What we were anticipating to come about is here now. The US is fully exploiting the Geronimo operation, planted sensitive reports which are periodically appearing in US media truly divulge American intentions to spread propaganda against Pakistan military, intelligence and nukes. However, it’s yet to decide whether US is just playing psychological tactics or testing the balloon to check the air.
Lately, the NBC News reported that the US military and intelligence operatives are debating, strategising, gaming and potentially even conducting crisis on entering Pakistan and seizing Pakistan nuclear weapons during a crisis. The report clearly vows about US contingency plan to ‘snatch and grab’ Pakistan nukes. It quoted current and former US officials who declared that Pakistan nuclear weapons were a threat to either America or its interests and it amid strains in bilateral ties.
The report utterly speaks that ensuring security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons has long been a high US security plan even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as former White House Deputy Counter-Terrorism Director Roger Cressey has also confirmed.
It’s not merely NBC report which reveals the US intentions but the US Congressional Research Report has already debated and justified the case by claiming that Pakistan has to be deprived of its 100-120 nuclear arsenals. Moreover, an intelligence scholar Jeffery Richelson in 2009 wrote in his book ‘Defusing Armageddon’, that US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace five years ago outlined two kinds of situations, ‘elimination operations’ and ‘interdiction operations’ by the United States to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the operations task would be to locate, secure, disable or destroy Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
MAIMUNA ASHRAF
Islamabad
