US-UK share ‘deep concerns’ over Pakistan’s nuke weapons programme: Wikileaks

LONDON - The latest release of around 250,000 US diplomatic cables by the whistleblower website Wikileaks has revealed that Britain and the US have ‘deep concerns’ about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.

According to the Daily Mail, the UK’s concerns were communicated to America by Mariot Leslie, then the Foreign Office’s director general of defence and intelligence, at a meeting in September last year.

Leslie, who is Britain’s permanent representative to NATO, was quoted as saying that ‘the UK has deep concerns about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ and added that China could play a ‘big role’ in ’stabilising Pakistan’.

The Ministry of Defence’s Director General for security policy, Jon Day, had warned US officials separately that relations between Pakistan and India were especially strained, the paper said.

He had apparently said that Pakistan was ‘not going in a good direction,’ and expressed support for the encouragement of a ‘cold-war’-like relationship’ between the two countries that would ‘introduce a degree of certainty.’

US officials had also reportedly raised concerns over the danger of Pakistani fissile material finding its way into the hands of extremists.

On Sunday, Wikileaks began publishing about 250,000 US diplomatic cables in a third major release of classified US documents. The first two concerned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (ANI)