LONDON, April 21: Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Britain, Dr Maleeha Lodhi, has warned that the Indo-US nuclear deal can undermine strategic stability in the region and could trigger a new arms race.

Speaking at a conference in Cambridge on Friday, Dr Lodhi said that the civil-nuclear agreement could also cast a shadow over the ongoing peace dialogue between Pakistan and India.

The High Commissioner made these observations in her keynote address at a conference titled ‘Quest for Peace’ organized at the Wolfson College by Islamabad’s Institute for Strategic Studies and the Allama Iqbal Fellow.

Dr Lodhi said that under the Indo-US nuclear agreement, a large number of facilities and reactors, including breeder reactors, will be maintained outside safeguards, which could encourage India to continue and even accelerate its weapons programme without any constraint or inhibition. This, she stressed, would erode the region’s strategic stability.

Dr Lodhi said that a package approach for India and Pakistan, rather than the discriminatory one being followed, would help to avert a nuclear arms race in the region, promote restraint and preserve strategic stability.

Dr Lodhi was emphatic in declaring that the future of the dialogue and stability in South Asia depended on the two countries’ ability to address and overcome their divergences, especially on Kashmir and the nuclear-military balance.

In the absence of any forward movement on Kashmir, she said, relations between the two South Asian nuclear neighbours will remain susceptible to future relapse into tensions.

Reviewing the past two years of the dialogue process, she said that the environment in which the two countries conduct their relations had been markedly transformed. She listed six features of the transformed environment.

These included the popular sentiment for peace underpinning the dialogue process, the recognition by both sides that there is no military solution to the Kashmir dispute as well as the realization that neither country could achieve its full economic potential while engaged in confrontation.

Speaking at length on the nuclear-strategic relationship between Pakistan and India, she said this remained to be defined and stabilized. For this reason Pakistan had proposed a strategic restraint regime, both in the nuclear and conventional fields, based on the concept of “minimum deterrence”.

She emphasized the need to translate the concept of minimum deterrence into an operational understanding.

The conference was also addressed by Chairman All Parties Hurriyat Conference Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and Senator Mushahid Hussain, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.