NUCLEAR ANXIETY: THE KNOW-HOW; U.S. and China Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb
By
TIM WEINERJUNE 1, 1998
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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a future Prime Minister of Pakistan, declared in 1965, ''If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves -- even go hungry -- but we will get one of our own.''
It required more than three decades, a global network of theft and espionage, and uncounted millions for Pakistan, one of the world's poorest countries, to explode that bomb. But it could not have happened without smuggled Chinese technology and contradictory shifts in American policy, according to present and former United States officials.
China, a staunch ally of Pakistan's, provided blueprints for the bomb, as well as highly enriched uranium, tritium, scientists and key components for a nuclear weapons production complex, among other crucial tools. Without China's help, Pakistan's bomb would not exist, said Gary Milhollin, a leading expert on the spread of nuclear weapons.
But the United States, a cold-war friend that turned its back on Islamabad when that long battle was over, pursued policies that proved almost as essential to the Pakistani bomb program as the uranium and tritium, some present and former Government officials say.
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The United States provided Pakistani nuclear scientists with technical training from the 1950's into the 1970's. And it turned a blind eye to the nuclear weapons program in the 1980's, because Pakistan was providing the crucial link in the Central Intelligence Agency's effort to smuggle billions of dollars of weapons to Afghan guerrillas attempting to drive out Soviet invaders.
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But when that covert operation ended, the United States cut off a multi-billion military aid program by imposing sanctions in the 1990's -- leaving Pakistan feeling defenseless.
''We have helped create the conditions that exist today for the big bomb,'' said Milt Bearden, who was a senior C.I.A. officer in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989. ''Our marvelous sanctions forced their hand -- forced them to go where they are today.''
Nicholas Platt, who was the United States Ambassador to Pakistan in 1991-92 and now serves as president of the Asia Society, said, ''Our own policy, which denied them a credible conventional capability, has in a way forced them to rely more on the nuclear deterrent.''
Pakistan's efforts to build the bomb began in the 1950's. Under the ''Atoms for Peace'' program, the United States agreed to train Pakistani scientists in nuclear-reactor technology. Washington also provided Pakistan's first research reactor and fuel. The training continued until 1972.
That year, shortly after a crushing defeat in its third war with India since the two nations were cut free from British colonial rule in 1947, Pakistan resolved never to suffer such humiliation again. In January 1972, Mr. Bhutto, by then Prime Minister, summoned his nation's best nuclear physicists and ordered them to build a bomb. Pakistan set up a world-wide smuggling ring to buy, copy or steal nuclear weapons technology, according to United States officials and declassified Government documents.
India tested a nuclear weapon in 1974, and Pakistan greatly intensified its efforts in response. The program was closely monitored by the United States military, intelligence and law-enforcement services -- so closely that President Jimmy Carter cut off all military and economic aid to Pakistan in April 1979, citing United States laws aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
That decision was reversed nine months later, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which lies on Pakistan's border.
Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, agreed to smuggle weapons to the Afghans on behalf of the C.I.A. Suddenly Pakistan was the recipient of a six-year, $3.2 billion American aid package -- half cash, half high-tech weapons.
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But in 1983, a secret State Department report said there was ''unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.'' The report detailed how Pakistan had bought or stolen nuclear weapons technology around the world.
The report, based on information gathered by the C.I.A. and recently declassified, also said flatly that ''China has provided assistance to Pakistan's program to develop a nuclear weapons capability.''
The ''unambiguous evidence'' included Pakistan's secret blueprint for a nuclear bomb. That blueprint was made in China.
Pakistan had obtained the plans from the Chinese Government in the early 1980's. The bomb was simple and efficient, based on highly enriched uranium, and it had been tested by the Chinese in 1966. United States Government physicists built a model of the bomb and reported that it was a virtually foolproof design.
''The United States approached the Pakistani Government at the highest levels to communicate its extreme concern'' over the nuclear-weapons program, the report said.
Mr. Bearden, the former C.I.A. officer stationed in Pakistan, recalled, ''We went to them and said, 'Here is what your bomb looks like' -- even showed them a model, I believe.''
But General Zia indicated his belief that he had the blessings of President Ronald Reagan and the Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, to go ahead and build the bomb, according to two retired Pakistani military intelligence officials. The general clearly stated his intent in a 1986 interview. ''It is our right to obtain the technology,'' General Zia said.
