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Pakistan's cruise missile will spur arms race in Asia, says expert

Vladimir Radyuhin

"This sounds an alarm bell for all adjacent regions"

MOSCOW: The test firing of a cruise missile by Pakistan will spur the arms race in Asia and increase the risk of its nuclear arms falling into the hands of Islamic radicals, Russian experts and media said.

The `Babur' missile test conducted on Thursday had implications that go beyond the India-Pakistan relations, said Professor Yuri Galenovich of Russia's Institute of the Far East. "This sounds an alarm bell for all adjacent regions. Neighbouring countries will no doubt take retaliatory measures, which will trigger a new spiral of the arms race in Asia," the scholar said. "But the main thing is that Pakistan is one of the military power centres in the Muslim world and its nuclear bomb has been called the `Islamic bomb'. Now we have the `Islamic cruise missile'."

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