“Pakistan’s military spending has until recently been subsidised by large amounts of military and economic aid from the United States. It is moving now to depending mostly on military and economic assistance from China,” according to the latest global report, Assuring destruction forever: 2020, released by Reaching Critical Will ,a disarmament programme of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the world's oldest women's peace organisation. It’s penned by Prof Zia Mian, Pakistani-American nuclear physicist, Research Scientist and Co-Director, Program in Science and Global Security, Woodrow Wilson Center, University of Princeton, USA

Now in 2020 Pakistan is believed to have around 150-160 nuclear weapons, a roughly ten-fold increase from the year 2000. The US government estimated in 2011 that Pakistan’s stockpile then may have been in the range of 90 to over 110 weapons. The growth of the arsenal appears to have been steady for most of the past decade. It is projected to increase at a faster rate in coming years, reaching perhaps 250 weapons within five years, making it larger than the arsenal of the United Kingdom and comparable in size to the arsenals of China and France” .

The key policy goal of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability is to deter ‘Indian conventional as well as nuclear aggression. Its secondary policy goal, if deterrence fails, is to deny India victory in the event of a war. The existing literature on Pakistan’s nuclear program “identifies a wide range of political and economic roles that the program fills. Recently, references have even been made to the possibility of utilizing nuclear forces as a deterrent against threats emerging from states other than India.

In 2019, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan warned that .If the world does nothing to stop the Indian assault on Kashmir and its people, there will be consequences for the whole world as two nuclear-armed states get ever closer to a direct military confrontation.’ He threatened that a conventional conflict would spiral into nuclear war, saying that ‘if say Pakistan, God forbid, we are fighting a conventional war, we are losing, and if a country is stuck between the choice: either you surrender or you fight ‘til death for your freedom, I know Pakistanis will fight to death for their freedom. So when a nuclear-armed country fights to the end, to the death, it has consequences’, RCW states.

The report expresses concern over ‘little reliable information on the yields of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons’ and questions reliability about official data pertaining to the number and yields of the nuclear weapon tests carried out on 28 and 30 May 1998 . Pakistan initially claimed ‘ six tests with some having explosive yields of tens of kilotons (KT), while independent seismologists found evidence supporting a smaller number of tests and total yields of about 10 KT and 5 KT for the tests on 28 May and 30 May respectively’

Peace researchers abroad are in the dark about Pakistan’s weapon designs.” It is believed to have received in the early 1980s a first generation Chinese weapon design that used highly enriched uranium. If two weapon designs were tested in 1998, one may have used HEU and the other plutonium for the hollow shell of fissile material (the ‘pit’) that undergoes the explosive nuclear chain reaction, or possibly a ‘composite’ pit combining both materials.”

Pakistan might have developed ‘boosted’ weapons. There ‘tritium gas is injected into the pit just before it explodes to increase the fraction of the fissile material that undergoes fission, significantly increase the explosive yield of the nuclear weapon, and decrease the required amount of fissile material in each weapon.6 Pakistan is not believed to have thermonuclear weapons, although Pakistani nuclear weapon scientists claim they could develop such weapons if tasked and funded to do so.’

It’s well-known that the most updated system to begin development in Pakistan is the 60 km-range Nasr missile, which was first tested in 2011. “Nasr is described as a battlefield system able to carry “nuclear warheads of appropriate yield.” Reports suggest that Nasr is presumably intended for use as a short-range battlefield nuclear weapon system against Indian conventional armoured forces during the early stages of a conflict. Analysis of such a scenario suggests Pakistan would need to deploy and use many tens of Nasr missiles to be able to destroy a significant fraction of the 1000 or so Indian tanks that may be involved in such an action”, according to the document. (IPA Service)