Indian Defence Review

The following remarks has been received from the reader (author), which raises many questions:

Finally, North Korea did the unthinkable. On 06 January, North Korea announced that it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. If true, North Korea, now processes something much more powerful than the weapons it has tested in the past.

North Korea is the only nation to have conducted any nuclear tests since 1999, with tests in 2006, 2009, 2013 and this year. While Pyongyang does not have intercontinental ballistic missile technology that would enable it to strike the United States, but this Nuclear test certainly not only places South Korea, Japan and 100,000 American troops in the region at risk but the entire world at risk.

The nuclear age is 70 years old, and while relatively few nations possess the power, the potential consequences of North Korea upping its nuclear game from a basic atomic bomb to a hydrogen bomb has caught the world’s attention.

With this explosion, North Korea is directly poking Washington in the eye and Americans should remember that all this is only possible because of help to North Korea in the past by a US “ally” Pakistan.

How has North Korea acquired this technology? Has it been their own expertise and technology or due to some covert support from elsewhere? While China has played a role in North Korea’s program, but it is primarily US ally Pakistan, which has played a key role and their role is well-documented.

On 24 November 2002, for example, the New York Times reported in a detailed investigative article that American spy agencies had tracked Pakistani military planes landing several times in North Korean airfields to take home a secret payload of ballistic missile parts in return for a “many of the designs for gas centrifuges and much of the machinery it needs to make highly enriched uranium for the country’s latest nuclear weapons project.

It was a “perfect marriage of interests” between Islamabad and Pyongyang and it was conducted through American-built C-130 planes that were supplied to Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. In fact, it is an open secret that majority of the weapon and equipment given to Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan has been deliberately transferred by Pakistan to its Eastern border with India.

The “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb Abdul Qadeer Khan even confessed in 2004 to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya. The world ignored this gross and blatant act of a Pakistani scientist supported by the Pakistan government.

Even United Nations nuclear watchdog had found in 2008 that Khan‘s network smuggled nuclear blueprints to Iran, Libya and North Korea. US then had only warned Musharraf regime in Pakistan of grave consequences but on ground did nothing to discourage and Punish Pakistan.

Abdul Qadeer Khan was immediately pardoned and detained in his home. He was freed even from that in in 2009 by a court ruling that allowed him to “lead a normal life”. Pakistan managed to successfully shield him from punitive American action.

Despite the US and the West knowing Pakistani collusion with North Korea, they continue to turn the blind eye on Islamabad’s deeds. The world should not forget that the real issue is proliferation of technology.