How Mossad strangled Pak N-programme in its infancy

Jerusalem: Israel’s espionage agency Mossad is suspected of having bombed and issued threats to German and Swiss companies that “energetically worked” to aid Pakistan in its nascent nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s as the Jewish state saw Islamabad acquiring nuclear capabilities as an “existential threat”, a leading daily said here on Tuesday.

The Jerusalem Post quoted a prominent Swiss daily report that “the suspicion that Mossad carried out the attacks and issued threats soon arose” after the three bombings in 1981 on three of these companies following an unsuccessful intervention by the United States to stop the activities”. “For Israel, the prospect that Pakistan, for the first time, could become an Islamic State with an atomic bomb posed an existential threat,” Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) reported on Sunday. Pakistan on May 28, 1998 conducted five simultaneous underground nuclear tests at Ras Koh Hills in Chagai district of Balochistan province. Codenamed Chagai-I, it was Pakistan’s first public test of nuclear weapons. The second nuclear test, Chagai-II, followed on May 30 in the same year.

Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran worked closely together in the 1980s on developing nuclear weapons devices in which the intensive work of German and Swiss companies in aiding their nuclear programme is “relatively well researched,” NZZ reported. “New, previously unknown, documents from archives in Bern and Washington sharpen this picture,” it claimed. —(PTI)