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Former CIA Officer Richard Barlow on Friday reacted to reports about a joint plan by India and Israel in the 1980s to launch a pre-emptive strike on Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear facility, saying that former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not approve of the attack, which would have solved a lot of problems. “It never happened, it was just talk. It is a shame that Indira (former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) did not approve it. It would have solved a lot of problems,” Barlow told ANI’s Ishaan Prakash. #WATCH | On the reported Israel-India proposal for a preemptive strike on Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear facility, Former CIA Officer Richard Barlow says, “It never happened, it was just talk. It is a shame that Indira (former Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi) did not approve… pic.twitter.com/5M0C8cfRAM — ANI (@ANI) November 7, 2025 However, he said that any action against Pakistan’s nuclear facility would have infuriated then-US President Ronald Reagan, who would have taken strong action against then-Israeli PM Menachem Begin. “It would have interfered with the Afghan problem because… they (Pakistan) were basically using the flow of covert aid to the Mujahideen as blackmail. I think that’s what (Pakistan Army Chief Asim) Munir was saying.” Barlow, who served as a counterproliferation officer during Pakistan’s covert nuclear build-up in the 1980s, said the US President continued to certify that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons, a position with which CIA officers were not comfortable with. “In 1990, there was another crisis between India and Pakistan, a major crisis. The intelligence community saw nuclear weapons moving to air bases and being put on F-16s. The nuclear weapons that Pakistan did not possess, according to the US president,” he added. Barlow said Richard J Kerr, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, called it the “scariest thing” since the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s, when the US and the Soviet Union came close to a military confrontation during the Cold War. Reagan dispatched Robert Gates, the NSC advisor at that time, to Islamabad and New Delhi to defuse the crisis. In the same interview, Barlow also said Pakistan’s initial drive to develop nuclear weapons was meant to counter India, but under its chief architect Abdul Qadeer Khan, the programme evolved into an “Islamic bomb” aimed at spreading nuclear technology to other Muslim nations. Barlow that while Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions were triggered by India’s 1974 nuclear test, they soon took on a broader ideological dimension. He also criticised Washington for ignoring Pakistan’s proliferation network for decades, alleging that US administrations “did nothing” about Islamabad’s nuclear dealings for more than 20 years.
