Pak Could Pass Nuke Weapons to Surrogate Taliban for Use against India: US

A non-proliferation US Commission has said that Pakistan may pass nuclear weapons to the Taliban for use against India if tensions escalates or war takes place between the two countries, said media reports.

“If something broke out in Kashmir that reignited the vitriol between India and Pakistan, that could be an incident that could cause someone to make the decision.

“We don’t want to use these weapons, but we’re going to let our surrogate Taliban have access to these weapons and they’ll do our dirty work,” Bob Graham, head of US Commission on the Prevention of WMD proliferation and terrorism told US lawmakers.

He made the statement while answering queries from worried lawmakers who voiced their concerns over the safety and security of nuclear weapons in Pakistan at a Congressional hearing convened by the House Homeland Security Committee.

“I think one of our recommendations was to work with India and Pakistan to develop some fail-safe procedures. Unlike, the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, where although we were strong adversaries and had the capability of destroying each other.

“We understood that we didn’t want to allow a misstep or an accidental event to become the ignition for such a war. So we set up the red phone in the Oval Office and a whole protocol,” Graham was quoted as saying referring to the report of the commission released early this year.

“None of that exists between India and Pakistan. I have felt that this may be an area in which the US and Russia together, since we developed these protocols for our own benefit and the world’s benefit, might work together with India and Pakistan to try to get them to develop,” he was quoted as saying.

“I was encouraged that within the last month India and China have started to develop some of those fail-safe procedures. But there’s almost nothing that has been done in a similar vein between the real adversaries, which are India and Pakistan,” Graham was quoted as saying.

(Based on internet reports)