Former CIA counterproliferation officer Richard Barlow has shed new mild on a long-rumoured episode from the early Nineteen Eighties — a secret joint plan by India and Israel to hold out a pre-emptive strike on Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear facility. Talking to ANI, Barlow confirmed that such discussions did happen inside intelligence circles however had been in the end deserted after then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to approve the operation.
“It by no means occurred, it was simply speak. It’s a disgrace that Indira didn’t approve it. It might have solved lots of issues,” Barlow mentioned.
In keeping with him, the strike — had it been executed — might have dramatically altered South Asia’s nuclear trajectory. “In 1990, when India and Pakistan got here near confrontation, the intelligence neighborhood noticed nuclear weapons being moved to air bases and mounted on F-16s — the very weapons the US president claimed Pakistan didn’t possess,” he added.
The key plan
The India-Israel plan reportedly emerged within the aftermath of Israel’s profitable 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. Involved about Pakistan’s accelerating nuclear enrichment efforts at Kahuta — seen as an try to construct an “Islamic bomb” — Israel is alleged to have proposed an identical operation concentrating on the location.
Beneath the proposed association, Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets would fly from Indian airbases in Jamnagar and Udhampur, with Indian Jaguar strike plane offering operational assist and refueling. The mission’s aim was to destroy Kahuta earlier than it turned operational.
Whereas Indira Gandhi reportedly gave preliminary clearance for the plan, she later withdrew her approval resulting from mounting geopolitical dangers — together with the potential for full-scale warfare with Pakistan and backlash from the US, which was deeply concerned in supporting Islamabad throughout the Soviet-Afghan battle.
‘Reagan would have been livid’
Barlow famous that the operation, had it gone forward, would have angered then US President Ronald Reagan. “It might have interfered with the Afghan downside as a result of Pakistan was utilizing the circulate of covert support to the Mujahideen as blackmail,” he mentioned.
He added that the CIA was already uneasy with the Reagan administration’s choice to proceed certifying Pakistan as non-nuclear, regardless of intelligence on the contrary. “The US president saved certifying that Pakistan didn’t possess nuclear weapons — a place CIA officers weren’t snug with,” Barlow recalled.
Reviews recommend that the CIA tipped off Pakistan in regards to the proposed operation, prompting Islamabad to step up its defenses round Kahuta. Quickly after, Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 successfully buried the concept.
Barlow, who rejoined authorities service in 1985, mentioned he solely heard in regards to the plan second-hand. “I didn’t get my tooth into it as a result of it by no means occurred. It’s a disgrace that Indira didn’t approve it,” he remarked.
Pakistan’s ‘islamic bomb’ imaginative and prescient
In the identical interview, Barlow claimed that Pakistan’s nuclear programme, initially conceived as a deterrent towards India after the latter’s 1974 nuclear take a look at, later advanced right into a broader ideological venture.
“Beneath A.Q. Khan, it turned an ‘Islamic bomb’ — a programme aimed toward spreading nuclear functionality to different Muslim nations,” he mentioned, including that Washington turned a blind eye to Islamabad’s proliferation community. “For greater than 20 years, US administrations did nothing about Pakistan’s nuclear dealings,” he alleged.
Barlow recalled that throughout the 1990 India-Pakistan nuclear disaster, US intelligence detected the motion of nuclear warheads to Pakistani airbases. Then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard Kerr described it as “the scariest factor because the Cuban Missile Disaster,” prompting Reagan to dispatch Robert Gates, then Nationwide Safety Council adviser, to defuse tensions in Islamabad and New Delhi.
The revelations reignite a decades-old query: What if India and Israel had struck Kahuta earlier than Pakistan went nuclear? Whereas Barlow insists the transfer “would have solved lots of issues,” goepolitical specialists argue it may need unleashed unpredictable geopolitical penalties — together with a US-Pakistan rupture and doable warfare in South Asia.
