After Chagai-Pakistan's next mission |
Every May, Pakistan returns to the mountains of Chagai. In the minds of Pakistanis, the image is familiar: the desert hills in a deserted part of Baluchistan turning white, an announcement from Islamabad, the surge of public pride, and a country telling itself that it has shifted history and secured its geography.
Pakistan was no longer merely asking to be heard in the world. It had forced the world to listen. For Pakistanis, the nuclear tests were about more than the weapons. They were about the fear that a state created through sacrifice could be pressured, punished, dismembered or dictated to by stronger powers.
Nuclear tests were about India, the region’s dominant military power, and the need to ensure that Pakistan would never again face strategic humiliation. So it built a credible deterrence. This is why the Chagai hills of Baluchistan and May 1998 still matter in the collective consciousness of the nation.
Pakistan’s nuclear capability gave it something no alliance or diplomatic assurance could provide: a military parity with India at the highest level of national defence. It did not make Pakistan richer. It did not make its politics wiser. It did not fix its institutions. But it did change the strategic equation.
It reduced the possibility that Pakistan could be treated like a disposable state, invaded or broken under the logic later applied elsewhere in the Muslim world – remember Iraq and Libya. In that sense, the bomb was never an act of aggression.
For Pakistan, it was........