November 17, 2025 12:46 PM IST First published on: Nov 17, 2025 at 12:46 PM ISTPervez Musharraf acknowledged the murky backdrop to Pakistan’s Nuclear Programme in his memoir, In the Line of Fire, where he concedes that the Pakistani national hero, Dr A Q Khan: “A Q was not ‘part of the problem’ but the ‘problem’ itself”. He accepted, “Our political leaders were intentionally ambiguous in public about our capabilities, for strategic reasons,” and that “possibilities were frightening”, given the inherent nature of the Pakistani Nuclear Programme, where very often the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was up to.But beyond the obvious surreptitiousness of the Pakistani Nuclear Programme (which later metastasised into the infamous proliferation scandal), there is also an ingrained desperation of the Pakistani State. In 1965, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had chillingly claimed, “We (Pakistan) will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own (Atom bomb)… We have no other choice!”.Economically and prophetically, Pakistan is as close as it has come to eating grass, with its sovereign coffers almost empty and it surviving on international aid or doles. In an unbelievable development involving secret parleys with the Israeli Mossad, the American CIA and the Pakistani “establishment” (read: Pakistani military) in the safe territory of Egypt, negotiations for dispatching 20,000 Pakistani soldiers to Gaza for a post-war stabilisation mission are underway. However, Pak information ministry has rubbished this report.AdvertisementBut such milking of militaristic assets augurs worryingly for a nation that is credibly assessed to have over 100 nuclear warheads (fifth largest nuclear state). International nuclear weapons analysts, Hans M Kristensen and Robert S Norris, noted gravely, “Despite its political instability, Pakistan continues to steadily expand its nuclear capabilities and competencies; in fact, it has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear stockpile”. This is a disconcerting development of the possible uses (and misuses) that Pakistan could put its wherewithal to sustain itself as a nation-state.Contrary to the drummed-up euphoria and murmurs of India having “hit” facilities around the Kirana Hills (housing the Pakistani nuclear storage) during airstrikes carried out as part of Operation Sindoor, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has further confirmed that there was no radiation leak or release detected to suggest any “hit”. This means that the Pakistani nuclear facilities, capabilities and the accompanying infrastructure remain intact.Like India, Pakistan remains a non-signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but unlike India, it has been conclusively guilty of proliferation and misuse. Recently, it has defined itself to a “credible minimum deterrence” posture that allows it to pursue a full-spectrum framework beyond the simple “minimum deterrence” posture (as was postulated earlier). Such a revised agenda theoretically enables the development of platforms, technologies and capabilities entailing a wide spectrum of strategic to tactical nuclear weapons with full air/sea/land-delivery capabilities. It can be assumed that Pakistan now has a survivable second-strike capability and escalation control levers in place.AdvertisementThe increased militaristic imprint and assertion in the overall Pakistani governance by Rawalpindi GHQ (housing Field Marshal Asim Munir and his top brass of the Pakistani Military) has deepened the securitised national narrative. The Field Marshal is furiously clocking air miles by shuttling between Washington DC, Beijing, and Riyadh, to stitch together a survival toolkit that seems to be connected to it, invoking its militaristic prowess in the region. Islamabad has historically had no qualms in recklessly leveraging its nuclear capabilities for both legitimate and amoral purposes. Today, with depleted assets and levers at its disposal, nuclear capability becomes a dangerous (though plausible) asset to bargain for its own survival.It is against this backdrop that the recent Donald Trump comment that Pakistan “has been testing” nuclear weapons raises serious concerns. Tellingly, Trump had alluded to Pakistani testing with the suffix that “they do not talk about it” to nail the age-old Pakistani machinations. Recent images of a telltale lenticular cloud formation over the Koh-e-Murdar region near Quetta added to suggestions of dodgy Pakistani behaviour, yet again. The loaded ambiguity (neither deny nor confirm) in the statement of Pakistan’s voluble Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, “Now don’t ask all these questions. Ask such things in private”, typified the suspicious Pakistani double-speak.most readDelhi was quick to state the obvious, “Clandestine and illegal nuclear activities are in keeping with Pakistan’s history, that is centred around decades of smuggling, export control violations, secret partnerships, A Q Khan network and further proliferation. India has always drawn the attention of the international community to these aspects of Pakistan’s record. In this backdrop, we have taken note of President Trump’s comment about Pakistan’s nuclear testing.” But this will not create much international hoopla or dissonance, as for its own bargaining reasons to do with the Work-In-Progress trade negotiations with India, Trump has curiously gone soft on Pakistan and decided to play hardball with Delhi instead. This counterintuitively accommodating stance by Washington afforded to Islamabad not only amounts to downplaying the earlier concerns raised by previous US administrations (including those by the Trump Administration in his first tenure and by himself tweeting about Pakistan’s patent insincerity and unreliability), but it may come back to haunt Washington, once the dust settles on the trade negotiations with India.So far, the Pakistani regime (handled by Field Marshal Asim Munir in the backdrop) has navigated the unlikely tightrope between ingratiating itself with the USA and the Chinese, and now also additionally with the wounded Arab world and possibly the Israelis, simultaneously. The only resource or asset that it has brought to the table has been its militaristic prowess (with the carrot of nuclear capabilities thrown in), and that makes it a very reckless and combustible trade ware for the region as a whole. History is instructive that each time the US overlooked its own professional security assessment in favour of other geopolitical purposes, the Pakistanis made them pay for it.The writer is a retired lieutenant-general and a former lieutenant-governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry