ISLAMABAD, 19 June 2004 — Experts from Pakistan and India were preparing yesterday for talks in New Delhi on how to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear attack, six years after both countries conducted nuclear tests.
The two-day talks, slated to start today, will focus on nuclear crisis management — including a ban on further tests and preventing the accidental or non-authorized use of nuclear weapons, an official said.
In Islamabad, Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan on Thursday said the nuclear discussions would focus on “strategic stability, nuclear crisis management, risk reduction and coordinated as well as responsible stewardship”.
India and Pakistan shocked the world when they carried out nuclear tests in May 1998, provoking international concerns that decades of hostility between them could erupt into a nuclear conflagration.
Such fears worsened when the two countries fought a mini-war in the Himalayas in 1999, and came close to war again in mid-2002.
However, relations have since thawed and both countries are actively pursuing peace.
“We are coming with a positive spirit and positive suggestions. We are here for result-oriented talks,” Tariq Usman Haider, a top Pakistani Foreign Ministry official, was quoted as saying yesterday by the Press Trust of India news agency.
“Delegations of both India and Pakistan have a responsibility to the people of the two countries,” said Haider, who’s leading Pakistan’s six-member delegation to the talks.
The talks on nuclear issues will be followed by a June 27-28 meeting between the two countries’ foreign secretaries in New Delhi, where they’ll discuss the decades-old Kashmir dispute — the cause of two of the two countries’ three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947.
In 1999, a year after they disclosed their nuclear capabilities, the two countries agreed to take measures to reduce nuclear risks through a series of confidence-building steps. These included advance notification of missile tests, an agreement both sides have adhered to.
But plans to hold further nuclear talks were thwarted as relations deteriorated after an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2002, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan’s spy agency and Pakistan-based militant groups. Both the agency and the militant groups denied the charge.
Two years after the attack, at a historic January meeting in Islamabad, then-Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf agreed to a schedule of negotiations to resolve their outstanding issues, including ending violence in Kashmir.
Anti-nuclear activists are, however, demanding that both sides agree to dismantle warheads from missiles and that the rivals institute safeguards against accidental use of their weapons of mass destruction.
