Comment by Riaz Haq on February 7, 2025 at 8:30pm

Pakistan Joins China's Lunar Mission For Exploring Moon's South Pole

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/pakistan-joins-chinas-change-8-luna...

In Islamabad's first major involvement in lunar exploration, Pakistan's space agency SUPARCO has joined hands with China for its upcoming Chang'e-8 moon mission in 2028. An indigenous rover built by the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) will reportedly join the Chang'e 8 mission, which is part of the larger International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project.
The collaboration is aimed at contributing to scientific research on the Moon, particularly in the study of its south pole, according to a report by Pakistan Observer.

According to NASA, Chang'e 8 is designed to test technologies necessary for the construction of a lunar science base. It will also conduct surveys and scientific experiments including earth observation, analysis of lunar samples, and test resource utilization techniques to asses sustaining a terrestrial ecosystem in the lunar environment.

As part of a joint mission, Pakistani media said SUPARCO will provide a 35-kilogram rover designed to explore the moon's south pole-- a region known for its challenging terrain and potential scientific discoveries.

"Pakistani rover will play a vital role in advancing lunar surface research, contributing to China's broader goals for lunar exploration," Pakistan Observer quoted a SUPARCO spokesperson as saying.

The latest collaboration between 'ironclad friends' Islamabad and Beijing builds on their previous partnership in space exploration, when Pakistan's iCube Qamar CubeSat satellite successfully entered lunar orbit after being launched aboard China's Chang'e-6 mission in May 2024.

About China's Chang'e-8 Lumar Mission
China's upcoming Chang'e-8 moon mission is reportedly offering an unprecedented amount of space for equipment for other countries.

Per a report by the South China Morning Post, the mission has offered 200kg (440lb) of payload capacity for interested countries. These payloads could be instruments fixed to the lander or items such as robots, rovers and flight vehicles that can work independently after landing, said Wang Qiong, the mission's deputy chief designer.

China National Space Administration had invited letters of intent for the mission in 2023 and said priority would be given to innovative projects, robots which can grab objects from the moon's surface - including lunar soil - and scientific instruments that complement Chinese ones.

China is reportedly working towards the goal of building a base near the moon's south pole around 2035 and the Chang'e-8 mission is aimed at advancing that goal.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2025 at 9:37am

Rabia Akhtar
@Rabs_AA
My response in
@TFT_
to
@ForeignAffairs
article by
@NarangVipin
&
@pranayrvaddi
. The claim that Pakistan seeks ICBMs to target the U.S. is strategically detached from Pakistan’s doctrinal realities.

Rebuttal: Pakistan In The New Nuclear Age

https://x.com/Rabs_AA/status/1938228225508778067

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Thomas Keith
@iwasnevrhere_
An entire column of Indian search results, India Today, Times of India, Hindustan Times, Economic Times, CNBC TV18, Firstpost, Times Now, The Federal, and more, now screams the same line: Pakistan is secretly building a U.S-range ICBM. Every headline cites one source: a single paragraph in Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi’s Foreign Affairs essay. No satellite imagery, no test data, no official statement, just an unnamed intelligence “conclusion” lifted from a think-tank article whose real purpose is to lobby Congress for a larger U.S. arsenal.

Narang is Biden’s former deputy assistant secretary for nuclear policy; Vaddi shapes Brookings’ extended-deterrence agenda. Their essay argues Washington needs “more, different, better” warheads to counter China and Russia. Pakistan appears once, as a hypothetical future problem. Indian media stripped that sentence from its context, cloned it across outlets, and marketed it as breaking news. That is narrative laundering: speculative analysis becomes “assessment,” “assessment” becomes “alarm,” and alarm becomes justification for India’s plea for deeper U.S. missile cooperation after Operation Sindoor’s humiliation.

The asymmetry is blatant. Israel’s Jericho-3 and India’s MIRV-equipped Agni-V draw praise; a rumored Pakistani range upgrade is branded a global threat. What Washington and Delhi fear is not a Pakistani first strike but a Pakistan that cannot be first-struck without consequence. Minimum-credible deterrence is being recast as aggression because parity kills coercion. No missile has flown, yet Indian outlets are already counting on American panic to restore their strategic comfort. Strip away the headlines and only one fact remains: if Pakistan’s deterrent reaches beyond the subcontinent, India’s narrative of uncontested escalation dies on the launchpad.

https://x.com/iwasnevrhere_/status/1938217146527490230

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2025 at 5:31pm

How to Survive the New Nuclear Age: National Security in a World of Proliferating Risks and Eroding Constraints

by Vipin narang and pranay vaddi (Indian-American analysts)

Yet another threat comes from Pakistan. Although Pakistan claims its nuclear program is strictly focused on deterring India, which enjoys conventional military superiority, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Pakistani military is developing an ICBM that could reach the continental United States. In acquiring such a capability, Pakistan might be seeking to deter the United States from either trying to eliminate its arsenal in a preventive attack or intervening on India’s behalf in a future Indian-Pakistani conflict. Regardless, as U.S. officials have noted, if Pakistan acquires an ICBM, Washington will have no choice but to treat the country as a nuclear adversary—no other country with ICBMs that can target the United States is considered a friend. In short, mounting nuclear dangers now lurk in every region of vital interest to the United States.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-survive-new-nuclea...

