ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: The Foreign Office on Thursday strongly rejected media reports that Saudi Arabia wants to acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan.
“There is no Pakistan-Saudi nuclear deal,” the Foreign Office Spokesman Qazi Khalil Ullah said at his weekly news briefing in Islamabad on Thursday.
His statement came in reply to a question regarding recent foreign media reports that Saudi Arabia is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan amid growing fears of a nuclear-armed Iran.
In its report published on Tuesday, The Sunday Times reported while quoting a US official that the Saudis had “taken the ‘strategic decision’ to acquire ‘off-the-shelf’ atomic weapons from Pakistan.”
“There has been a longstanding agreement in place with the Pakistanis [over nuclear weapons] and the House of Saud has now made the strategic decision to move forward,” a US defence official said according to The Sunday Times.
Khalil Ullah pointed out that there has been entirely baseless and mischievous campaign in the international media about Pakistan’s indigenous nuclear program.
The spokesman emphatically stated that Pakistan’s nuclear program is purely for its own legitimate self-defense and maintenance of credible minimum deterrence.
