Pakistan's
nuke quest
pre-dated
India's 1974 test: US report


Pakistan began its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 1972 soon after the 1971 war with India, a new US Congressional report has said, challenging the conventional (and Pakistani) narrative that India's first nuclear test in 1974 was the trigger for its weapons quest.

In a May 15 report to US lawmakers, the Congressional Research Service says Pakistan's nuclear energy program dates back to the 1950s, "but it was the loss of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in a bloody war with India that probably triggered a political decision in January 1972 (just one month later) to begin a secret nuclear weapons program." Observers point to the peaceful nuclear explosion by India in 1974 as the pivotal moment which gave additional urgency to the program, it adds. Pakistan has long argued, and falsely represented to the international community, that it was forced to take the nuclear weapons path because it was provoked by India's first nuclear test in 1974. While many credulous observers buy into this narrative, other experts point out that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's famous call to nuclear arms in 1972 pre-dated India's test.

One such expert, White House insider Bruce Riedel, who recently co-authored the Obama administration's Af-Pak policy, offered the following sequence in a recent op-ed, broadly concurring with the CRS report: "The origins of the Pakistani nuclear program lie in the deep national humiliation of the 1971 war with India that led to the partition of the country, the independence of Bangladesh and the destruction of the dream of a single Muslim state for all of south Asia's Muslim population. The military dictator at the time, Yahya Khan, presided over the loss of half the nation and the surrender of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers in Dacca. The Pakistani establishment determined it must develop a nuclear weapon to counter India's conventional superiority. "The new prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, convened the country's top 50 scientists secretly in January 1972 and challenged them to build a bomb. He famously said that Pakistanis would sacrifice everything and "eat grass" to get a nuclear deterrent.

The 1974 Indian nuclear explosion only intensified the quest. "Mr. Bhutto received an unsolicited letter from a Pakistani who had studied in Louvain, Belgium, Abdul Qadeer Khan, offering to help by STEALING sensitive centrifuge technology from his new employers at a nuclear facility in the Netherlands. Over the next few years—with the assistance of the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI)—Mr. Khan would STEAL the key technology to help Pakistan produce fissionable material to make a bomb.

" Both the CRS report and Riedel point to the help China gave Pakistan in its nuclear weapons quest, a subject successive US administrations are leery of broaching for fear of angering Beijing. "Islamabad gained technology from many sources," says the CRS report, adding, "This extensive assistance is reported to have included, among other things, uranium enrichment technology from Europe (stolen by Khan, according to Riedel), blueprints for a small nuclear weapon from China, and missile technology from China." Riedel concurs, writing, "China also helped the nascent Pakistani program overcome technical challenges. According to some accounts by proliferation experts, it allowed Pakistani scientists to participate in Chinese tests to help them learn more about the bomb."