How Pakistan’s Faulty Missiles Stopped a Nuclear War During Kargil

The issue of Indo-Pak is the world known affair but what made Pakistan not to go Nuclear on Kargil War. Though Pakistan planned to deploy nuclear weapons against India during the 1999 Kargil War.

According to the retired Pakistani nuclear scientist who allegedly claimed that Pak’s former leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 military adventurism in the Kargil region has failed because of the North Korea-aided, nuclear-capable Ghauri missiles he needed to deploy then had a defective guidance system.

However, the scientist has confirmed it through the statement, “during 1999 Kargil crisis the former army chief Musharraf, “wanted to deploy Ghauri missiles, but air went out of his balloon when the top general in charge of the missile program told him the missile had a faulty guidance system.”

Pakistan had carried out the successful first test of the intermediate-range ballistic missile which has developed by Khan Research Laboratory with North Korean assistance back on April 6, 1998.

Musharraf said that the ballistic missile failed to reach its predesignated impact point in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan. To be volatile Line of Control in disputed Kashmir, after Musharraf became chief of the army staff began planning the ill-fated incursions to burst out the worst outbreak of fighting since the India-Pakistan war of 1971.

Musharraf was unaware of the Ghauri missile’s faulty guidance system and learned the truth in March 1999 before the Kargil war from Lt. Gen. Zulfikar Khan. And, suddenly after that, he ordered another Ghauri test. All this happened just three days after India tested its Agni-2 intermediate-range ballistic missile.

But, fortunately for India and unfortunately for Pakistan, this test also failed but was publicly declared a success, however. And, the scientist said North Koreans had confronted with the fault in their technology at army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

“The North Koreans started talking left and right but were told to open their eyes and take care of the guidance system in their Nodong missiles,” said the scientist.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the exposed nuclear scientist from Pakistan whose laboratory develops nuclear warheads for the country’s missiles, admits there was a row about the Ghauri’s accuracy. But Khan exposes the statement that Musharraf wanted to return them over their faulty guidance system, saying, “What difference does it make if a nuclear-tipped missile falls 1 km left or right of the predetermined impact point?”

Meanwhile, the Kargil war followed in the wake of six nuclear tests carried out by Pak, which almost the triggered to ban against the country.

Interestingly, the Musharraf in his autobiography wrote, “I can also say with authority that in 1999 our nuclear capability was not yet operational. Merely exploding a bomb does not mean that you are operationally capable of deploying nuclear force in the field and delivering a bomb across the border over a selected target.” Musharraf also called it a “myth.”
 

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