New Delhi: Days after US President Donald Trump claimed that Pakistan was among a handful of countries “testing nuclear weapons”, India said it had “taken note” of his remarks, framing them in the context of Islamabad's record of “secret and illegal” nuclear activities and past proliferation networks.

At the weekly media briefing on Friday (November 7), Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said Pakistan’s “secret and illegal nuclear activities are consistent with its long history of smuggling, violations of export control regulations, covert partnerships, the A.Q. Khan network and continued nuclear proliferation”.

“India has always drawn the world’s attention to these aspects of Pakistan’s record,” he added. “It is in this context that we have taken note of President Trump’s remarks regarding Pakistan’s nuclear tests.”

Jaiswal’s comments came in response to a question about Trump’s recent statement during a television interview, in which the US president claimed that Pakistan was among several countries “testing nuclear weapons”.

The remarks, made on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ programme earlier this week, were part of a wider discussion in which Trump said that “North Korea has been testing. Pakistan has been testing … Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it.”

Trump, who has directed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, said he did not want the US to be “the only country that does not do so”. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he wrote that he had instructed the Department of War to begin testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with other countries.

Amid concerns over Trump’s statement, US energy secretary Chris Wright clarified earlier this week that Washington does not plan to conduct live nuclear detonations.

“These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call non-critical explosions”, Wright said in a Fox News interview, explaining that only components would be tested through advanced simulations.

There has been no official response from Pakistan’s foreign office to Trump’s remarks.

However, CBS News quoted a senior Pakistani security official as saying that “Pakistan was not the first to carry out nuclear tests and will not be the first to resume nuclear tests”.

Pakistan’s last known nuclear tests were conducted in 1998, shortly after India’s Pokhran-II tests.

Both countries, which have not signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, have since maintained a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.

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