Pakistan’s former army chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg has said that late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had asked the Air Force (PAF) to be ready to attack Indian nuclear facilities in 1990. The PAF was to mount an attack if India targeted Pakistan’s nuclear installations with the help of Israel and United States.
It is believed that India-Pakistan came very close to a nuclear war in 1990. The precursor to it was the Brass Tacks crisis of the late 1980s. Then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Army Chief General Krishnaswami Sundarji planned an aggressive military strategy to attack Pakistan through Sindh and cut it into half. The reason was possibly to end the Kashmir problem and make sure that Pakistan never attempted to harm India again. At the peak of the crisis in January 1987, “India had deployed 400,000 troops, or about half the Indian army, within 100 miles of Pakistan.” The plan was to enter Pakistan through Rajasthan and cut off Islamabad’s access to the Karachi port and the Arabian Sea, making it a landlocked country. Around the same time A.Q. Khan admitted in an interview that Pakistan had a nuclear bomb. The two countries later held hurried talks and managed to avoid another war.
According to a 1993 New Yorker report by Seymour M. Hersh, Richard J. Kerr, Deputy Director of the C.I.A., “described the confrontation in stark terms: “It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’ve been in the U.S. government. It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.” Having lost two wars against India, the only chance Pakistan had to win against a full-fledged assault by India was to use nuclear weapons. The US also had very reliable intelligence that Pakistan could use its nuclear option. “Precisely what was obtained could not be learned, but one American summarized the information as being, in essence, a warning to India that if “you move up here”—that is, begin a ground invasion into Pakistan—“we’re going to take out Delhi.”
It is unclear why Gen Beg chose to make these revelations at such a sensitive time in Indo-Pak relations. While it may hold no significance for senior military and government personnel involved in the nuclear crisis of 1990, it has the potential to shock and create further distrust about Pakistan among everyday Indians. That is the last thing anyone in the subcontinent needs.
