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Pakistan conducts 5 nuclear tests in response to India

ISLAMABAD, May 28 Kyodo - Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices Thursday, heightening global concern over nuclear arms proliferation following India's five nuclear tests earlier this month. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced the tests in a televised address. Pakistan detonated the devices at 3:23 p.m. at the Chagai site in Baluchistan Province, western Pakistan.

''Today, God has given us determination, that today for the safety of our nation we have been able to decide for ourselves,'' Sharif said, referring to the tests.

Calling the decision to hold the tests ''inevitable,'' Sharif said India's tests have threatened Pakistan, that the international community has failed to sufficiently punish India and that he has followed the wishes of the Pakistani people.

While the Pakistani tests ignored international calls for Islamabad to show restraint, Sharif shifted responsibility of a possible nuclear arms race in South Asia to India, saying ''We were never trying to get into a nuclear race in the first place.''

He said that if that had been Islamabad's intention, Pakistan could have carried out its own tests following India's first test in 1974.

''It was our wish that basically our race should be for economic betterment and social betterment,'' he said, adding that Pakistan had been preparing ''to ward off India's bad intentions'' and persuading the international community to take action against India.

Pakistan, the first Muslim nation to conduct nuclear testing, has said India's five nuclear tests near the Pakistan border May 11 and 13, the country's first in 24 years, threatened Pakistan's security.

He also said the tests were conducted partly because he did not want to see a recurrence of the ''calamity'' that happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- the two Japanese cities that suffered U.S. nuclear attacks 53 years ago.

''Japan's stand on this issue is also understandable and their concern is also very understandable for us,'' Sharif said, suggesting that Japan would not have suffered from the attacks if it had had nuclear capability. Displaying an understanding of impending international reaction to the tests, Sharif also called on Pakistanis to brace themselves for possible economic sanctions, urging citizens to work harder, to start leading austere lives and to pay their taxes dutifully.

India and Pakistan have refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), preventing the pact from taking effect after more than two years since it was adopted at the U.N. General Assembly in 1996. The new tests heightened tensions between the two countries, which have fought three times over the ownership of Kashmir since their independence from Britain in 1947.

Bilateral tension intensified before India's tests after Pakistan in April test-fired an HATF-5 (Ghauri) missile with a range of 1,500 kilometers and a 700-kilogram payload.

Japanese and U.S. officials immediately expressed their intention to impose economic sanctions on Pakistan as they have done on India. A Japanese government source said Thursday that Japan, the largest donor country to Pakistan, will impose sanctions as strict as those it imposed on India.

Japan's sanctions on India included the suspension of fresh grants-in-aid and the shelving of a plan to host a World Bank forum of donor nations on India on June 30 and July 1, as well as suspension of new yen loans. White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said sanctions will be inevitable, according to U.S.-based Cable News Network (CNN).

Both Tokyo and Washington had dispatched senior officials -- U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Seiichiro Noboru, chief of the Japanese Cabinet Councilors' Office on External Affairs -- to Islamabad to urge Pakistan not to carry out the tests. On Wednesday, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto asked Sharif to exercise restraint during a telephone conversation.