‘Nuclear weapons could wipe us out’

Book launched on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.

LAHORE: Punjab University (PU) Vice Chancellor (VC) Dr Mujahid Kamran believes that the US strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan means the risk of nuclear war cannot be ruled out.

“Our elite ruling class and leaders of the Muslim Ummah should raise their voice against US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Dr Kamran said at the launch of Atom Bomb – From Idea to Reality, a book about Pakistan’s nuclear programme by PU Pro VC Dr Jamil Anwar.

The launch ceremony was held at the Undergraduate Block on the New Campus.

The VC said that Pakistan should allocate four per cent of its GDP to the education sector. He said America currently spent the most of any country on education and scientific research. “That is why American forces are present in 152 countries,” he said.

He said the varsity administration had started uploading the titles of books written by faculty members to the varsity website.

Dr Anwar, the author of the book, said that the USA needed massive financial resources and years of hard work by its scientists before it was able to manufacture the atom bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Compared to the advantages the US had, Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons on its own despite being an underdeveloped country was “the second greatest miracle after the birth of Pakistan”.

Former finance minster Sartaj Aziz stressed the need for a comparative study of all scientific innovations to date with a view to evaluating which discoveries had promoted human welfare and which had promoted destruction.

He said the scientific knowledge created in the next decade would be equivalent to all the knowledge gained during the last two thousand years. He urged educationists to use emerging scientific advancements to usher in an agrarian and industrial revolution in Pakistan.

Columnist Dr Attaul Haq Qasmi observed that towards the end of the Second World War, the US government repeatedly urged Japanese generals through mass media to lay down their arms.

The Japanese, he said, preferred death over surrender. But one Pakistani general, he said, had publicly admitted defeat while another had surrendered after a single telephone call.

Poet and columnist Amjad Islam Amjad impressed upon the country’s academics to achieve excellence in science and other disciplines so that the country could make rapid strides shoulder to shoulder with the technologically advanced nations of the world.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2010.