PAKISTAN and India agreed on Friday (June 24) to try to ease fears about their nuclear arsenals, in unexpectedly positive talks between the two countries’ top diplomats.
Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir agreed to expand confidence-building measures in both their nuclear and conventional weapons.
A meeting of experts would be asked to “consider additional measures to build trust and confidence and promote peace and security,” they said in a joint statement after a two-day meeting in Islamabad.
The outcome of the talks was better than expected, with both foreign secretaries holding an unscheduled joint news conference, and also agreeing to try to improve trade and travel across the ceasefire line dividing disputed Kashmir.
“The ideology of military conflict should have no place in the 21st century,” Rao told the news conference.
India and Pakistan in February resumed a formal peace process broken off after the November 2008 attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants which killed 166 people.
But as in previous peace efforts, progress has been slow, and vulnerable to any attempts by Islamist militants to try to trigger a war between Pakistan and India by launching another Mumbai-style attack.
“Negative thinking exists on both sides so there are chances that either one of them could misread or miscalculate the other’s movement and begin assembling and loading nuclear weapons,” said Pakistan defence analyst Hassan Askari Rizvi.
The outcome of the talks was very good, he said. “They should talk more and more because this is how they can minimise the threat of war and particularly nuclear war.”
Uday Bhaskar, director of the National Maritime Foundation think tank in New Delhi, also welcomed the inclusion of nuclear confidence-building measures in the talks.
