Pakistan’s new leader had been dreaming for years of an Islamic nuclear bomb, which would put his country on a par with its much larger rival. The humiliating partition of Pakistan had disgraced the military and ushered Bhutto into power. He was determined that no similar disgrace would lead to his ouster. He had first talked publicly of a nuclear weapon in the early 1960s when he was the government’s energy minister. Then, in his 1967 autobiography, he had laid out his argument for going nuclear, writing: “All wars of our age have become total wars; all European strategy is based on the concept of total war; and it will have to be assumed that a war waged against Pakistan is capable of becoming total war. It would be dangerous to plan for less and our plans should, therefore, include the nuclear deterrent.” The generals in power at the time had rejected Bhutto’s plans, arguing that the costs would cut too deeply into spending on conventional forces. Once he took charge, however, Bhutto was eager to carry out his plan.
Beneath the canopy, he began his remarks sedately and then gradually increased the intensity by recounting the recent crushing defeat by India and promising to restore the country’s honor. He reminded his audience that he had long wanted Pakistan to counter India’s greater military numbers by developing a nuclear deterrent, though until that time no one had embraced his vision. Because the latest battlefield loss had had the effect of entrusting him with the country’s destiny, he said, he had decided to take the single most important step to protect Pakistan’s security: building an atomic bomb. His voice rising and trembling, he told his rapt audience, “You men here will make it for me and for Pakistan.”
There were men inside the tent who knew well the enormous scale and the dangers of what Bhutto was asking. Abdus Salam had founded a respected theoretical-physics center in Italy and recognized the difficulty of building an atomic weapon. Munir Ahmed Khan had just returned to Pakistan from a senior job at the International Atomic Energy Agency, so he was aware of the obstacles to obtaining the technology. I. J. Usmani, who had spent the previous decade building up the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, knew that the country lacked the technology and skill to build a nuclear weapon, and he had spent the previous days trying to persuade Bhutto to abandon the idea.
But enthusiasm born of frustration and bitterness coursed through the crowd of generals and lesser scientists. Khaled Hasan, Bhutto’s press secretary, saw emotions sweep over the group as the realization dawned that they might be present at a historic turning point for their young country. To the scientific and military elite of a nation suffering from yet another defeat at the hands of its worst enemy, Bhutto offered salvation and even retribution. Many were ready to embrace the challenge, no matter how outlandish or risky the goal seemed. “He had great charisma, and he really moved those people,” Hasan said years later, remembering the day as if it had just happened. “They cheered him. They said they could do it. Everyone believed in Bhutto.”
“Can you give it to me?” Bhutto exhorted the audience, like an evangelical preacher warming up a tent sanctuary packed with true believers.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes. You can have it. You can have it,” they chanted.
“How long will it take?” he demanded.
The harsh reality of the question silenced the group. It was one thing to hoist the banner of building a nuclear weapon, another entirely to carry out one of the most complicated tasks of modern science. The murmuring began, and slowly the skeptics emerged. As the group pondered the challenge, some questioned whether Pakistan had the scientific and technical expertise to build a bomb, and others wondered whether it could afford to drain scarce resources to finance such a massive project. The country possessed only the barest beginnings of a nuclear industry—a small research reactor provided by the United States under the Atoms for Peace program sat in Rawalpindi, the garrison town next to Islamabad. A larger reactor was under construction by Canadians near Karachi, but it was designed to generate electricity, and the Canadians had insisted as part of the contract that its operation be monitored by the IAEA. Building a nuclear weapon required thousands of trained technicians and access to the most sophisticated technology in the world. Starting from scratch would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and could take many years.
Some of the senior people at Multan were brave enough to stand up to Bhutto and tell him that it was impossible to predict how long it would take to complete such an enormous project. A few suggested Pakistan lacked the scientific foundation and resources to accomplish the task. But before long, emotion overpowered reason, and one man jumped to his feet and embraced Bhutto’s challenge.
“It can be done in five years,” he said.
“Three years,” Bhutto fired back. “I want it in three years.”
Another scientist, a young physicist named Siddique A. Butt, shouted, “It can be done in three years.”
Bhutto smiled broadly, promising his audience that he would scour the globe for the financial resources and scientific talent to make the dream a reality. Usmani was fired as head of the PAEC, replaced by Munir Khan; Salam opposed the whole idea of building a bomb and left the country in 1974, going on to share in the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 for work done at Imperial College in London and the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.
