Pakistan as a Frontline State in the Terror War

Arjun - You don`t need a Time Machine to admit Israel helped India to develop Nuclear capability and missile technology but only a Truth Capsule. Here is one from your `own pharmacy`.

http://www.saag.org/papers2/paper131.html

INDIA – ISRAEL RELATIONS: THE IMPERATIVES FOR ENHANCED STRATEGIC COOPERATION

by Dr.Subhash Kapila

India’s Military and Intelligence Contacts with Israel in the Years Before Diplomatic Recognition

Devoid of access to classified documents and entirely by deductive analysis, it becomes apparent that beginning in the 1970’s, India did realise that its West Asian Policies of excluding Israel were wrong. In the military field in India’s critical hour of need of the 1971 war with Pakistan, India sought Israel’s help to supply it with the devastating artillery weapon, 160 mm mortars and ammunition, exclusively manufactured in Israel.

Facilitating such covert Israel aid was that:

``Acting widely as an alternative diplomatic service, the Mossad has opened doors and maintained relations with dozens of countries which prefer that these connections not be known. The Mossad simply gives the other nation an easy way out – receiving military, medical and agricultural advice from the overenthusiastic Israelis without risking economic or political boycotts of the Arab World``.4

It also appears that at the about the same time India - Israel intelligence cooperation had commenced. The book under quote sets out lucidly that: ``India even more populous was another useful contact point for Meir Amit`s Mossad, even though the Indian Government was also unwilling to tell its 800 million Hindu and Muslim people about the secret relationship with the Jewish State. Clandestine cooperation is always based on common interests, leading to an exchange of information. For India and Israel, the common potential enemy was Pakistan – a Moslem nation committed to helping the Arab countries of the Middle East``.

India had yet not given diplomatic recognition to Israel, but in a rare display of pragmatism and need, it began a covert relationship with Israel in the 1970`s. Again with no records to go by, it can be safely assumed that covert military and intelligence exchanges should have ensued till 1992.

#99 by ali_1
//..don`t scratch that foreskin w..//

Mian - you are obssessed with foreskins! Any bad childhood experiences? May be somebody with foreskin abused you when you were a child....??

I see the whackos are out full strength. Our friend ali_1 not long ago insisted that islam was the ``perfect religion``. Now he has naturally moved on to abuse and ethnic hate speech. No surprises there, the two are faces of the same coin.

Another nut says:

[quote]
And so what if Israel is a democracy?
[end-quote]

Why not just say all knowledge is in the Koran and get it over with? At least you will then be honest, instead of being a hypocrite and pretending to be interested in concepts like human rights, secularism etc.

And now for some reality (yesterday`s WSJ). A sad story of a decent indian being misled and manipulated by islamic fascists and hatemongers. Needless to say hatemongers like Ali_1 and Urstruly will find nothing wrong with this.

PAGE ONE
Student Journeys Into Secret Circle Of Extremism

Muslim Movement Founded in Egypt Sent Tentacles to University in Knoxville
By PAUL M. BARRETT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

One afternoon, Mustafa Saied, a junior at the University of Tennessee, was summoned by a friend to a nearly empty campus cafeteria. The two settled themselves in a quiet corner, and Mr. Saied`s friend invited him to join the Muslim Brotherhood.

``Everything I had learned pointed to the Muslim Brotherhood being an awesome thing, the elite movement,`` says Mr. Saied of his initiation in 1994. ``I cannot tell you the feeling that I felt -- awesome power.``

On that day in Knoxville, Mr. Saied entered a secretive community that was slowly building a roster of young men committed to spreading fundamentalist Islam in the U.S. A movement launched 75 years ago in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has inspired terrorist acts, as well as social reform, throughout the Middle East and has chapters in some European nations. Until recently, law-enforcement officials saw little evidence that the organization was active in the U.S.

Once inside this world, Mr. Saied railed against Jews and Israel during Friday services. He attended meetings in hotels in Toledo and Chicago where radical sheiks glorified jihad. He raised money for Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya, some of which he later learned was funneled to mujahedeen fighters.

