The only option

Reacting to the stepped-up international campaign to malign Pakistan's nuclear programme, the National Command Authority (NCA) met on Thursday and announced in most unequivocal terms the country's determination to maintain Credible Minimum Deterrence (CMD) at all costs.
It also informed the potential detractors of the "operational readiness of Pakistan's strategic weapons", as Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, speaking from the NCA platform, vowed that "promoting and protecting the national interests of Pakistan is a sacred responsibility and we will never fail in this noble duty".
These rather bold words, spoken with uncharacteristic openness by an otherwise hush-hush organisation, tend to suggest the seriousness of the moves against Pakistan's nuclear programme. No doubt from the very word go Pakistan's nuclear programme has come under attack by hostile forces and their over-arching media lobbies, often in the name of the Islamic Bomb, but of late this hostility has acquired the form of a concerted campaign. Having failed at Conference of Disarmament to dispossess Pakistan of its fissile-material production capability, these forces are now working to achieve their objective with the connivance of the UN Security Council.
At the same time, a poisonous vilification media campaign has been launched to undermine the security and safety aspects of Pakistan's strategic assets, even making the outlandish claims that these assets can fall into the wrong hands. The funniest of these attempts has come to light only recently, in that a fabricated letter has been published by some newspapers alleging that some senior Generals of Pak Army had received money to sell nuclear secrets to North Korea.
Even when the story stands condemned, instantly the negativity it tends to inject in many a mind in the West cannot be overlooked. Mind you, Iraq was invaded in the name of dispossessing Saddam Hussain of his 'nuclear bombs', which where neither here nor there except in the empty head of the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell planted by the then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfield, with the help of the British.
The NCA has done well to sound a timely warning to the detractors of Pakistan's nuclear programme. Not that Pakistan would love to be a nuclear power only for the heck of it; it is its security compulsion dictated essentially by India's preponderance in conventional weaponry. If there is peace in South Asia today, one principal reason for that is the nuclear parity between Pakistan and India. Over time India has come to recognise the logic of this argument and we hope the Pak-India working group would succeed firming up the confidence-building measures (CBMs) between the two nuclear rivals.
Pakistan needs nuclear technology not for weapons alone, it needs it even more badly for power generation. With plenty of technical expertise available over the last many decades Pakistan by now should have set up many more nuclear power stations, especially in the days when the embargoes were much less stringent while international opinion was less hostile. But that could not be done, and as a consequence nuclear power generation capacity is extremely limited and the country is facing long spells of powder outages.
Now that the NCA has reviewed and approved the self-sustaining Nuclear Power Programme 2050 "to meet the existing energy shortfalls and to respond to the future requirements of a growing population and economy" it is our hope that the authorities would persist in their resolve to defend and protect Pakistan's nuclear option. Pakistan has also to speed up its space programme which the NCA said it would do. But at the same time the government must come out in the open and defend the rationale of Pakistan to exploit nuclear technology for national defence and security and people's welfare and development.
We must seek an explanation from the United States, whose interests in the region we are defending and promoting at enormous cost, why we cannot be given the same nuclear co-operation as available to India. And we should also question the discrimination on the part the Nuclear Supplier Group, by sidelining Pakistan, while opening up its doors to India - in defiance of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Given the peculiar security challenges in South Asia, the enormous generation-consumption gap energy produced by conventional means and resources and the cost-effectiveness of nuclear energy over longer period Pakistan has no alternative to making the best use of nuclear technology.