--------

In 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama came into office, nuclear weapons looked increasingly superfluous. As the Cold War faded into history, Moscow and Washington, the world’s two nuclear superpowers, had long been working together to reduce their arsenals. At the same time, after years of protracted conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the broader “war on terror,” the U.S. defense establishment was far more preoccupied with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency than with nuclear strategy and great-power rivalry. The notion that any other country would attempt to reach nuclear parity with Russia and the United States seemed far-fetched, and American leaders were all too happy to delay an expensive refurbishment of the aging U.S. arsenal. So strong was the consensus that nuclear arms were a relic of a previous era that four top former national security officials—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry, not one of them a dove—publicly called for “ending” nuclear weapons “as a threat to the world.”

A decade and a half later, things could not be more different. The United States now faces a Category 5 hurricane of nuclear threats. After decades of maintaining only a minimal nuclear capability, China is on pace to nearly quintuple its 2019 stockpile of some 300 nuclear warheads by 2035, in a quest to attain an arsenal equivalent in strength to Russia’s and the United States’. Far from being a partner in arms reductions, Russia is using the threat of nuclear weapons as a shield for its aggression in Ukraine. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to expand its arsenal, which now includes missiles capable of hitting the continental United States. Iran is closer than ever to producing a nuclear weapon. And in May, the world witnessed India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed powers, strike each other’s heartlands with conventional weapons in the aftermath of a terror attack, a confrontation that—already unprecedented—could have escalated to a nuclear standoff.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2025 at 5:32pm

How to Survive the New Nuclear Age: National Security in a World of Proliferating Risks and Eroding Constraints

by Vipin narang and pranay vaddi (Indian-American analysts)


https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-survive-new-nuclea...

These multiplying threats have not just brought nuclear strategy back to the center of U.S. defense concerns; they have also introduced new problems. Never before has the United States had to deter and protect its allies from multiple nuclear-armed great-power rivals at the same time. Like Russia, both China and North Korea may integrate nuclear weapons into offensive planning, seeking a nuclear shield to enable conventional aggression against nonnuclear neighbors. Moreover, there is a growing possibility that two or more nuclear powers—for example, China and Russia, or North Korea and Russia—might try to synchronize military aggression against their neighbors, stretching the U.S. nuclear deterrent beyond its means. Finally, the rapid erosion of nuclear guardrails, the diplomatic architecture that has for decades limited proliferation and brought security to dozens of countries under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, has pushed some Asian and European allies to consider acquiring their own nuclear weapons. All this has happened in an era in which the United States’ antiquated nuclear arsenal has fallen into disrepair, with ongoing modernization efforts mired in delays and rampant cost overruns.

This coming nuclear hurricane poses far-reaching challenges. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Washington will need to develop more, different, and better nuclear capabilities and begin to deploy them in new ways. Given the scale of the problem, nuclear concerns can no longer be treated as a niche issue managed by a small community of experts. Officials at the highest levels of government will need to incorporate them into core defense policy in each of the major theaters of vital interest to the United States: Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East. At the same time, Congress will need to back an accelerated effort to overhaul the U.S. arsenal with significant funding and give the project urgent priority, to be able to address not just today’s changing threat environment but tomorrow’s as well. Above all, for the United States to effectively handle a highly volatile and quickly changing nuclear order, nuclear affairs must once again become a central part of American grand strategy.


CHINA’S BIG PLAY
The most momentous shift in the global nuclear weapons landscape is China’s determination to become a nuclear powerhouse. As recently as 2019, the small Chinese arsenal scarcely factored into U.S. nuclear strategy. After first testing nuclear weapons in 1964, Beijing sought nuclear capabilities almost exclusively for defensive purposes and to be able to deter the United States (or the Soviet Union) from nuclear attack and “blackmail.” To achieve these limited goals, Beijing maintained a handful of unfueled intercontinental ballistic missiles and stored the warheads separately—an arrangement that required hours, perhaps days, to prepare the ICBMs for launch. This posture enabled a retaliation-only strategy, accompanied by a “no first use” pledge to the world. As a result, U.S. strategists, both during the Cold War and after, were able to set China’s nuclear forces aside as a “lesser included case” and concentrate on deterring the Soviet Union and its successor, Russia.

Sometime during the last decade, however, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a breathtaking expansion of his country’s nuclear arsenal.

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