Pakistan’s Nuclear Threat, Terror Attacks, and Benazir’s Sobering Thoughts

By Shyam Bhatia

London. In 2011, the world was stunned to learn that Osama bin Laden — the most wanted terrorist in the world — had been living for years in a compound in Abbottabad, adjacent to the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA), and apparently under its protection. The discovery shattered Islamabad’s claims of innocence and exposed a pattern of deceit and duplicity. The warning signs had been there, were already there, just that the US and other nations were just not listening.

A decade earlier in 2003, I sat with former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in the living room of her beautiful Dubai villa. She was in exile with her children. There were no handlers, no recorders — just candour, born of long friendship dating back to our Oxford days. What she told me that day has never been published before.

But as India and Pakistan once again exchanged fire, and nearly came to a full scale war, following ISI’s terror attacks in Pahalgam murdering innocent tourists, her words have acquired a new and chilling relevance.

“Let me ask you a silly question,” I said. “As a Pakistani leader, did you ever seriously consider launching a nuclear strike on India?”

Bhutto didn’t flinch.

“For God’s sake, never have I ever for a moment woken up with such a horrible thought,” she replied. “Because I know that nuking India — even if I was mad enough to think that — would also end up nuking my own people.

Her understanding of deterrence was sobering.

Trading n-Tech for Missiles with North Korea

Bhutto went further. She had been a classmate in Oxford and was comfortable to talk.

She admitted that when Pakistan faced serious obstacles in its missile development programme, she had authorised — and executed — a covert Nuclear Technology-For-Missiles deal with North Korea.

She personally carried CDs containing uranium enrichment process and data in “an overcoat with the deepest possible pockets.” In return, she flew back parts of a NoDong missile aboard her official aircraft. Pakistani engineers later used those parts and technology to build the Ghauri missile.

Years later, North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yop confirmed the existence of this trade. But Bhutto had told me this long before.

Benazir also acknowledged indigenous missile work — the Hatf series — and Chinese assistance with M-9 and M-11 solid-fuel systems.

Yet Bhutto’s tone was never triumphalist. She saw the arms race as a strategic trap. Parity, not ambition, was driving escalation. And unlike the generals who denied bin Laden’s presence, she spoke without evasion.

The Nuclear Smuggler – Abdul Qadeer Khan

Bhutto described her first impressions of Abdul Qadeer Khan — later disgraced for running a global nuclear black market.

“When I knew him, he was a modest man. The huge ego only started in 1980,” she said. “I first came across him when he came to see me with Munir [Ahmed Khan]. They seemed like government servants, ready to carry out government orders.”

This was not hero-worship. It was a clear-eyed view of a system built not on checks and balances, but on quiet obedience.

Pakistan Deep State’s Do and Deny

Bhutto’s private candour contrasts sharply with the strategic opacity of the Pakistani state.

The same security architecture that later sheltered bin Laden — while receiving billions in US aid — had already been used to smuggle nuclear secrets and missile parts. What she revealed, and what Abbottabad confirmed, was not just duplicity, but a deliberate system of Do and Deny.

India had responded with diplomacy and intelligence warnings to US and other western powers. But Pakistan’s Western allies would rarely confront Pakistan’s behaviour — especially when Islamabad served other geopolitical ends.

The Proliferation Security Initiative proved toothless. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) remained silent.

Pakistan was a nuclear proliferator wrapped in impunity.

Kashmir

I asked Bhutto about Kashmir. She replied:

“We had two agenda items: One was Kashmir and the other was India–Pakistan. We said we must not let progress on one issue impede progress on the other. If we disagreed over the territorial unity of Kashmir, we can still work for the social unity of Kashmir by working for safe and open borders.”

She then asked: “With a population of over a billion people and high rates of poverty amid islands of affluence, what do we do to pick ourselves out of this mess for the future?”

Bhutto’s approach was also shaped by gender.

In a patriarchal system, her calls for restraint were often misread as weakness. But her clarity stands out in contrast to the maximalist fantasies of her successors.

Pakistan’s First Strike Option

Benazir rejected Pakistan’s emerging counterforce temptation — the belief that a rapid first strike could decapitate Indian command and control. For her, those were dangerous illusions, divorced from second-strike realities.

“Neither India can use the nuke, nor can Pakistan. Whichever country is throwing that nuke,” she said, “knows there is not enough time or space — and is going to get it [thrown] back.”

I may mention, considering the latest Pakistani terror attacks on India, what I hear from New Delhi: India is committed to its No First Use (NFU) policy but if the Pakistani mullahs in power – Mullah Asim Munir, the army chief as he is called there – is foolish enough, the “system is automatically programmed to destroy Pakistan.”

Nuking anyone is a horrible thought, unacceptable at any point for human civilisation. Unfortunately, Pakistani generals have been on TV in the recent days threatening nuclear strikes on India.

It will be as unfortunate for Pakistan as for India.

Will the Pakistani generals, and more importantly, the Pakistani people, listen to Benazir Bhutto’s sobering words of wisdom! I hope they do. In Rawalpindi. And all over Pakistan.

And maybe India too.