WASHINGTON, July 10: US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has questioned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's claim that China played a ``significant and helpful role in trying to move India and Pakistan back from the brink of nuclear arms race''. Making a startling disclosure, Moynihan, former ambassador to India, said that Shanghai communique of Nixon era by US and China, which was still a living document governing Sino-US relations, voiced the two countries' support for ``the Pakistan government and the people in their struggle (against India) to preserve their independence and sovereignty and the people of Jammu and Kashmir in their struggle for the right of self-determination''. Moynihan said the Shanghai communique was ``unknown'' in India but ``it is markedly pro-Pakistan''.It was China's assistance to Pakistan in the nuclear field that helped it carry out nuclear detonations and in acquiring technology to get Ghauri missile from north Korea ``certainly through Chinese agency'', he said at ahearing of the Roth sub-committee of the Senate Finance Committee here yesterday. He also criticised Albright for disagreeing with the arguments that China's nuclear missile technology assistance to Pakistan forced India to conduct nuclear tests.
Albright, speaking at the Committee earlier, had denied that it was China's help to Pakistan in the nuclear and missile fields and US moves towards Beijing which gave the impression of Sino-American hegemony that pressured India to carry out the nuclear tests.
Moynihan said his ``specific concern is the prospect that (Pakistan's) `Islamic bomb' will migrate to the Middle-East by somebody buying it from bankrupt Pakistan, which is now faced with our sanctions and so forth.''
Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to former president George Bush, however, said ``as a result of Pakistan's venture into the nuclear web, we backed out of that (communique) entirely but Chinese never did.''
Meanwhile, National security adviser to former United States presidentJimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has termed the US non-proliferation policy as ``sanctimonious'' and called for a balance of power in Eurasia involving Europe, China, Japan, India, Pakistan and Russia. He said, ``The two countries not weaponising is obviously in our interest. It is also in our interest that they do not engage in further proliferation.''
Include India, Pak in N-club: US expert
WASHINGTON: An independent American think-tank has urged the United States to recognise India, Pakistan and Israel as fellow nuclear states and convene an eight-member conference on nuclear disarmament.The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a widely respected body among the pro-nuclear non-proliferation community in the US, has further urged all the eight nuclear powers to reach an agreement on deactivating their arsenals to prevent first strikes by any of them as also any `accidental nuclear war'. ``The goals of such a meeting would be clear: to eliminate, so far astechnically possible, the danger of accidental nuclear war and prevent regional nuclear conflict in South Asia and Middle-East,'' IEER president Arjun Makhijani said in an article in the Washington Post. Criticising the US move to appease China despite its tacit support to Pakistan, Makhijani said such a policy may increase pressures on India for the development of long-range missiles.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
