Look ahead, says father of Pak. a-bomb

ISLAMABAD, MAY 28. The father of Pakistan's atomic bomb says his country should now look ahead to peaceful scientific advancement rather than harp on the nuclear prowess it proved two years ago to compete with arch- rival India.

In an interview with Reuters television on the anniversary of Pakistan's May 28, 1998 nuclear blasts, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan said those blasts were necessary to give the country a credible deterrence after India did the same.

But he said the feat, mainly credited to him as the country's top nuclear scientist, was messed up economically by the then Government of Nawaz Sharif with the much-resented freezing of foreign currency bank accounts.

Mr. Khan, 64, lamented that Pakistan was doing little in science and technology and said he and his colleagues had been advising Government authorities that ``please, don't keep on harping what happened two years ago. ``It was a good thing, it gave us a viable deterrence, but please forget it now. Now concentrate on the development of science and technology,'' he said.

``One should not live in the past. The nuclear weapons or whatever we produced is not something that we should really be very, very proud of,'' said Mr. Khan, who also created the 2,000- Km range Ghauri ballistic missile that can carry nuclear warheads. ``We should look forward now.''

Mr. Khan said Pakistan ``had no option'' but to carry out the tests in the southwestern Chagai mountains to prove its capability to deter India, with which it has fought three wars since independence from Britian in 1947.

``But unfortunately the Government of the time...made a mess of it. Instead of benefiting from it, getting the people behind it, due to the one step of usurping the foreign exchange of expatriates and local Pakistanis, it killed the whole spirit.''

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Section  : International
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