In recent years, especially in the wake of the terror attacks in 2001, much of this radical activity in the U.S. has been tamped down, according to law-enforcement officials. The State Department in 1999 barred the sheik Mr. Saied heard endorsing jihad from entering the country. The Treasury Department two years ago froze the accounts of the charity that sent his donations abroad, later designating it a ``financier of terrorism.``

Mr. Saied, now an executive at a Florida environmental-testing firm, underwent a conversion to a less orthodox form of Islam in 1998. Today, his story offers a rare inside look at an extremist movement that flourished in the U.S. And it raises questions about how it managed to spread undetected in the U.S. and whether, since Sept. 11, it has simply moved deeper underground.

``Anti-American sentiment is usually reserved for closed-door discussions or expressed in languages that most Americans don`t understand,`` says Mr. Saied. ``While such rhetoric has been drastically reduced since 9/11, it is still prevalent enough to be a cause for concern.``

Bungee Jumping and Paula Abdul

Mr. Saied`s roots were anything but radical. On the plane to America from India in 1990, he made a to-do list: learn to skateboard and bungee-jump, go on road trips, hang out with girls. It was his first time in the U.S., though he already spoke fluent English, learned from rebroadcasts of Sesame Street and Starsky & Hutch. He selected the University of Tennessee because its catalogue was in the library of the American consulate in his home state of Chennai and happened to include a tear-out application.

In Knoxville he roomed with another outgoing engineering major who, like Mr. Saied, came from a highly educated Indian family. ``We had many hobbies in common: basketball, football, movies, especially music,`` recalls Rajesh Juriasingani. Pop singers George Michael and Paula Abdul were favorites. Religion didn`t come up much, says Mr. Juriasingani, a Hindu who works for a semiconductor company in Chaska, Minn.

When Disney recruited on campus for a work-study program, Mr. Saied leapt at the chance to spend a semester at Disney World, taking evening classes on the company`s approach to business. He left Orlando in 1993 with a photograph of himself, in a suit and tie, shaking hands with Mickey Mouse.

Back in Knoxville, he decided on impulse one afternoon to drop by the inconspicuous mosque near campus, even though it wasn`t a Friday, the day Muslims gather to pray. In the sparsely furnished, one-story mosque, he found a small group of students discussing verses from the Quran. Never shy, Mr. Saied offered a few opinions. His listeners praised his insight and invited him back. He was deeply flattered. ``I knew a couple of things, and they were so impressed,`` he recalls. He says he felt like he had been invited into an elite club. Within days, he had stopped shaving, in the orthodox Muslim fashion, and started praying five times a day.

Mr. Saied had received a religious education growing up. But his father, a petroleum-plant supervisor, and his mother, an electrical engineer who stayed home to raise Mustafa and his older sister, taught their children that ``Muslims weren`t better; they were just people, like Hindus and others,`` he says.

Before his conversion to fundamentalist Islam, Mustafa Saied spent a semester at Disney World.

Spurred on by his new friends, Mr. Saied reshaped his worldview according to a handful of passages from the Quran. Mr. Saied says he and other immigrant-Muslim students were drawn to verses preaching intolerance, such as one that claims that ``whomsoever follows a religion other than Islam ... in the Hereafter he will be among the losers.``

Within a few months of his first visit to the mosque, Mr. Saied was asked to deliver the sermon during a Friday prayer service, attended by students and other Muslims. Speaking from the mosque`s elevated pulpit to about 300 congregants seated on the carpeted floor, Mr. Saied excoriated Americans who indulged in alcohol and premarital sex, or celebrated ``false`` holidays such as Halloween and Christmas. He continued periodically to give sermons, often peppering his speeches with condemnations of Jews and Israel. ``Our view was that suicide bombings were fine,`` he recalls. ``Israel is the oppressor; Israel does not have the right to exist. It must be destroyed.``

Usually, a few worshippers scolded him after his talks. But Mr. Saied and his circle of a dozen or so immigrant-Muslim friends dismissed proponents of a more moderate approach to their religion.

