[LEMONS] 10.30.2001
The New Yorker: Fact
India has had a tactical atomic bomb since the nineteen-seventies, and Pakistan's became operational in the late nineteen-eighties, although Pakistani leaders denied this fact for years. The Kashmiri dispute first veered close to nuclear confrontation in 1990. That spring, the American National Security Agency was monitoring what seemed to be yet another slowly escalating series of Pakistani and Indian attacks, when intercepts revealed that the Pakistani leadership had "panicked," as a senior intelligence official put it, at the prospect of a pre?mptive Indian strike and had readied its small arsenal of nuclear warheads. (The previous fall, the Bush Administration had assured Congress that Pakistan did not possess such weapons--although it knew better--in order to gain continued approval for military aid to the country.)
But I'm sure the Bushies are on the up and up now...
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