New Delhi: The letters typed up on a small plain piece of paper bearing the signature of Pakistan’s then prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. And this is what he wrote. ‘In developing its nuclear technology, Pakistan would not divert any of its urgently needed development resources to the expensive efforts required to produce a nuclear explosion, provided its defence in the conventional field is assured.’
It’s an extraordinary document. In 1975, Bhutto had gone to Washington begging for security help to his just defeated country which had been split in half by the Indian Army.
The Pakistani leader was told though bluntly that that assistance would only be forthcoming if Pakistan seized to pursue a nuclear bomb and Bhutto held out the sign promise.
There are another couple of letters though in the archive from around the same time. One is from a Pakistani engineer living in Holland who wrote to Bhutto in 1974 just after India had tested its nuclear weapon offering his services to Pakistan’s nuclear programme.
Bhutto invited the famous A.Q.Khan to meet the next time he was in Pakistan, which happened in December 1974. What exactly happened at that meeting we don’t know, there are no minutes but Pakistan’s nuclear programme kicked in.
Hi, I’m Praveen Swami, and I’m a contributing editor to ThePrint. Thank you for joining this episode of ThePrint Explorer.
There’ve been two big developments this week. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif pointed out that Pakistan hadn’t kept the promises it made in the Lahore Declaration. The peace agreement he signed along with prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
We all know what happened in Lahore. It was after all an agreement that was meant to bring India and Pakistan down the road of normalisation. The road ended instead in Kargil.
But, the vast bulk of the Lahore agreement wasn’t just about India-Pakistan peace on Kashmir. It was about ensuring stability between the two powers that had just tested nuclear weapons a few months earlier in 1998.
There was another big development in Pakistan last week. It’s annual Youm-e-Takbir, the day on which Pakistan celebrates those nuclear tests and remembers them as a heroic moment in which the stability and security of the country was assured.
I’m going to be looking today at how Pakistan got the bomb and how that ended up shaping the Lahore agreement and ask if something can still be salvaged from that betrayed peace deal.
The search for the bomb
It’s kind of difficult to say exactly when Pakistan’s nuclear quest actually began. The archives are completely opaque on this. I’m guessing though that the story started off in October 1964 when China conducted its first nuclear weapons test.
Days later, on October 24, the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, the legendary Homi Bhabha, went on All India Radio and gave Indians some professional education in nuclear weapons. He estimated, perhaps wrongly, that a stockpile of 50 atomic bombs could be built for just $21 million.
Some people call that false salesmanship meant to hook a reluctant political establishment. Maybe he genuinely believed it. But he closed his broadcast by urging the great powers to pursue nuclear disarmament in order. ‘To create a climate favourable to countries which have the capability of making atomic weapons but have voluntarily refrained from doing so.’
The message was pretty clear. India could respond to China’s nuclear test by building a bomb if it wanted. And it would be financially possible for this poor country which had just emerged from the trauma of Partition and decolonisation to do it.
However, India was willing to walk back if the rest of the world would. And obviously, the rest of the world wasn’t interested. China, you’ll recall, had an increasingly fraught relationship with the Soviet Union. It also feared the West.
The two great Cold War powers in turn were reluctant to pull back their nuclear weapons. And even allies of the US like France and Great Britain had got nuclear insurance of their own, their own bombs, just in case America didn’t prove as reliable a partner, as they thought.
These were the Cold War years, and they were a dangerous time. It’s pretty clear. Homi Bhabha’s words must have been heard in Pakistan, too. India wanted to balance out China’s bombs. But by the same logic, someone in Islamabad must have reckoned maybe they needed to consider a bomb to balance out the weapons India might now seek.
Bhutto was then a foreign minister in President Ayub Khan’s military government. He and other Pakistani elites seem to have committed themselves sometime in 1965 to the pursuit of nuclear weapons.
A British journalist writing in 1965 reported. ‘Deep anxieties in the key ministries in Rawalpindi, particularly at the Defence Ministry, that one day 110 million Pakistanis will wake up one fine morning and hear from Radio Delhi that India has become the world’s sixth nuclear power.’
It was in this article by the journalist Patrick Keatley that Bhutto uttered his famous statement if India got the bomb, then we should have to eat grass and get one or buy one of our own.
1965, the scholar George Perkovich notes, that this backstory is critical to understanding the subsequent Pakistani narrative. See, in March 1965, Ayub and Bhutto met Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing. At this meeting, Bhutto hinted in testimony he would give at his trial in 1977 when he was jailed and subsequently executed by another military ruler, General Zia-ul-Haq, that he sought China’s help to develop nuclear weapons.
Bhutto may have had all kinds of motives to give the testimony he did. But it’s likely this request was made, even if it was not exceeded at the time. We do note that subsequently China was fulsome in its support for Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The official Pakistani story has it that
Pakistan’s pursuit of nuclear weapons began only in 1974, well after India got the nuclear bomb.