When a visiting religion scholar gave a talk on campus expressing skepticism of Muslim fundamentalists, ``Mustafa stood up, glared around at people and announced, `` `I`m a Muslim fundamentalist and there is only one true Islam,` `` recalls Rosalind Gwynne, the longtime faculty adviser of the University of Tennessee chapter of the Muslim Student Association. ``You see this among some of the immigrant students from time to time: trying to live in this country in a box, hermetically sealed.``

Some of Mr. Saied`s former friends qualify aspects of his account. Khaled Bahjri, then a biology major of Yemeni descent, says some talks focused on Islam being the only legitimate basis for all institutions in society. He confirms that students often denounced ``Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.`` But Dr. Bahjri, now a physician in southern California, says, ``This activist involvement was not anything extremist or wrong,`` and it wasn`t derogatory toward non-Muslims.

By 1994, Mr. Saied had taken to wearing the sort of keffiyah headdress favored by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Mr. Juriasingani says he watched in dismay as his roommate declared he was through with pop music, movies and dating. Mr. Saied eventually dropped all of his non-Muslim friends.

Like many activist Muslim students, Mr. Saied belonged to an Islamic study group. His often focused on the writings of Youssef Al Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric based in Qatar who is a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Sheik Qaradawi is known among many Muslims as relatively moderate on such issues as relations with the West, while endorsing what he calls ``martyrdom operations`` against Israel and Jews.

For months in 1994, Mr. Saied sensed that his allegiance to radical Islam was being tested by members of his study group. He wasn`t sure why he was being scrutinized, but he steadfastly expressed enthusiasm for Sheik Qaradawi`s views. Finally a friend from the United Arab Emirates asked him to join the Muslim Brotherhood, during their conversation in a campus cafeteria. ``Needless to say, I said, `Yes,` `` Mr. Saied recalls.

The Muslim Brotherhood began as a social-reform and religious-revival movement in the 1920s in Egypt. It resisted British domination and evolved into a sometimes-violent organization. Brutally repressed in Egypt, its members scattered throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, spreading their influence. Some attended graduate schools in the U.S. and helped start the Muslim Student Association in 1963, as well as other Muslim social and financial groups.

Today, the Brotherhood remains an active, controversial organization working within the political systems of some Arab countries. Its violent offshoots include the faction that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and the Palestinian terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Another outgrowth of the Brotherhood, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, is led by Osama bin Laden`s top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, who merged his organization into the al Qaeda network in 1998.

In the U.S., the Brotherhood has not operated openly. But federal prosecutors say they are investigating whether Brotherhood members who arrived in the U.S. decades ago have used businesses and charities here to raise and launder money for terrorism abroad.

Mr. Saied started meeting weekly with a handful of students -- a subset of Muslim fundamentalists who were deemed hardcore enough for admission to the Brotherhood. They drank tea and ate baklava or other sweets, and then discussed, theoretically and practically, how to motivate Muslims to return to a way of life entirely shaped by the Quran and Islamic law. They talked of the need to keep the movement`s existence secret.

The leader of the group, who has since returned to the U.A.E., recounted with admiration how the Brotherhood has functioned as a wellspring of jihadist factions. The subject of using violence in the U.S. came up, but the Knoxville Brotherhood circle`s attitude was, ``We don`t do that here, unless necessary,`` Mr. Saied says. The trigger would be ``the Muslim population being in danger, as it is in Palestine,`` and that didn`t seem likely.

Some meetings were hosted by Dr. Bahjri, the former biology major. But he says the participants ``were not involved as a direct group with the Muslim Brotherhood.`` He adds: ``Indirectly, we were impressed by the Muslim Brotherhood understanding of Islam, yes, and we discussed the comprehensive view of Islam. But this is not membership.``

Whatever the precise status of these students, other Muslims in Knoxville eventually became aware of the Brotherhood-influenced circle on campus, says Tarek El-Messidi. As a teenager, Mr. Messidi took religious classes from Mr. Saied on Sundays. Sitting at a table in the mosque`s library with three or four other students, he listened to Mr. Saied discuss Islamic history and sometimes ridicule other religions.

