To enhance its nuclear capability, Pakistan is developing non-strategic nuclear weapons, thus joining the ranks of countries like the US and Russia, a leading American think-tank has said. “Today, at least five of the world’s nine nuclear weapons states have, or are developing, what appears to meet the definition of non-strategic nuclear weapons: Russia, the United States, France, Pakistan, and China,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project, and Dr Robert S Norris, senior fellow for Nuclear Policy, in a new edition of the Nuclear Notebook. Like France, Pakistan characterizes all its nuclear weapons as strategic. “However, Pakistan is developing a new short-range rocket with nuclear capability that certainly would be characterized as a non-strategic nuclear weapon if it belonged to Russia or the United States. Moreover, even Pakistani statements regarding the weapon clearly place it in a different category,” Kristensen and Norris wrote in the latest issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
