The Hindu : No proof of Musharraf's role in nuclear scam, says Rumsfeld

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 29, 2004

International

International

No proof of Musharraf's role in nuclear scam, says Rumsfeld

W ashington MARCH 28. The United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said today that he had seen no evidence that the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, was involved in leaking nuclear secrets, but he could not say if Pakistan's military was involved.

"I do not believe that there's any evidence or any suggestion that President Musharraf was involved," he told ABC television, adding that Musharraf is a "person with a lot of courage'' who has been "tremendously cooperative" in the U.S. "war on terror."

Asked whether high-level Pakistani military officials could have been involved, he said: ``I'm not going to say that. That's where — listen, you can't prove a negative. You can't say that I know that every person connected with the Pakistani military over some sustained period of time had no knowledge or participation whatsoever. That's silly. I couldn't do that."

Dr. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, last month publicly confessed that he had shared nuclear secrets with Iran, Libya and North Korea. Gen. Musharraf later pardoned Dr. Khan.

`No deal'

Gen. Musharraf sought to play down the impact of the nuclear proliferation by the country's top scientist, even as he rejected any quid pro quo deal with the U.S. for Washington's silence on the issue in return for Islamabad's crackdown on the Al-Qaeda. "People are over-assessing the physical damage of the proliferation," he said.

"If a country is given drawings or parts of centrifuges and even whole centrifuge, that does not mean it is capable of producing a nuclear device.

It is not easy. It is a highly technical issue — having got a bomb, how to explode the bomb. You can break it, you can throw it but cannot explode it unless you have proper trigger mechanism," he said.

It is "absolutely impossible" for the Al-Qaeda to have "suitcase nuclear bombs."

"If you talk of briefcase bombs, you are talking of trigger mechanism. It is not that you can sit in mountain and make things like this," he said.

Asked about the "deal'' with the U.S., he retorted: "It is all humbug." If anyone in the United States thinks that Pakistan should be coerced in some direction, ``I am afraid they do not know ground realties here." he said. — AFP, PTI

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