Late in the summer of 1962, a long plume of fire arced over the beach at Sonmiani, watched by gaggles of tourists from nearby Karachi. The country became, one newspaper account was to claim, the “first in the Islamic world, third in South Asia and 10th in the entire world to launch a vessel into outer space.” The reality was somewhat less impressive. The sounding rocket was entirely American-made and launched as part of NASA’s Apollo lunar programme. Two hundred rocket launches would take place over the next decade, probing the winds and temperature of the upper atmosphere.
Three decades after that launch, Central Intelligence Agency analysis observed that Pakistani scientists who had studied at NASA’s Wallops Island and the Goddard space flight centres had begun to turn those sounding rockets into short-range missiles.
Flight-tested eight times since the beginning of 1989, the Hatf-1 and Hatf-2 missiles lacked a guidance system, were highly inaccurate, and could not carry Pakistan’s nuclear bombs, the CIA recorded. Islamabad, though, was attempting to obtain Soviet Union-made missiles from North Korea, and had sought European technology as well.
Last week, the United States announced sanctions on Pakistan’s missile production and development agency, the National Development Complex—a decision that comes on the back of multiple rounds of similar action against Chinese and Pakistani companies involved in supplying the organisation. The sanctions are driven by fears that an economically-crippled Pakistan could become a proliferator of ballistic missiles, just as it once sold nuclear-bomb technology to North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya.
The sanctions story isn’t new, though. Sanctions had first been imposed on the NDC in 1998 by President Bill Clinton because of the same missile proliferation risks. Those sanctions were waived after 9/11, though, to enable American counter-terrorism cooperation with Pakistan—cooperation that never fully materialised.
America’s decision comes decades too late to end the dangers posed by Pakistan’s missiles. The story illustrates the lethal consequences the Cold War could yet have for the world.
The making of the missiles
“First Muslim Nobel Prize winner,” read the gravestone of the man the world honoured for his role in predicting the existence of the Higgs boson. Late in 2013, a magistrate in the town of Rabwah ordered the scrubbing out of the reference to Abdus Salam’s religion. The Ahmadiyya sect he belonged to had been declared non-Muslim by Pakistan in 1974, by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government. Abdus Salam was excised from textbooks and Pakistan’s memory.
The year before Pakistan’s first rocket launch, Salam had travelled to the United States together with then-military ruler Field Marshall Ayub Khan. As Ayub Khan’s scientific advisor, Salam worked to build the foundations of modern science in Pakistan. In the course of that 1961 visit, he seized on NASA’s open offer to establish rocket ranges in all countries on the littoral Indian Ocean.
Following the 1962 launch of Rehbar-1, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission’s Space Sciences Wing deepened its rocket cooperation with the West. France transferred technology to manufacture sounding rockets, while German firms supplied the ammonium perchlorate needed to make solid rocket fuel. Great Britain helped with rocket launches.
The year after the first rocket launch, Pakistan began operating a small reactor with applications in medicine, industry, and agriculture. The research reactor was the first in a long series of developments that would blossom into a nuclear weapons programme in 1973, following the war that led to the independence of Bangladesh.
The United States was aware of this programme early, according to declassified CIA documents. The CIA predicted that Islamabad could have a bomb “as early as the first part of the 1980s.” The United Kingdom, for its part, believed Pakistan could have a nuclear weapon by 1981. In 1978, the British diplomat Michael Pakenham handed over a dossier to the State Department, recording Pakistan’s purchase of inverters used in plants to enrich uranium.
Early in 1979, the American ambassador in Islamabad, Arthur Hummel, confronted military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq with the evidence scholar William Burr has recorded in an authoritative study. The State Department had long resisted this course of action, fearing it would jeopardise the relationship with a long-standing ally against the Soviet Union. That was increasingly offset, though, by the realisation that a Pakistani bomb could pose “a direct threat to US national interests in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.”
Finally, in March 1979, the United States imposed a law cutting military and economic aid to countries that acquired nuclear enrichment technology. Less than six months later, though, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, now argued that “our security policy towards Pakistan cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy.”
