ISIS issued a statement taking issue with some of the language used in a Washington Post article by Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick. While it can be valuable to scrutinize language for inaccuracies, ISIS’s argues for some assumptions that don’t seem to be the case. Drawing from the Post’s statement that
U.S. and allied officials and experts who have tracked developments in South Asia have grown increasingly worried over the rapid growth of the region’s more mature nuclear programs, in part because of the risk that weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.
ISIS says the following
the Washington Post today called Pakistan’s imminent development of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and perhaps thermonuclear weapons a sign of a “more mature” program, as if to imply that more destructive nuclear weapons somehow lead to a better nation . . . Debates over conventional weapons are spared these distortions. Few would say, for example, that the possession of semi-automatic weapons by criminals is a sign of a more mature criminal.
It is unclear how the Post article was trying to say (or even implies) that “more destructive nuclear weapons somehow lead to a better nation.” The Post sentence connotes “some of the more advanced nuclear programs in the region quickly growing these programs is bad because it could facilitate nuclear terrorism” (a pretty straightforward argument) much more than “Pakistan will be a better nation if it has more destructive weapons.” “Maturity” refers to the degree of technological advancement in this context and it seems a stretch to argue the Post implies otherwise. In fact, the way the sentence is written the phrase “the region’s more mature nuclear programs” is used to describe the nuclear programs of countries like Pakistan in the status quo. It says nothing along the lines of “if Pakistan gets more weapons, it will [insert phrase of choice].” In other words, all the Post was saying is Pakistan currently has one of the more technologically advanced nuclear weapons programs in South Asia. That is a technical fact that shouldn’t be considered a particularly controversial or provocative statement.