Pakistan Explodes 5 Nuclear Devices in Response to India

The Pakistanis answered India on Thursday with five nuclear weapons tests of their own, accelerating the arms race between the two rivals and shattering hopes of a quick end to the South Asian crisis.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan said he ordered the explosions to safeguard his nation’s security in the face of an imminent Indian threat.

The detonations, carried out at 3:30 p.m. at the Chagai Hills laboratory in the Baluchistan desert of western Pakistan, came 17 days after the freshly elected Indian government startled the world by announcing that it had tested nuclear devices--including one intended for use in a hydrogen bomb.

“India exploded nuclear devices, and today we have paid them back,” Sharif said Thursday in a broadcast speech. “We would rather be beheaded than tolerate this insult.”

Pakistan seemed poised not just to match India’s five tests, but to raise it one or more.

It appeared to be making preparations for another nuclear test 60 miles from the site of Thursday’s underground explosions, according to a senior official in the Clinton administration.

The official declined to provide details but said any additional tests could be days away, or longer.

Sharif blamed India, saying its round of testing made Pakistan’s inevitable, and he chastised the industrialized nations for failing to sufficiently punish New Delhi. He gave no indication whether he will order more tests.

President Clinton, whose phone call late Wednesday failed to dissuade Sharif, said he will impose economic sanctions on Pakistan as required by U.S. law.

The sanctions, though identical to the ones slapped on India, are likely to cut much deeper into the frail Pakistani economy.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Clinton said. “I cannot believe we are about to start the 21st century by having the Indian subcontinent repeat the worst mistakes of the 20th.”

Hours after the announcement of the blasts, Pakistani President Mohammed Rafiq Tarar declared a state of emergency, suspending Pakistan’s Constitution and legal system. The order gives extraordinary powers to the government and suspends civil rights.

With the tests, Pakistan became the world’s seventh avowedly nuclear-armed state--along with the United States, Britain, Russia, China, France and India--and the first predominantly Islamic nation to test atomic weapons.

Sharif offered few details about the detonations, but he said they had released no radiation into the atmosphere.

Defense officials in Washington said the Pakistanis appeared to have tested only fission weapons, and that none were of a thermonuclear character used to produce a more powerful hydrogen bomb.

The tests, though widely anticipated here and abroad, seem certain to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, bitter enemies that have fought three wars since they broke from the British Empire in 1947.

The tests demonstrated--for the second time in less than three weeks--that the web of treaties and penalties erected by the international community is powerless to halt a nation determined to test a nuclear bomb.

In announcing the explosions, the Pakistani government said it will place nuclear warheads on its Ghauri missiles, which can reach most areas in India.

The announcement matched the Indian government’s recent statement that it not only tested nuclear weapons but deployed them.

However, Sharif did not rule out first-use of nuclear weapons, as India--with its vastly larger army--has done.

Pakistan Was Urged to Refrain From Tests

Joining a chorus of world leaders, Clinton urged Pakistan and India to refrain from further nuclear tests and to join treaties--already signed by most of the world’s nations--banning the spread and testing of nuclear weapons.

Sharif offered to do so Thursday night.

Clinton had offered Sharif a number of incentives to refrain from testing, including a resumption of economic aid and the delivery of 28 F-16 fighters, held up because of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

But Clinton’s offers paled next to the pressure Sharif was feeling at home: intense, nearly unanimous public support for testing a nuclear device and the perceived need to counter archrival India, which maintains an army twice the size of Pakistan’s.

Last week’s threats uttered by Indian leaders over the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir, the cause for two of the countries’ three wars, only seemed to increase the likelihood of a Pakistani response.

Sharif, dressed in a black tunic and flanked by the Pakistani flag and a portrait of the nation’s founding hero, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, warned citizens to prepare for lean economic times.

Pakistan, already one of the poorest and most illiterate countries in the world, stands to suffer much more than India, whose economy is largely self-contained.

“We have to show discipline,” a deliberate and unsmiling Sharif said. “Without sacrifice, nations do not stand on their own.”

To show he will share in the hard times, Sharif offered to vacate his own splendorous official residence in Islamabad, the capital.

He pleaded with Pakistanis to pare back their lifestyles and pay income taxes--something that less than 1% of its citizens do.

Still, the penalties may flatten Pakistan’s economy, which has been staggering under the burdens of foreign debt and prolific defense spending. Japan, which provides more aid to Pakistan than any other donor, hinted that it will soon end its $500 million in annual assistance.

