Washington, August 4(ANI): The United States and Pakistan are heading towards yet another confrontation, perhaps more devastating than all previous disputes, as the Obama administration prepares to persuade Islamabad to halt production of nuclear bomb materials at the United Nations General Assembly in New York next month.
US media reports suggested that the US is backed by four declared nuclear powers namely China, Russia, France and Britain to coerce Pakistan to sign the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty(FMCT).
The NBC News channel reported that the US was preparing for "the worst-case scenario of attempting to snatch Pakistan's 100-plus nuclear weapons if it feared they were about to fall into the wrong hands".
The channel quoted former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf as warning that this "would be a disastrous miscalculation, as such an incursion would lead to 'total confrontation' between the United States and Pakistan".
"Ensuring the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons has long been a high national security priority, even before the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, and that plans have been drawn up for dealing with worst-case scenarios in Pakistan" the NBC News quoted current and former US officials, as saying.
It is yet not clear if China would back the US move to cap Pakistan's nuclear capability and thus allow India to become the sole nuclear power in South Asia.
The US and its allies are seeking to arrive at a nuclear agreement by September and then start talks on the FMCT at the UN Assembly.
So far, Pakistan has successfully resisted all international pressure to endorse the FMCT, and warned that it would boycott any process to negotiate a US-backed treaty outside the deadlocked UN Conference on Disarmament (UNCD).
"Our preference is to negotiate an FMCT within the Conference on Disarmament, but that body has been deadlocked by Pakistan," the Dawn quoted US State Under-secretary Ellen Tauscher, as saying. (ANI)
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