When Mr. Messidi moved on to the university, he headed the Muslim Student Association in 2000 and 2001. ``The Ikhwan influence was still there,`` he says, using the Arabic name for the Brotherhood. Mr. Messidi says that he considered Brotherhood ideology and strategy to be irrelevant in the U.S., and banned it being taught within the MSA.


But for Mr. Saied and his friends, it was very relevant. In December 1994 they attended a conference at a Chicago hotel sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association. The meeting attracted some 6,000 people, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Students listened to lectures, ate communal meals of lamb, chicken and rice, and worshipped in a makeshift prayer area -- a portion of a large banquet room with sheets spread on the carpet to mark a sanctified zone.

At one point, Mr. Saied says, the lights in a packed ballroom went dark, with spotlights trained only on the stage, where several speakers sat. Suddenly, six or seven masked young men dressed as Hamas militants ran down the aisles, waving the organization`s green flags and shouting, ``Idhbaahal Yahood!`` (``Slaughter the Jews!``)

``There were people who were ecstatic over the display, shouting in response, `Allahu Akbar!` (`God is Great!`), and there were also people who were simply shocked that something like this was going on,`` Mr. Saied recalls. He says his own reaction was, ``Cool.``

Mr. Bahjri, who was there, plays down the significance of the Hamas display and the crowd`s response. ``It was just emotional -- a reaction,`` he says.

In December 1995, Mr. Saied attended another Muslim Arab Youth Association conference at a hotel in Toledo, Ohio. Sheik Qaradawi, the cleric affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, gave a speech later transcribed and translated by the Investigative Project, a terrorism-research group based in Washington. Islam will ``overcome all the religions`` and dominate the world, the sheik told his audience of several hundred people. He quoted Islamic texts as saying, ``You shall continue to fight the Jews, and they will fight you, until the Muslims will kill them. And the Jew will hide behind the stone and the tree, and the stone and the tree will say, `Oh, servant of Allah, Oh, Muslim, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!` The resurrection will not come before this happens.``

That weekend, Mr. Saied ran into Sheik Qaradawi as the luminary emerged from a crowded hotel elevator and attempted to fend off people trying to kiss his hand. Mr. Saied stepped forward and greeted the cleric and they talked briefly, he recalls. ``I was awestruck because he was the biggest Muslim Brotherhood figure in the world, and I had met him,`` says Mr. Saied.

In Knoxville, Mr. Saied says he was raising thousands of dollars after Friday prayers at the mosque to buy supplies for needy Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Once he stood up and asked the congregation for enough money to buy 100 tents at $60 each. By the next day, he says, the full $6,000 had been donated.

He contacted the Benevolence International Foundation, a nonprofit in Chicago that sent money to Muslims overseas, and a foundation representative periodically visited Knoxville to pick up contributions. Mr. Saied assumed the money was going to civilians, but in a 1995 conversation at his apartment, the foundation emissary explained that some was channeled to Muslim fighters. Mr. Saied says he immediately stopped raising money.

In November 2002, the Treasury Department alleged that the foundation had extensive financial ties to al Qaeda. The charity denied the allegations, but its chief executive pleaded guilty in 2003 to illegally buying boots and uniforms for Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped the charges involving al Qaeda.

Mr. Saied left the University of Tennessee in 1996, several credits shy of graduating. He moved to Florida with his new wife, Sadaf, who he had met at a Muslim student conference in Baltimore. Devoutly religious, Sadaf Saied, who is of Pakistani descent, recalls being dismayed at the arguments her husband and his friends made in favor of suicide bombing. ``That was a foreign thing to me,`` she says. As an undergraduate at the University of Miami, Ms. Saied says she helped start a moderate Muslim group on campus as an alternative to the one dominated by Arab immigrants whose views were similar to Mr. Saied`s.

