Musharraf challenges Indian arms spree

President Pervez Musharraf vowed yesterday that Pakistan would match what he called a huge arms build-up by rival and fellow nuclear power India that had upset the balance of forces in South Asia.

Musharraf, wrapping up a three-day state visit to South Korea, also restated his earlier denials that Pakistan had traded its nuclear weapons expertise for North Korean missile technology.

Musharraf told a news conference that peace with his giant neighbor India was maintained by keeping a balance of forces.

"This balance of forces was tilted -- and imbalance created -- when India went for the nuclear and missile forces, and similar imbalance is being created now through massive acquisition of arms by our adversary, India," he said without elaborating.

"We will respond to this imbalance, we will rectify this imbalance in the future through all means possible," said the army general, who took power in a bloodless 1999 coup.

Musharraf said it was the threat from India that had driven Pakistan to conduct its first nuclear tests in 1998. He said Islamabad had never proliferated nuclear technology to Seoul's communist neighbor, although it had bought North Korean missiles. He said reported visits to North Korea by nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, revered by many in Pakistan as the father of the country's nuclear bomb, were connected to purchases of conventional short-range missiles.

"We have purchased these missiles from North Korea. We have also had a transfer of technology of these missiles. We now manufacture ourselves these missiles in the same organization that Dr A.Q. Khan headed," he said.

Some media reports say Khan made a dozen trips to North Korea. A Pakistani firm Khan once headed was slapped with US sanctions in March last year, after Washington accused it of transferring nuclear-capable missiles from North Korea to Pakistan.