World Notes: Pakistan

As long as Pakistan served as a pro-Western staging ground for the covert war in Afghanistan, successive U.S. Presidents professed to believe their ally's long-standing claim that it did not possess nuclear bombs. But that increasingly transparent fiction finally melted down in 1990, when Congress cut off about $600 million in aid to Islamabad. Since then, the situation has been stalemated.

Last week, in an interview with the Washington Post, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Shahryar Khan offered the first official acknowledgment that his country does possess both the necessary technological "elements" and the know-how to produce a nuclear explosion. Pakistan was finally becoming candid about its capabilities, Khan said, to "avoid credibility gaps." The Foreign Secretary declared that Pakistan has voluntarily frozen production of enriched uranium fuel. But he insisted that a "public perception problem" at home precludes any destruction of existing weapons, as demanded by the U.S. Congress, unless India agrees to a similar step. Since New Delhi has shown little inclination to do so, Pakistan's newfound honesty seems unlikely to reopen the aid taps.