Having had close links with India and Pakistan a decade ago, Robert M Gates, nominated as the next US Defence Secretary, is said to have helped avert a nuclear war between the two South Asian neighbours in 1990.
WASHINGTON: Having had close links with India and Pakistan a decade ago, Robert M Gates, nominated as the next Defence Secretary, is said to have helped avert a nuclear war between the two South Asian neighbours in 1990.
Gates, who served as Deputy National Security Adviser under the Bush Sr. and then as CIA Director, visited the two countries in May, 1990 during heightened tension.
However, the view that Gates visited India and Pakistan to "defuse" a nuclear standoff between the two countries has been brushed off by Indian analysts and former senior officials as "highly alarmist".
According to an article in The New York Times by Seymour Hersh, Pakistan had deployed its armoured tank units along the Indian border and had secretly put its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert."
"...the Bush administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India." Hersh quotes Richard J Kerr, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1990, as saying.
"It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have faced since I've been in the U.S. government. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis," Kerr told Hersh.
Gates had to break away from a visit to Russia and "rush" to the Indian subcontinent,he reportedly told Hersh that "Pakistan and India seemed to be caught in a cycle that they couldn't break out of. I was convinced that if a war started, it would be nuclear."
According to Hersh, the US had evidence that Pakistan was on verge of deploying its nuclear weapons during the crisis and it was this fact which made the Gates mission urgent.
Gates first traveled to Islamabad where he met President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Army Chief Mirza Aslam Beg and called for restraint; and in New Delhi he is said to have met the then Prime Minister, the Minister of External Affairs Minister and the Minister of State for Defence.
Analysts said that while the "crisis" may have abated two weeks after the Gates' trip, the notion that a "nuclear" crisis had been averted is exaggerated.
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