South Asia Investor Review

Ukraine is under a massive Russian assault. Kiev is under siege. Russian President Vladimir Putin's main objective is to keep Ukraine permanently out of NATO, the western nations' military alliance. Putin says the West has broken its promise to not expand NATO after the end of the Cold War. Ukraine is complaining that the West has left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia's powerful military after it agreed to give up its nuclear weapons under firm security assurances contained in the Budapest Memorandum.  NATO Expansion. Source: BBC Ukraine Gave Up Nukes: When Ukraine became independent in the early 1990s,  it was the third-largest nuclear power in the world with thousands of nuclear arms. In the years that followed, Ukraine made the decision to denuclearize completely based on security guarantee from the U.S., the U.K. and Russia, known as the Budapest Memorandum.  Ukrainian analyst Mariana Budjeryn explained in an interview with  NPR's Mary Louise Kelly  as follow...

A Times of India report last year claimed that "Pakistan has surged well ahead of India in the missile arena". It also lamented that "the only nuclear-capable ballistic missile in India's arsenal which can be said to be 100% operational as of now is the short-range Prithvi missile". Along with raising the alarm, the Indian report offered the usual excuse for the alleged missile gap by boasting that "unlike Pakistan, our program is indigenous". Let's explore the reality of the "indigenous" claim repeated ad infintum by Indian government and New Delhi's defense establishment. US-European Origins of Indian Missile Program: APJ Abul Kalam is credited with designing India's first satellite launcher SLV3. Its design is virtually identical to the American Scout rocket used in the 1960s. According to the details published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists , Abul Kalam spent four months in training in the United States in 1963-1964. H...

"Imagine if the (swine flu) spread were intentional, not natural, and the virus’ lethality had been artificially enhanced. Pakistan has many dangerous diseases and pathogens under its control. The Nunn-Lugar program can help secure the pathogen strains to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. Equally important, the U.S. can assist Pakistan in establishing a system designed to detect, characterize and respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases," US Senator Richard Lugar, ranking member of the US Senate's foreign relations committee, said last week. While Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability is well known, the country has had no publicly known chemical warfare (CW) program in the past. Pakistan has also signed and ratified the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and remains a member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in good standing, according to NTI . Pakistan is self-sufficient in the production of chemicals such as sulfur...