Mr. Saied continued his activism in Florida, preaching his view of Islam at a camp for Muslim teenagers. In 1997, he brought Yasir Billoo, one of his former campers, to a meeting of about 30 men in an Orlando hotel conference room. ``Leadership was the topic -- how to organize and get people to follow Muslim Brotherhood members,`` says Mr. Billoo. Afterward, Mr. Billoo says, he was invited to join the Brotherhood. He declined. ``It was way too secretive for me,`` says Mr. Billoo, then 18, who came to the U.S. from Pakistan as a child.

A year later, after attending a young Muslims conference, Mr. Saied and Mr. Billoo joined a discussion in the book-lined basement of a Chicago house. Over coffee, tea and fresh fruit, Mr. Saied launched into a tirade against non-Muslims and Americans. Assim Mohammed, who was hosting the gathering at his parents` home, had encountered the same attitudes in Muslim circles as a student at the University of Illinois.

Mr. Mohammed, now 27, says he and another young man launched a counterattack, arguing that ``the basic foundations of American values are very Islamic -- freedom of religion, freedom of speech, toleration.`` The battle raged for four hours, as several other people listened avidly. Mr. Mohammed and his ally deployed Quranic verses that suggest an embrace of pluralism. One he quoted states, ``O humankind, God has created you from male and female and made you into diverse nations and tribes so that you may come to know each other.``

Late that night, Mr. Saied says he realized that he and Mr. Billoo ``were out of arguments.`` Mentally exhausted, he says he thought, ``Oh my God, what have I been doing?`` Mr. Billoo, now attending Nova Southeastern University`s law school in Fort Lauderdale, describes a similar ``deprogramming experience.``

In the following months, both say they gravitated back toward the more moderate values they had learned growing up.

Today Mr. Saied, who is applying for U.S. citizenship, helps run an environmental-testing firm in Hialeah owned by his wife`s family. He says he still feels guilty about his years of extremism. After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, he co-wrote articles for USA Today and the Christian Science Monitor calling on American Muslims to raise their voices in support of religious moderation and the West. He worries that pockets of ``venomous hatred toward Western society`` persist on some campuses and in certain Islamic communities.

He continues to participate in online Islamic forums, trying to spark debate about how to be a ``progressive Muslim.`` He attends mosque but has shed his head covering and trimmed his beard short. These days he listens to music, both American pop and traditional Indian. He and his wife send their children to public school during the week and religious classes on the weekend. ``Religion,`` as he now sees it, ``gets you close to your spiritual connection with God, and that`s about it.``

Updated December 23, 2003

sigalph235,

``It`s fabulous that Israel and India are finally cooperating on a concrete, if limited, basis. Two pluralist, representative, liberal democracies, each with some neighbors who are BOTH unfriendly and non-democracies. ``

Ever the one for simple views, eh? Neither are cooperating because they are ``pluralist, representative, liberal decomracies``. Zionistan was known to work with South Africa (not eaxactly that bastion of western idealism, was it?) on it`s nuke programme, and India was ever the stanja boy of the USSR (not a representative, liberal democracy by any stretch of the mind).

Whatever is the basis of cooperation, the fact that both countries have common interests, and mutually exclusive ambitions, probably has a lot to do with the co-op.

And so what if Israel is a democracy? It`s a democracy that happens to systematically violate the rights of a large population...South Afrika was a democracy too...whoop-de-doo. Meaningless...

apu_m # 87, chill dude, they have cameras in 7-11... the boss might be watching..... get your hand out of till and don`t scratch that foreskin while at work. dunno what ras has poured there.

India and Israel

It`s fabulous that Israel and India are finally cooperating on a concrete, if limited, basis. Two pluralist, representative, liberal democracies, each with some neighbors who are BOTH unfriendly and non-democracies.

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arjun_m,

Don`t fool yourself...India is just as guilty of exporting bio/chem and nuclear know-how to Iran through front companies. Just hard-asses at NYT and Washington Post don`t seem to want to make a big stink about it.

