India–Pakistan: Benazir Bhutto’s chilling warning

SShyam Bhatia is an award-winning author and war reporter based in London. His books include “India’s Nuclear Bomb,” “Brighter than the Baghdad Sun” and Benazir Bhutto’s biography, “Goodbye Shahzadi.”

As India and Pakistan exchange fire across a border that has become a front line once more, the words of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto echo hauntingly, with extraordinary clarity about the suicidal logic of nuclear war.

Her words came in a conversation we had in Dubai in 2003, where she was living in exile with her children. We’d known each other since our student days at Oxford University. That long friendship allowed for a candor that formal political interviews often lack. And what she told me — quietly, without notes, and never published until now — reads like a warning meant for this very moment.

“Let me ask you a silly question,” I began. “As a Pakistani leader,” did she ever contemplate sanctioning nuclear strikes against India.

“For God’s sake, never have I ever for a moment woken up with such a thought,” she said. “Because I know that nuking India — even if I was mad enough to think that — would end up with nuking my own people. And this is something I don’t understand — how this is a deterrent.”

More than two decades later, with the two countries back on the brink of full-blown war, her voice carries chilling relevance. It’s a reminder of what hangs in the balance when deterrence becomes doctrine, and doctrine begins to fray amid high emotions and anger.

Later in that same conversation, Bhutto also offered a revelation. At a time when Pakistan faced technological problems in its missile program, she admitted playing a personal role in an illicit exchange of secrets with North Korea.

She described how she carried CDs containing sensitive nuclear data on uranium enrichment, hidden inside “an overcoat with the deepest possible pockets.”

In return, she said, North Korea handed over disassembled components of a NoDong missile, which she flew back to Pakistan on her official aircraft. Pakistani scientists would later adapt those parts for use in their Ghauri missiles.

Years later, North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yop publicly testified to the existence of such a trade between Pyongyang and Islamabad, confirming what Bhutto privately shared in exile.

Speaking in that Dubai living room, she also outlined Pakistan’s indigenous efforts, especially the Hatf missile series, and acknowledged China’s assistance with the M-9 and M-11 solid-fuel systems.

India was showcasing its own progress at the time: Prithvi short-range missiles, the Akash and Trishul air defense systems, and Rohini-class satellite launches.

But Bhutto made no attempt to glorify Pakistan’s buildup, instead placing the developments in a pragmatic light. The regional arms race, she implied, was a grim inevitability — one propelled by strategic parity, not ambition.

Indian security personnel patrol a security checkpoint in the outskirts of Srinagar. | Farooq Khan/EPA

When I asked whether she had ever discussed Kashmir with former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, her answer conveyed realism, while revealing a glimmer of regional idealism.

“We had two agenda items: One was Kashmir and [the] other was India–Pakistan, and we said we must not let progress on one issue impede progress on the other. If we disagreed over the territorial unity of Kashmir, we can still work for the social unity of Kashmir by working for safe and open borders.”

Then, she added, quietly: “I feel we must ask ourselves: With a population of over a billion people and high rates of poverty amid islands of affluence, what do we do to pick ourselves out of this mess for the future?”

She spoke, too, of the man who would come to be the most controversial figure in Pakistan’s nuclear history: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear physicist colloquially known as the father of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program.

“When I knew him, he was a modest man. The huge ego only started in 1980. I first came across him when he came to see me with Munir,” she recalled, referring to Munir Ahmed Khan, the then-chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. “They seemed like government servants, ready to carry out government orders. The prime minister called them, they came.”

Her tone was neither reverent nor condemnatory — simply descriptive, as if charting a trajectory she’d been able to observe up close. The myth of Khan as a national savior, she implied, had come later, fueled as much by politics and insecurity as by any singular scientific achievement.

This was no press conference. It was a conversation in exile — unguarded, revealing and now historically valuable. At a time when nuclear saber-rattling is back in fashion and disarmament feels like a dream deferred, Bhutto’s words strike like an alarm.

She had walked the corridors of power and knew what it meant to wield terrible responsibility. Yet, she also understood, instinctively, the absurdity of mutual destruction.

“Neither India can use the nuke, nor can Pakistan. Whichever country is throwing that nuke,” she said, “knows there is not enough time or space — and is going to get it [thrown] back.”

More than 20 years later, that logic remains sound.