F16 combat jets—which for years would be Pakistan’s primary means to deliver its nuclear bombs—soon made their way to General Zia, along with other state-of-the-art military equipment, enabled by a special exclusion carved out from the non-proliferation law. Financial aid was injected into Pakistan to stabilise its currency. America had decided to ignore the bomb.
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The nuclear race
Late in 1984, a man with a thick accent walked into the Texas offices of the defence contractor EG&G and offered to pay in gold for 50 Krytrons, tiny light-bulb-like devices that can be used as the high-speed switches needed to trigger nuclear explosions. Electronics had been seized at Montreal’s Dorval airport in 1980. Firms in Switzerland, Germany, and France vied with each other to sell technology to Pakistan. And when the United States pressurised them to stop, Pakistan simply turned to China.
Even though President Ronald Reagan would hand over $3.2 billion in aid to Pakistan, the country’s nuclear programme continued to dramatically accelerate. A bomb wasn’t much use, though, without a means to deliver it—and while the F16 was a superb platform, Pakistan’s Generals wanted something more effective and reliable.
Two separate missile development programmes are believed to have been launched. The first, centred around a solid-fuel rocket, was operated with assistance from China at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission under scientist Samar Mubarakmand. The second, helped by liquid-fuel technology from North Korea, was run at Abdul Qadeer Khan’s Khan Research Laboratories, or KRL.
In 1988, China agreed to sell M-11 missiles, launchers, and support equipment to Pakistan. The next year, Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) tested the first Hatf design, based on the French-sounding rockets it had tested. SUPARCO, established in 1981 by General Zia to take over the rocket programme, was later detected to be receiving multiple transfers of missile-related equipment and technology. And in 1993, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is alleged to have travelled to Pyongyang to swap nuclear bomb designs and know-how for Nodong missiles.
KRL test-fired the liquid-fuelled Ghauri in 1998, based on the Nodong, which brought New Delhi within range of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. A year later, KRL launched the Ghauri-2, which was capable of hitting most of India. Exactly one day later, PAEC successfully tested the Shaheen-1, introducing solid-fuelled intermediate-range capabilities to the Pakistani arsenal.
Even though President George Bush had reimposed nuclear weapons sanctions in 1990, it did little to retard Pakistan’s missile and bomb programmes. Little impact was made, either, by Clinton’s sanctions. Following 9/11 and the lifting of those sanctions, the NDC produced improved versions of missiles developed by SUPARCO, notably the Hatf-2, also known as the Abdali, and its successors, the Ghaznavi, Shaheen-1 and Shaheen-2. The NDC also developed Pakistan’s first cruise missile, the Babur, which surprised many experts with its technological capabilities.
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A dangerous future
Equipped with a growing nuclear arsenal powered by a stockpile of plutonium from four reactors, as well as an expanding infrastructure for uranium enrichment, Islamabad is developing increasingly sophisticated means to deliver its bombs. The Babur-2 will be capable of delivering nuclear bombs at ranges of over 700 kilometres, hugging the terrain to evade air defences. The air-launched Ra’ad is armed with conventional warheads but heralds the acquisition of even more sophisticated capabilities. Longer-range missiles are under development, too.
There’s little direct threat to the United States from these missile systems: The country, after all, has built missile defences to protect against far more sophisticated adversaries, including China and Russia. Like in the 1970s, though, the real danger is that Pakistan could end up supplying nuclear weapons technologies to states in the Middle East and elsewhere, destabilising the global order.
From the outset of its nuclear programme, Pakistan leveraged its strategic position to extract concessions. As late as 2009, leaked diplomatic cables show, Pakistan was able to use its 9/11 role to flatly reject American requests to return highly-enriched uranium from an ageing research reactor.
The cables also show that now-President Joe Biden became increasingly frustrated with Pakistan’s support of the jihadists his country was battling in Afghanistan—but failed to mount enough pressure to force Islamabad to change course.
America’s Cold War fixations let the nuclear genie out of the bottle in Pakistan. It’s probably too late to shove it back in.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)