But is that really true? What we know is a little more ambiguous. The issue is supposed to have been discussed at a meeting in the Chief Minister of Punjab’s home in Multan in January 1972, just after Pakistan’s defeat in the Bangladesh war, where Bhutto reportedly exhorted the gathering of the need to produce a nuclear bomb.
He apparently at that meeting gave a deadline of three years, just the time the Americans had taken to develop a nuclear bomb during the Manhattan project in the Second World War. Bhutto promised he would spare no expense for this to be done.
The logic of this was pretty obvious. Pakistan had haemorrhaged blood in the 1971 war. It had been cut into two countries, and Bhutto would have feared with insurgencies looming in Balochistan and restive populations elsewhere in the country that India could one day capitalise on this situation to cut Pakistan up into more pieces.
Let’s not forget either Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been a big proponent of the 1965 war where he thought he could use irregular forces to seize Kashmir from India. It’s possible that dream or that vision of seizing Kashmir remained even more painful for him after 1971, and he hoped that one day with nuclear weapons behind him as insurance, he could do this again to do to India what India had done to Pakistan in Bangladesh.
There was a third consideration that was probably very important to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, creating a nuclear bomb and a nuclear establishment with it would have given him a counterweight to the massive influence the military continued to have in Pakistan’s strategic community and establishment even after its defeat in the 1971 war.
You can think of this as deterring India, but also deterring his own generals from pursuing some kind of coup or policies to bring down the Prime Minister. Of course, we know that didn’t work out so well. The biggest problem Pakistan had was that unlike India, and India’s own resources were quite limited at this stage. Pakistan had even fewer numbers of highly skilled engineers, nuclear physicists and technical personnel needed for a bomb programme.
It also didn’t have the kind of elaborate nuclear infrastructure India had begun to develop. By 1973 after an earlier dalliance with the UK’s atomic energy agency fell apart, the Pakistan atomic energy agency contracted with a Belgian firm to secretly build a pilot scale reprocessing plant in Pakistan.
This eventually became what would be called PINSTECH (Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science & Technology) for what was the reprocessing plant. The reprocessing plant would have let Pakistan enhance fuels and garner plutonium, which can be used to build a lightweight nuclear device much easier to deliver than enriched uranium devices because of weight.
The plant was not large enough, though, to be the source of an ambitious nuclear weapons capacity. Pakistani nuclear officials also entered into negotiations with France to acquire an industrial scale reprocessing plant.
Pakistan hoped to obtain a facility free from nuclear safeguards, a possibility in that France had not at that point signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and was, therefore, not legally obliged to insist on any international safeguards at plants it cooperated in building in other countries.
But the talks were slow and fitful. In George Perkovich’s conversations with the former chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Munir Ahmad Khan, the original idea was for Pakistan to develop its own nuclear infrastructure as India had done. But all of these limitations likely meant that Pakistan very quickly realised it just wouldn’t be able to meet these objectives.
And even if it could build a nuclear bomb by getting plutonium from the French supplied plant, it wouldn’t be able to develop the other components that were necessary. It therefore decided to go down a shortcut route, which was to pilfer what it could.
Moreover, in 1975, PM Bhutto had started expressing frustration at the slow pace of negotiations over the reprocessing plant. The French were now insisting that the Pakistan government implement international atomic energy safeguards on the proposed facility.
And India’s tests, of course, as we know happened in 1974, adding on to the pressure. And that’s where Bhutto got the letter from A.Q.Khan in 1974. Khan cast himself as a patriot, disturbed by India’s tests and committed to helping Pakistan acquire the same facility.
A.Q.Khan returned to Pakistan in January 1976. He became famous. He was to become a household name in many parts of the world because he left his Dutch engineering firm and began an notorious career as a proliferator of nuclear weapons.
We don’t know exactly where Khan got, what he got. But we do know that he stole blueprints from a company called Urenco and plans for building at least one centrifuge, which is necessary to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
In this sense, Khan himself by stealing from Europe for Pakistan, was to be a precursor for the nuclear proliferation networks that would eventually bring him down, like selling nuclear know-how to North Korea and attempting to sell it to various other countries, especially Libya.
Things go wrong
The US, though, was pressing very, very hard to minimise, if not completely eliminate the threat posed by the French-Pakistani nuclear reprocessing plant.
Bhutto visited Paris in 1975 and encountered stiff resistance, insistence from the French that Pakistan signed safeguards. By early 1976, President Gerald Ford’s administration in the US was openly pressuring Pakistan to abandon its bid for the plant.
And in 1976, Pakistan announced plans to build eight nuclear power plants that would give a techno economic rationale for the reprocessing plants. This is something, by the way, that Iran is doing right now.
