When Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif recently claimed that Saudi Arabia could access Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella under a new defense pact, he was not simply engaging in careless rhetoric. He touched a raw nerve in international security, reviving long-standing suspicions about Riyadh’s interest in nuclear weapons and Islamabad’s willingness to oblige. The statement may have been hastily walked back, but the damage had already been done: once again, Pakistan’s nuclear program was thrust into the center of global scrutiny, and Saudi Arabia’s strategic anxieties were laid bare.

The pact between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, signed in the presence of Pakistan’s Army Chief General Asim Munir, has been described as a milestone in Saudi-Pakistani relations.

Officially, it commits both states to view an attack on one as an attack on the other. Unofficially, it raises the specter of nuclear sharing in the Muslim world — an idea with roots going back nearly half a century.

Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions have always carried a religious and ideological overtone. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously declared that Pakistanis would “eat grass” if necessary, to build the bomb, casting it as an existential necessity against India. But he also hinted at something larger: that Pakistan’s bomb would not merely be national, but “Islamic,” meant to protect the broader Muslim world.

That rhetoric was not empty. Saudi financial support during Pakistan’s early nuclear efforts has long been suspected, if never proven. Billions of dollars are required to sustain enrichment programs, and Pakistan’s perpetually fragile economy has never had the surplus to fund them independently. Former US diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad recently revived this suspicion, noting that Pakistan’s program may have been “co-sponsored” by Riyadh. Whether true or not, the perception endures — and perception in geopolitics often matters as much as........

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