While direct U.S. aid amounts to little more than $3 million a year, American diplomats will now be required to vote against any new assistance from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Pakistan is now receiving the first installments of a $1.5-billion IMF loan to help the country service its foreign debt. Financing from the World Bank, whose programs provide 80% of the money Pakistan spends on primary education, could also come to an end.

Some economists here warned of drastic economic consequences, including a default on Pakistan’s $30-billion foreign debt, a devaluation of its currency and steep rises in inflation and unemployment.

“When Mexico almost defaulted on its foreign debt, there was great interest in bailing them out,” said Shahrukh Rafi Khan, an economist and director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad. “Nobody is going to bail Pakistan out.”

Finance Minister Sartaj Aziz said Thursday that the country will have to reduce its imports by 15% and slash public spending by 10%. That seemed likely to push this country of 135 million people, with a per capita income of $1.25 a day, into an economic tailspin.

The fear of such a decline, growing since India’s first nuclear tests May 11, spread throughout the country Thursday. The main index of the Karachi Stock Exchange dropped 4.8% to its lowest level in five years. The market has fallen 28% since India’s nuclear tests began.

The Pakistani government, fearing a run on banks, ordered them to close and froze all foreign currency accounts.

Despite such fears, Sharif’s announcement was met with near universal approval and an explosion of national pride.

Jubilation Follows News of Blasts

Brokers at the stock exchange leaped in jubilation at the news of the nuclear blasts. In Rawalpindi, Karachi and other major cities, residents set off firecrackers, fired guns into the air and burned Indian flags. Even former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Sharif’s political foe, nodded her approval.

“Now the Muslim world can be proud of us,” said Mohammed Rasheed, a 38-year-old clerk and father of five in Karachi. “Pakistan is now a superpower.”

With May’s nuclear tests, Pakistan and India have both made public their long-presumed capabilities.

India, which tested a nuclear device for peaceful purposes in 1974, and Pakistan, slapped with U.S. sanctions in 1990 for its aggressive pursuit of nuclear technology, have been capable of producing nuclear weapons for years.

But in the delicate world of international diplomacy, where winks and bluffs often count as much as deeds, the tacit agreement of India and Pakistan to refrain from testing their nuclear hardware was considered a significant step in maintaining world stability.

The election two months ago in India of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, an avowedly Hindu nationalist group, set the stage for the dramatic rattling of South Asia’s strategic balance.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said he ordered the five nuclear tests to protect his nation in what he described as a dangerous nuclear neighborhood, where India is bordered by foes Pakistan and China.

China, which holds a large patch of territory in the Himalayas that is claimed by India, has been one of Pakistan’s main suppliers of nuclear and missile technology.

What’s more, the BJP matched its deeds with aggressive words. Last week, Vajpayee pointedly warned Pakistan about its support for Muslim insurgents in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and he suggested that he might launch a strike into Pakistan.

A.K. Advani, the party president, told Pakistan to submit to the changed strategic situation.

All week long, India and Pakistan have bombarded each other with artillery along their disputed border in Kashmir.

The fear of many people inside and outside the Indian subcontinent is that those exchanges could burn out of control--and perhaps spark a nuclear exchange. It was just such fears that sent U.S. diplomats racing to New Delhi and Islamabad in 1990 to defuse a confrontation that they feared was about to go nuclear.

“There is always a danger that things will get out of control,” retired Pakistani Gen. Nishat Ahmad said.

India Accused of Planning Attack

On Thursday, even before the latest tests were announced, tensions flared again as Pakistan accused India of preparing to launch a preemptive attack on its nuclear facilities.

A spokesman for the Indian government called the charges absurd.

After Thursday’s tests, Vajpayee said Pakistan’s nuclear detonations proved his decision to test was right.

“Pakistan’s nuclear tests have confirmed what has been known all along--that the country has been in possession of nuclear weapons,” Vajpayee’s government said in a statement. “We expect that those who disagreed with us will reassess their stand.”

While the Indian nuclear tests caught the world--and U.S. intelligence officers--by surprise, the Pakistani tests were widely anticipated.

Staff writers Jonathan Peterson, Robin Wright and Ed Chen in Washington, John-Thor Dahlburg in New Delhi and Tom Petruno in Los Angeles contributed to this report.