Pakistan has announced that it will use all the weapons at its disposal to defend the country and that includes nuclear weapons. Pakistani officials threatened to use nuclear weapons should India invade, following a statement by an Indian army chief saying they would attack Pakistan in the case of a terrorist incident.
Pakistan conducted its first nuclear-capable missile test on Monday, launching a Babur-3 cruise missile from a submarine in the Indian Ocean. The Pakistan Armed Forces say the Babur-3 misssile is able to deliver a wide range of payloads and would allow Islamabad to counter a potential nuclear attack against Pakistan. “Pakistan conducted its first successful test fire of Submarine Launched Cruise Missile (SLCM) Babur-3 having a range of 450 kilometers [some 280 miles], from an undisclosed location in the Indian Ocean.
Pakistan’s Defence Minister has threatened Israel with nuclear war apparently in response to threats from a former Israeli Defence Minister. Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif put out a tweet Friday in response to an apparent ‘fake news’ article quoting ex-Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon threatening to “destroy” Pakistan in a nuclear war if it dared send troops to Syria. The article claims that on Thursday Pakistan declared that it was ready to send ground troops to Syria as part of an international coalition to help the Syrian government fight ISIS.
Coming on the sixth year anniversary of the infamous "Cablegate", when on this day in 2010 Wikileaks made global headlines when it unveiled classified cables sent to the US State Department, revealing assessments of countries and details of eavesdropping, this morning WikiLeaks released more than half a million US diplomatic cables from 1979, covering various diplomatic events and incidents such as the Iranian revolution, Osama bin Ladin's departure of his native Saudi Arabia for Pakistan to support the Mujahideen, the siege of Mecca, Saddam Hussein becoming president of Iraq and much more.
Earlier today, a veteran White House correspondent laid out his version of how Obama "gets away with it" in a news cycle when everyone's attention should be glued to the economic failures of the lame duck president. One thing he forgot to mention, however, was the use of such conventional "rally around the flag" tactics as taking out a key symbolic nemesis of the US to drum up patriotic fervor.