Islamabad: Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) Chairman, General Khalid Shameem Wynne, has said that the country is compelled to maintain strong conventional forces backed up by nuclear weapons because of its regional environment.
“Our nuclear capability is only intended to ensure peace and stability. We have no ambitions of becoming a regional power, but we have every intention of preserving our sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the Nation quoted Wynne, as saying.
“We seek nothing beyond our own secure frontiers and we pose no threat to any other country,” he added.
Pakistan became the seventh country in the world to successfully develop and test nuclear weapons in 1998.
In May 1998, Pakistan had detonated five nuclear devices in the Chagai Hills in an operation named Chagai-I.
A Washington-based science think tank, Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), had estimated that Pakistan possessed around 200 nuclear weapons by the end of 2009.
It had also reported that the country was increasing its capacity to produce plutonium at its Khushab nuclear facility.
ANI
