India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons – and a history of war and terrorism.
Pakistan says it ‘reserves the right’ to respond after India strikes
India attacked Pakistan after last month’s deadly Hindu tourist attack in Indian Kashmir. Pakistani officials say they “reserve the right” to respond.
- New Delhi controls around 172 nuclear weapons, according to the Arms Control Association.
- Pakistan has approximately 170 nuclear warheads.
India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations, saw a decades-old conflict reignite May 7 as a terror attack in the disputed region of Kashmir led India to carry out cross-border airstrikes.
India’s government blames Pakistan for an April 22 terror attack that killed 26 tourists in India-administered Kashmir. Islamabad denies involvement.
The Pakistani military claims it shot down Indian planes during the airstrikes and it fired artillery across the disputed border. Pakistan promised further retaliation.
The rising tensions have alarmed world leaders, to include President Donald Trump. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on May 7 the fighting is “so terrible” and said he wants the warring countries to work it out.
“I get along with both. I know both very well,” he said. “I want to see them stop. And hopefully they can stop now. They’ve gone tit-for-tat, so hopefully they can stop now.”
He added: “And if I can do anything to help, I will − I will be there.”
Although Trump did not directly reference the possibility of a nuclear exchange between the two countries, concern about the countries’ nuclear arsenals has historically spiked during perious of conflict.
Here’s how India and Pakistan developed their nuclear weapons.
How India created its nuclear arsenal
In the late 1950s, India established its nuclear program with assistance from the U.S. and Canada, who provided nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel. The program was explicitly peaceful in its stated intent, and India agreed to safeguards meant to prevent the reactors and their fuel from being used for weapons.
Nuclear nonproliferation experts say India exploited a loophole in the safeguards when it began secretly reprocessing spent fuel into plutonium in the 1960s − one of the two main methods of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
New Delhi’s secret bomb development program officially began in 1964, but it reached a fever pitch by the early 1970s when multiple teams of Indian physicists simultaneously developed different weapons components needed to create a nuclear explosion from the reprocessed plutonium.
The country’s first nuclear test, code-named Smiling Buddha, took place in 1974 in a remote portion of the country’s northwest. India claimed the explosion was “peaceful,” but the international community concluded (and lead scientists later revealed) they had detonated a bomb.
In response, Canada halted nuclear cooperation with India. Although the U.S. did not impose sanctions or terminate nuclear assistance to New Delhi, the failure of the safeguards helped inspire Congress to pass the 1978 Nuclear Nonproliferation Act.
Over the ensuing decades, India developed stronger thermonuclear weapons and − to the world’s surprise − successfully tested them in 1998. Today, New Delhi controls around 172 nuclear weapons, according to the Arms Control Association.
How Pakistan built its nukes
The story of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program all but begins with A.Q. Khan, a metallurgist born in pre-partition India and raised in newly independent Pakistan.
Khan pursued graduate study in Europe and in 1972, he started working for a nuclear engineering consulting firm in Amsterdam where he gained access to information on ultra-centrifuges that were able to highly enrich radioactive uranium — the second main method of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
After India handed Pakistan a humiliating military defeat in a 1971 war and conducted the Smiling Buddha nuclear test in 1974, Khan wrote to Pakistan’s prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and offered to spearhead a nuclear weapons program for his home country. Khan successfully smuggled information, photos, blueprints, and even components of the centrifuges to the Pakistan embassy in the Netherlanda before successfully escaping to lead the program.
Khan led secret production efforts (in parallel to another Pakistani weapons program) that successfully yielded nuclear warheads in 1986, though they were not tested until 1998 − mere weeks after India tested its new thermonuclear weapons.
Khan also was linked with distributing nuclear weapons technology to rogue states including North Korea, Iran, and Libya.
Pakistan today has approximately 170 nuclear warheads, according to the Arms Control Association.
Contributing: Francesca Chambers
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