US President Joe Biden said that Pakistan may be one of the most dangerous countries in the world as it possesses nuclear weapons without any cohesion.
Biden’s remarks came on Thursday while addressing a Democratic congressional campaign committee reception. A transcript of the address published on the White House’s website quoting Biden says: “And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”
Biden’s remarks about Pakistan came while he was talking about the changing geopolitical situation globally, Biden said the world was changing rapidly and countries were rethinking their alliances. “And the truth of the matter is — I genuinely believe this — that the world is looking to us. Not a joke. Even our enemies are looking to us to figure out how we figure this out, what we do.”
“Did anybody think we’d be in a situation where China is trying to figure out its role relative to Russia and relative to India and relative to Pakistan?” Talking about his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, the US president termed him as a man who knew what he wanted but had an “enormous” array of problems.
“How do we handle that? How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion,” US President said.
On Saturday, a press release from the Pakistan Prime Minister’s office stated that PM Shehbaz Sharif has rejected US President’s comments on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons as “factually incorrect and misleading”.
Sharif said that Pakistan had proven to be a “most responsible nuclear state” over the past decades whose nuclear programme was managed through a “technically sound and foolproof command and control system”.
The press release further said that Pakistan and the US had a long history of a “friendly and mutually beneficial relationship”, further saying that it was “critically important that genuine and durable efforts are made to recognise the real potential of Pakistan-US relationship” at a time when the world was confronted by huge global challenges.