Pakistan and India exchanged lists yesterday of their nuclear installations under an accord aimed at protecting the sites in case of war, officials said, amid simmering tensions over the Mumbai attacks.
The South Asian rivals, whose relations have been rocky since the deadly November attacks on India’s financial center Mumbai, have exchanged the lists annually since 1992, under an agreement that came into force the previous year.
“The lists have been exchanged at the foreign ministries in New Delhi and Islamabad,” a spokesman for the foreign office in Islamabad, Mohammad Sadiq, said.
Under the agreement, both sides are to refrain from attacking nuclear facilities in the event of a war. The neighbors have also set up a telephone hotline to prevent accidental nuclear conflict.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between them but claimed in full by both.
The two countries came close to another war in 2002 after an attack on the Indian parliament that New Delhi blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba — the same group it blames for the carnage in Mumbai.
But after deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to the border, Islamabad and New Delhi retreated following intense international mediation. In 2004, they launched a peace process, but that is now on hold following the Mumbai attacks.
US President George W. Bush on Wednesday spoke with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. The White House said all had agreed on the need to avoid any increase in tensions.
Pakistan on Tuesday asked India to resume dialogue and urged New Delhi to deactivate its forward air bases and redeploy troops to peacetime locations, but India denied it had moved troops into offensive positions on the border.
India conducted nuclear weapons tests in May 1998. Pakistan, in a tit-for-tat response, detonated its own devices a few days later. In October 2005, the two sides formalized an agreement on pre-notification of ballistic missile tests.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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