The US encouraged Canada to use its leverage as the supplier of Pakistan’s nuclear reactor in Karachi to press Pakistan to drop its pursuit of a reprocessing facility. Despite all this, France and Pakistan proceeded with a nuclear reprocessing deal in March 1976. Pakistan capitulated to France’s demands that the plant operate only under IAEA safeguards.
In August that year, as US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was visiting Pakistan and offered to sell A-7 attack aircraft if Islamabad agreed to drop its reprocessing plant deal. This dispute went on and on and on. In fact, the US Defence Department even agreed to sell 110 A-7s to Pakistan contingent on congressional approval.
But in December 1976, the French government tried to relieve pressure by announcing it would not supply nuclear reprocessing plants in the future if this one plant could go forward. The Canadian government pressed on and announced that it would suspend its nuclear cooperation agreement with Pakistan and not supply uranium fuel for the Karachi nuclear power plant if that reprocessing deal went ahead.
1977, though, brought about big changes in Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq staged his famous coup. Sanctions were imposed on Pakistan in response for that military coup and military aid was suspended to the country. That was pretty much the end of this whole uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing sale deal.
Well, what was the impact of these sanctions and the end of these foreign negotiation deals? As you’ll remember, A.Q.Khan had already brought in stolen plans to enrich uranium to nuclear weapons grade. And this made him very, very valuable. Pakistan was already succeeding in tunneling around the international pressure brought on it using the stolen blueprints and stolen materials that Khan was willing to obtain.
We know from a number of histories around that time that there were various indications of this nuclear smuggling going on. But either the world was not overly concerned about it, did not take it seriously enough, or companies were just too greedy to care.
In August 1978, with growing US pressure and doubts about Pakistani intentions, France revoked its nuclear cooperation contract with Pakistan.
The French decision, of course, reflected growing world concerns about what a Pakistani nuclear bomb would mean and also changed geopolitical circumstances. In France, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, who was a big proponent of that nuclear deal with Pakistan, had stepped down.
Well, what was the end result of these pressures, conflicting pressures and pulls? In August 1978, the French walked out of their deal with Pakistan and that was the end of the reprocessing story.
But Pakistan, because of the stolen technology A.Q. Khan had brought in, could continue developing its nuclear weapons. From a variety of sources, we know that Pakistan probably had a crude ready to deliver nuclear bomb by 1987.
During the Operation Brasstacks crisis (1986-87), there are many accounts which suggest India was deterred by the possibility of nuclear escalation.
In February 1992, Pakistan’s foreign secretary publicly admitted that Pakistan had acquired the capability to assemble at least one nuclear device. And prime minister Nawaz Sharif himself announced that Pakistan possessed nuclear bombs. He made that declaration interestingly in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, probably to signal that if India went to war to change the Line of Control — remember, a big insurgency had broken out in Kashmir by that point — that Pakistan might go nuclear. Deterrence at work again.
The US continued to press Pakistan to roll back its nuclear weapons program, but with very little success. Washington at one stage held out an offer of 38 F-16 aircraft in return for agreeing to American non-proliferation objectives. No bite. And that’s where Lahore comes in.
Lahore declaration
In 1998, India tested its nuclear weapons and Pakistan did the same. And that agreement was to lead to a 2007 agreement which suggested that both countries have a dialogue on security concepts and nuclear doctrines.
Why is that important? Well, there are considerable asymmetries in how India and Pakistan understand that nuclear weapons might be used at some point. And that leaves a lot of scope for misunderstandings and missteps.
India has a stated nuclear doctrine, and that stated doctrine says it will use its nuclear arsenal to deliver an incapacitating second strike or massively retaliate in response to a first strike by Pakistan.
Pakistan doesn’t have a written doctrine, but its unstated doctrine attributes a dual role to its nuclear forces. To deter India from initiating a conventional war, and to deny India victory in case that war does break out.
Risk management is key to nuclear confidence building. And that’s why the India-Pakistan situation is so complex. There are no other nuclear powers directly perched on each other’s borders, which also have a hostile relationship.
Remember, Indian and Pakistani jets bombed each other after the Pulwama attacks not very long ago. And the two countries have a history of going to war. There is a terrorism problem of terrorists coming from Pakistan and conducting attacks in India, which is diminished, but not completely gone away.
Nuclear bombs, though, are very different from all other kinds of weapons, because the scale of damage they could potentially inflict would destroy both countries and their possibilities for progress for a great deal of time to come.
Lahore opened the gates for the two countries to negotiate a path forward. And that’s what Kargil really sabotaged. Not just trust, but a foundation for managing an adversarial relationship that involves nuclear weapons.
Nawaz Sharif is right to condemn or ask Pakistanis to introspect on why that deal was sabotaged by the Pakistan military. Both countries need to see, though, if they can’t move forward towards developing a more stable relationship, because the fortunes of a very large chunk of humanity depend on neither country ever reaching a situation which might spill into a nuclear war.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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