Iran needs nukes...it`s foolish not to want them. Oh well...there`s a time and place for everything. Perhaps later. But nukes they will get...

re:#71 by jang
Pakistanis may justifiably feel proud of the fact that they have nuclear weapons. How did they get them is something they would not be proud to hear. And, what they are doing with it is something that will make Pakis even less proud.

Pakisanis (civilian, military, govt) put in the most elaborate deception known in recent times to smuggle into Pakistan nuclear secrets from abroad. Abdul ``Xerox`` Khan`s is only one part (but an important part) of that deception. Pak could not have made the bomb indegenously as it simply lacked the technology. It had to get it ASAP as it perceived a grave threat from India (one cannot blame Pak for this; they had seen their country dismembered in 1971 and rightly or wrongly they blamed India). So, it went the only route it could: of smuggling in the technology. In this, everyone who mattered collaborated. If only all Pakis could work like this in nation building, their nation would be another South Korea today. But, faced with a grave threat, Pakis gave it their best. Result: a nuclear ``Islamic`` bomb.

There is nothing to be really proud of the technology, which is today more than 50 years old. It is a costly technology and most nations would not care (even if they could) to make an A-bomb.
In fact, the technology is so freely available that a University kid in USA made a rudimentary A-bomb for his paper. Read about the A-bomb kid:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0351/essay.php

Excerpts:

``In 1977, John Aristotle Phillips found worldwide fame as the Princeton junior who designed a working Nagasaki-class weapon the size of a beach ball.``

``So Phillips proposed a Term Paper to End All Term Papers: ``How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb.`` His instructor was Freeman Dyson, famed colleague of bomb-meisters Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. But Dyson carefully avoided giving his student extra help. Phillips gathered declassified documents at the National Technical Information Service—"Oh, you want to build a bomb too?`` a librarian asked him dryly—and many sleepless nights of calculations later, he pulled it off. Phillips did this while camped out with a broken typewriter in the campus Ivy Club. For extra surrealism, the club members who observed his mysterious work included fellow student Parker Stevenson. Yes, the Hardy Boys` star Parker Stevenson.

So how good was his design?

``I remember telling him I would give him an A for it,`` Dyson e-mails me, ``but advised him to burn it as soon as the grade was registered.`` Phillips was spared the trouble of procuring matches: The U.S. government kept his term paper and classified it. Soon Phillips was pursued by hack journalists and trench-coaters alike: The Pakistani embassy tried to get a copy; agents trailed him; the FBI and CIA got involved. Everything exploded. ``.

Did you read the bit about Pak embassy trying to get a copy. We are talking of 1977. Pak was trying to get access to nuclear secrets even then. And a university student had devised a rudimentary design for the A-bomb, something that the entire nation of Pak could not do and was trying to get its hands on the student`s papers! I do not think this is something to be proud of. As always, most Pakis do not know this and the other deceptions and have always been spoon fed about the greatness of Abdul ``Xerox`` Khan and his team.

Pak has not been a responsible nuclear state, as the world is discovering recently.
People are questioning Pak`s commitment to non-proliferation:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_23-4-2003_pg1_8
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=58572
http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/169/documentid/2202/history/3,652,169,2202

Again, is that something that Pakis want to be proud of?
Sridhar
P.S: I, for one,am not terribly proud of India having a bomb. I believe it was a strategic necessity (vis-a-vis China).

