WASHINGTON, Nov 25: Media reports that Pakistan has provided nuclear technology to North Korea, come at a time when Islamabad is engaged in crucial defence talks with the United States that may go a long way in defining its relations with Washington.

Pakistani diplomats in Washington told Dawn that the joint defence consultative body, formed to help Pakistan meet its defence needs, is finalizing its recommendations.

To reduce Pakistan’s dependence on nuclear technology, the United States is considering a number of proposals for strengthening its conventional defence capability.

One of the proposals is to revive an old deal, stalled by Bush senior in Oct 1990, for providing F-16 aircraft to Pakistan.

“There’s a whole range of plans for providing better equipment to all three forces, the army, the navy and the air force,” said a Pakistani diplomat privy to the talks.

While these talks were going on, India sought an assurance from the United States that it would not give F-16s to Pakistan under any circumstances. And later, Indian officials in New Delhi said that they had succeeded in obtaining such an assurance from Washington.

The emergence of the MMA as a strong political force in the Oct 10 elections also has caused alarm in the United States, particularly in the pro-Israeli and conservative Christian lobbies. Both the groups have powerful supporters within the Bush administration who argue that it is not wise to allow a Muslim nation to maintain a nuclear arsenal, especially a nation with a strong religious lobby.

They want the Bush administration to force Pakistan to abandon its nuclear weapons and are strongly supported by India. All three groups — the pro-Israeli, the pro-Indian and the ultra-conservative Christians — also have supporters in the media who gobble up any information that could strengthen the argument for disarming Pakistan.

The last thing Pakistan needs at this stage is a scandal involving something as sensitive as the nuclear technology. There’s a law that binds the US government to impose strict sanctions on a country found guilty of sharing nuclear weapon technology with another state.

If the charge that Pakistan had shared nuclear technology with North Korea was proven, Washington would be forced to impose those sanctions on Pakistan despite its cooperation in the war against terrorism.

North Korea is not only one of the so-called rogue states; it is also a country particularly despised by President George W. Bush who has never shied away from expressing his feelings against the Korean regime.

The reports — published in powerful newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post — claim that Pakistan has helped North Korea develop its nuclear weapons programme in return for missile technology it needs to strengthen its defence against India.

The NYT described the relationship between North Korea and Pakistan as “much deeper and more dangerous than the United States and its Asian allies first suspected.”

Quoting unnamed sources in Washington, Pakistan and South Korea, it reported Pyongyang had provided President Pervez Musharraf with missile parts allowing him to build a nuclear arsenal able to reach “every strategic site in India.”

In return Islamabad provided North Korea with designs for gas centrifuges and machinery needed to make highly enriched uranium for the country’s latest nuclear weapons project.

Pakistan reacted as expected. The ISPR’s Maj-Gen Rashid Qureshi described these reports as totally baseless and urged NYT to “upgrade its intelligence gathering system.”

US officials have also been careful in commenting on these reports. When contacted by Dawn to explain what impact these reports may have on Washington’s relations with Islamabad, a State Department official said: “We do not conduct diplomacy on the basis of newspaper reports.”

Yet, when NYT published the first report in September, Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was forced to seek a clarification from President Musharraf.

After his conversation with Musharraf, he told reporters he had received “four hundred per cent assurance” from the Pakistani president that “there is no such interchange taking place now.”

Powell, however, left some room for ambiguity when asked if Pakistan had assisted North Korea in the past. “We didn’t talk about the past,” he said, fuelling speculations that Islamabad had helped Pyongyang in the past, even if it was not doing so now.

Powell’s clarification helped Pakistan weather the storm. But as the dust was settling, Washington Post reported last week that Pakistan had cooperated with North Korea even after joining the US-led alliance against terrorism in September 2001.