The country may not be it’s favourite ally but it is certainly one of the most important ones, if not the most. Aid will continue and support will continue. There is simply no other alternative.”

Chomsky also addressed the Israel-Palestine situation during the lecture. “TheUSknows that it is losing friends and fast. Over a 100 countries now recognisePalestinein some variety or the other and that exceeds more than half the world’s population. We know we are all moving towards a two-state solution and even thisUSgovernment is beginning to recognise that,” he said.