re: post # 67 by Chowk Mullah

``India attacks its own parliament and implicates Paksitan in it, the policy backfires. India fails once again. It hijacks its own airliner and tries to implicate Paksitan and India fails again. India kills its own people - sikhs and hindu yatris and implicates Paksitan in it and policy fails. Even sikhs blame their own government for the massacares. ``
I did not read beyond the above lines. I do not have to. The above lines could be written only by a raving lunatic. I call this a ``frog in the well`` syndrome. Just like a frog in the well refuses to believe there is light and another world outside the well, people like Urstruly refuse to see the light even if they are shown one.
I have heard that Pakis are full of ``conspiration theories`` and Urstruely is a living eg of that.
Urstruly can also add to the list:
1. Indian Army was the one that committed the genocise in Bangladesh and implicated the Paki army
2. Pak Army had actually won the 1971 war but due to Indoo-Jewish conspiracy, victory was snatched from its hands at the last minute
3. Jews were responsible for the Twin tower disaster as most Pakis believe and i would not be surprised if Urstruly is one of them.
So, happy fantasies my dear Mullah and happy smoking the pot.
Sridhar

re:#73 by anew
You seem to be ignorant of a lot of things. Why don`t you go back to rocking back and forth in front of your Holy book and memorizing thoses Arabic verses that you seem to appreciate better.
For your info, India exploded its first nuclear device in 1974. Abdul Kalam`s visit to Israel in the 1990s has nothing to do with nuclear matters. Read the following Url and educate yourself:
http://members.tripod.com/~no_nukes_sa/precis.
``On May 24, 1974, at the height of a nation-wide railway strike (led by the current Defense Minister, George Fernandes), India conducted its first nuclear test at Pokharan in the desert in Rajasthan. The telegram sent to the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Raja Ramanna, the leader of the team that carried out the explosion, read ``The Buddha is Smiling`` – a phrase that has become the source of several article titles. The device tested is believed to have been large and heavy with a yield of about 8-12 kilotons, a little less than the weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima.``

After 6 years of painstaking research, George Perkovich wrote the definitive book ``India`s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation``. George Perkovich was the director of the Secure World Program of the W Alton Jones Foundationt and described how India`s nuclear explosive program evolved from its inception in 1947 through to the early aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear tests.
Url:
http://bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/1999/000163.html

One thing that definitely comes out of the book is that India`s program was largely indegenous.
Excerpts:
``On the nuclear weapons side, Perkovich maintains that the ``Indian
scientists and engineers benefited from various forms of outside
assistance: reactors, heavy water; declassified literature on isotopes;
blueprints and information for tritium separation; literature on implosion
systems for weapons; and so on.Yet, assistance in the form of major
technology has been blocked for decades and Indian teams have developed
self-sufficiency in designing and building nuclear weapons.``

Perkovich said that the broader point is that every state with nuclear
weapons has benefited from contributions by others in one form or another.
He pointed out that the first US bomb was largely the product of work by
scientists from Europe. The Soviet bomb benefited enormously from espionage
from the U.S. The Chinese bomb was developed with ``modest assistance``
from the Soviet Union. The British bomb emerged from collaboration with the
US in the Manhattan Project. France helped Israel extensively. China helped
Pakistan enormously. ``So this focus on how indigenous India`s bomb
capabilities are seems peculiar. Perhaps it is a hangover from colonialism
in two ways: Indians want to insist on self-sufficiency to repudiate any
sense of colonialism, while some of the major powers may want to highlight
India`s dependence in a sort of subconscious message that a poor country
like India could not get by without help. But it`s a rather silly
discussion,`` he added.``
Sridhar

#74 by twintopaz

``If the dutchs were really so advanced and capable then they must have built nuclear bomb..do they have it?..NO``
A lot of nations have the technology to make a nuclear bomb but see no reason to spend millions of dollars when they have no strategic or security reasons to make a nuclear bomb. why should the Dutch make a bomb? Their money is being put to better use. Have i answered your query, Einstein?
Sridhar

re:#78 by Urstruly
Ha, ha, ha!
More proof for my thesis about this ``frog in the well syndrome``. Keep going.
Sridhar

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Ras Sahib,

I haven`t read what you have written but observing the soreness of uncut foreskins this board, one can assume this must be very good!

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arjunm

My ``impotent frustration`` is another yardstick. Don`t forget that so far we have been using your yardstick i.e. ``Americas Approval`` and it has proven to be a lot bigger for whole India. India measures minute on it.

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Dear Hindus,

Calling me names does not change reality. All the bad things that you say about Paksitan are