Sometime this week, the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists (FAS) plans to put up satellite images of Indian and Pakistani nuclear and missile facilities up on their website, www.FAS.org. The pictures, taken by the newly-launched iknos satellite owned by SpaceImaging, will have a one-metre resolution.
"We anticipate orders of about half-a-dozen images of nuclear and missile facilities in India and Pakistan this week, and another half-dozen images within the next week or two," says John Pike, main analyst and webmaster at FAS. "Although SpaceImaging is an American company that must obey US export control laws, which include restrictions on export of products to some countries such as North Korea, and are legally prohibited from acquiring or selling imagery of Israel, just about anyone else can buy imagery of just about any place, if they can afford the multi-thousand dollar price of the image," adds Pike.
Indian defence officials, however, are obviously tightlipped about whether they’ve bought these images. Some even wonder how...