In 1985, Congress enacted a law requiring the President to certify that Pakistan was not building nuclear weapons and thus eligible for continuing military and economic aid. And every year from 1985 to 1990, Presidents Reagan and Bush certified just that.
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''Reagan and Bush said it ain't a bomb until they turn that last screw and paint B-O-M-B on the side,'' Mr. Bearden said.
Everything changed after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when Pakistan was no longer needed as the key link in the C.I.A.'s arms pipeline to Afghan rebels. In 1990, the United States finally acknowledged that the Pakistani nuclear weapons program existed -- and, under the law, cut off military aid.
This left Pakistan's armed forces, facing an Indian Army twice their size, without a reliable source of conventional weapons, like tanks and jets. It is still waiting for 28 F-16's, for which it paid the United States $650 million.
Beginning in 1990, Pakistan is believed to have built between 7 and 12 nuclear warheads -- based on the Chinese design, assisted by Chinese scientists and Chinese technology. That technology included Chinese magnets for producing weapons-grade enriched uranium, a furnace for shaping the uranium into a nuclear bomb core, and high-tech diagnostic equipment for nuclear weapons tests, according to the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which tracks the spread of nuclear weapons and technology.
Now, with last week's weapons tests, Pakistan faces fresh sanctions from the United States.
''Sanctions are such a blunt instrument that they could potentially ruin Pakistan's economy,'' said Mr. Platt, the former envoy to Pakistan.
That worries Mr. Bearden, the former C.I.A. officer. ''We could destabilize Pakistan through sanctions,'' he said, ''and that scares me more than anything.''
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/01/w...and-china-helped-pakistan-build-its-bomb.html
And here indians think Chinese supplied us with everything
In each of the major cities of Pakistan, you can find a strange monument depicting a saw-toothed mountain and a poised missile.
The mountain is a peak in the Chagai Hills, in whose granite depths Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests five years ago. In the Islamabad version of this tableau, which sits on a traffic island amid a congestion of garishly ornamented trucks, three-wheeled taxis and donkey carts, the mountain is bathed at night in a creepy orange light, as if radioactive. The camouflage-dappled missile is called the Ghauri, and it has a range of about 900 miles. If the chronic tensions along the border between Pakistan and India should ever escalate to a nuclear war, the Ghauri would try to deliver at least one of Pakistan's warheads onto New Delhi. Lest anyone miss the point, the missile was named for a 12th-century Afghan warrior whose most memorable accomplishment was conquering part of India.
A couple of things about these odd shrines are worth considering. The first is the way Pakistan flaunts its nuclear potency in such a proud, even provocative public display. Traditionally most countries that possess nuclear weapons have maintained a discretion about them, befitting their stigma and mystique. Israel has never even publicly acknowledged the existence of its program, nor did the white rulers of South Africa before they quietly decided to dismantle their arsenal in 1989. Pakistan, too, used to be coy about whether it possessed nuclear weapons, but in the past few years the Pakistanis have decided that their weapons are more useful when brandished. Useful, first, in warding off the superior conventional army of India, but useful too as a nationalist proclamation and a beacon to Islamic pride.
A second salient fact about these roadside sculptures is that the Ghauri is, beneath its Pakistani cosmetics, a copy of a North Korean missile called the Nodong. A strong suspicion of American and Indian intelligence services is that Pakistan paid for this missile -- which can deliver a nuclear warhead -- in part by giving North Korea vital tidbits of information about the production and testing of nuclear explosives. Pakistani officials deny this categorically, but not very convincingly in the view of more impartial experts. (The father of the Pakistani bomb, A.Q. Khan, is known to have paid at least 13 visits to North Korea.) If the suspicion is justified, then Pakistan -- which lives at the busiest crossroads of Islamic terror -- is the first nation to have bartered away nuclear weapons technology on the black market
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/magazine/the-thinkable.html
Why have you included Iran? or you are trying to tell the defense audience that Pakistan should attack Iran for no reason just to try out that how would it feel? or is their something else that you Indians know about it and the rest of the world doesn't.
Pakistan's Islamic bomb is the result of Financing by Saudi Arabia, Technology assistance from China and intentional indifference of the West.