armoured vehicles spread across its western desert, India launched the final stage of a huge military exercise that stirred new tensions with Pakistan. The scale of the operation was bigger than any North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exercise and the biggest land exercise since World War II. Initially, around 600,000–800,000 troops were mobilized and stationed on Rajasthan state's western border, less than 100 miles away from Pakistan. The commander of the Indian Army's Western Command, Lieutenant General Prem Nath Hoon, maintained that, "Operation Brasstacks was a mobilization of the entire Army of India." The magnitude and large scale of the exercise led to Pakistani fears that India was displaying an overwhelming conventional superiority and was planning to invade Pakistan and dismember it by surgical strikes, as it did to East Pakistan during the Indo-Pak 1971 Winter war. According to General Hoon's memoirs, a letter was directed to Sundarji by Western Command, arguing that "when such a large exercise is conceived", the movement of Indian forces is going to attract the attention of Pakistan. General Hoon maintained that, General Sundarji did not inform Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi about the scale of the operation and such details were hidden from him. Hoon also wrote in his memoir: "Brasstacks was no military exercise. It was a plan to build up the situation for a fourth war with Pakistan." Indian scholar, Paul Kapur further argues that during Operation Brasstacks, It is theorised by author Robert Art and others that the Brasstacks crisis was not an inadvertent and accidental crisis caused by Pakistan's misinterpretation of a large scale Indian Army exercise, confined mainly to the vast Rajasthan desert sector, as provocative. In this theory, General Sunderji's strategy was to provoke Pakistan to respond and this would provide India with an excuse to implement existing contingency plans to go on to the offensive against Pakistan and destroy its atomic bomb projects in a series of preventive strikes. Pakistan strategic response After the success of the Israeli Air Force's surprise Operation Opera air strike on the Iraqi nuclear power plant in Osirak in 1981, the Pakistan Armed Forces had been on alert. According to memoirs of nuclear strategist and theoretical physicist Munir Ahmad Khan, hectic discussions took place every day between the Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, amid fears that India might attack Pakistan, who was on route to becoming a nuclear power. Since 1981, the