WORLD : French-Pakistani A-Plant Deal
French President Francois Mitterrand announced today that France will provide a nuclear power plant to Pakistan, honoring an agreement signed 14 years ago despite fears that Islamabad may be developing nuclear weapons.
“We have decided to show full confidence in Pakistan,” Mitterrand told a joint news conference with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on the third day of a four-day visit.
He announced that under an agreement signed today with Pakistan, “France pledges to authorize French industrial enterprises . . . to make rapidly a technical and commercial offer for the sale of a nuclear power plant to Pakistan.”
France agreed in 1976 to build a 900-megawatt nuclear processing plant at Chasma but reneged on the deal two years later under U.S. pressure.
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