Pakistan on August 25 successfully test-fired a new air-launched cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile, named Ra'ad (meaning thunder in Arabic), has a range of 220 miles. Its test-firing brought into focus sustained efforts to upgrade nuclear weapons delivery capabilities in response to India, whose civilian nuclear agreement with the United States has been described by President Pervez Musharraf as a threat to regional stability.
There is little public information about Pakistan's nuclear facilities, but important assets (reactors, uranium enrichment sites, plutonium reprocessing sites, research and development centres, nuclear testing and weaponisation facilities) are located across the four provinces of Punjab, North-west Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Sindh. Having launched a civilian nuclear programme in 1955, Pakistan started trying to become a nuclear weapons state in 1972:
%u2022 Absent a strong technological base, it secretly looked overseas for skills and equipment. %u2022 Nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan procured secret centrifuge designs from a Dutch consortium in the mid-1970s. %u2022 Pakistan first successfully tested its nuclear weapons technology in 1998. %u2022 In 2003, it was disclosed that Pakistan had helped Iran, North Korea and Libya develop nuclear programmes, with Khan the focus of subsequent investigations. %u2022 After a swift Pakistani investigation, Khan confessed on television that "many of the reported activit
