Hans Kristensen over at NukeStrat.com noticed what has to be one of the weirdest proposals out of South Asia that I’ve seen a while.
General Mirza Aslam Beg—former Pakistan Chief of Army Staff—has penned a couple of op-eds suggesting that Pakistan “outsource” its nuclear arsenal to Iran:
If India and Pakistan want to dissuade Iran from going nuclear, then ‘out-sourcing a nuclear strike’ becomes essential. Iran has the missiles, which can reach Israel. Iran fears nuclear capable Israel, and by outsourcing our nuclear strike to Iran, a credible nuclear deterrence will be established in the Gulf Region, the West and South Asia.
Where the hell did he get a crazy idea like that?
“Therefore,” Beg concludes “it would be proper to consider ‘outsourcing our nuclear strikes’ to Iran – as US and Nato have done: A specific number of nuclear warheads which, under US and Nato war plans, will be transferred to US non-nuclear allies to be delivered to targets by their warplanes’.’”
Oh, yeah, sorry about that.
The quote, by the way, is from Hans’ report, U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe: A Review of Post-Cold War Policy, Force Levels, and War Planning.
On a related note, I mentioned a while back that Paul Robinson argued for extending NATO-like security regimes to other states as a measure to stem proliferation. He didn’t say whether that included nuclear sharing arrangements—but I gleefully chose to read him literally. Maybe I should send Robinson’s piece to General Beg and see what he thinks.
The folks over at BASIC have been complaining that NATO nuclear sharing arrangements run counter to the spirit of the NPT.