BHUTTO needed millions of dollars for his bomb, but his country was poor, so within weeks of the Multan meeting he embarked on a whirlwind tour of twenty countries, mostly in the Middle East, with stops in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Hasan, who traveled with Bhutto, called the trip the president’s Islamic offensive. In Libya, he met with Colonel Moammar Gadhafi, the revolutionary who had seized power in a military coup in 1969 at the age of twenty-seven and established one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Gadhafi was a wild-eyed man of the desert who had enormous ambitions for himself and his country, which included using oil revenue to finance international terrorism and turn his country into a regional superpower. Gadhafi had already tried without success to buy a bomb from China. He was intrigued by Bhutto’s proposal.
Gadhafi was not the only one interested; the prospect of an atomic bomb manufactured in Pakistan had broad appeal across the Muslim world. Arab rulers in the Middle East were realistic enough to understand that the world, and particularly Israel, would not tolerate a nuclear-weapons program in the volatile, oil-rich region, but they believed that Pakistan stood a better chance of avoiding international interference because its bomb might be seen as a counter to India’s superior forces and its rumored nuclear program. Certainly there would be loud opposition, but the conventional wisdom was that no one was likely to launch an attack against a Pakistani nuclear effort, except perhaps India.
Bhutto did not have to wait long for help. The international oil crisis of 1973 sent prices through the roof. In February 1974, he planned to cash in on his allies’ bonanza under the guise of an Islamic summit. He chose the perfect backdrop to rally Muslims: the historic and beautiful city of Lahore. A former capital of the Mughal Empire, Lahore’s brick-and-limestone fort and luxurious gardens were reminders of the Muslims’ lost glory on the subcontinent. The leaders of thirty-seven Muslim nations arrived in Lahore at a time when some saw the possibility of a new era for their people. Arab armies had exhibited newfound strength in fighting Israel a few months earlier, and many governments were fat from oil revenue. Pakistan had no oil, but Bhutto saw another role for his country. He used the forum to lay out a broad vision of a new Muslim alliance that would join poor Islamic countries with their wealthy brothers to fight the Zionists and their Western backers. He envisioned Pakistan at the forefront of Islamic nations, if it could develop the weapons necessary to challenge the world’s superpowers.
“Israel has gorged and fattened on the West’s sympathies, nurtured itself on violence and expanded through aggression,” he told the conference. Now was the moment, he said, that oil money and military strength could shift the balance in favor of the Muslim world. “This may well be a watershed in history,” h
e said.
Bhutto singled out Gadhafi for special attention, determined to secure his support for Pakistan’s bomb. Though both had a flair for the dramatic, the men were a study in contradictions. Bhutto was a son of privilege who had a degree from the University of California at Berkeley and had studied law at Oxford University. Gadhafi was the last child and only son of a poor Bedouin family. He had risen to power through the Libyan military, engineering the overthrow of King Idris and promoting himself to colonel. Bhutto honored his new friend by naming the largest cricket stadium in Pakistan after the Libyan strongman. Bhutto gave him a rare personal tour of the country’s military installations and the Canadian-built nuclear reactor nearing completion outside Karachi. The courtship worked, and Gadhafi agreed to help finance the nuclear effort. “Mr. Bhutto told me that during the Islamic summit in Lahore, he had several discussions with Colonel Gadhafi about the manufacture of an atomic bomb by Pakistan,” said Mohammed Beg, a former Pakistani diplomat and journalist. “[Gadhafi] promised Mr. Bhutto that he would provide however much money was needed. And, in return, he asked Mr. Bhutto if Libya could have the first bomb.” In the months that followed, two couriers arrived in Pakistan from Libya, each carrying $100 million in cash. There were also reliable reports that Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal agreed to provide money for the program in return for a promise that Pakistan’s nuclear program would provide a security umbrella for the kingdom. Bhutto later demonstrated his appreciation by renaming the former colonial city of Lyallpur as Faisalabad.
Arab support for Pakistan’s bomb reflected the lessons of the first nuclear age. The world had been divided into two camps: those who had the bomb and those who did not. No Muslim country had the bomb, and some Arab leaders were convinced that acquiring it was the only deterrent against attack from the West and Israel. For others, an Islamic bomb was a potent symbol of their importance on the world stage. Certainly both rationales were part of Bhutto’s mind-set, but fear of India weighed heaviest on his mind. Pakistan had little chance of defeating the larger forces of India through conventional warfare, so Bhutto turned to nuclear deterrence. Not everyone in Pakistan agreed, and some of the generals openly opposed the nuclear path, arguing that they could hold their own against the Indians with conventional forces. This argument defied recent military history, and it was rendered moot three months after the Lahore summit.
ON MAY 18, 1974, about one hundred miles from the Pakistani border, India detonated a nuclear device roughly equivalent in power to the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi watched as the floor of the Rajasthan desert heaved from the blast set off 350 feet underground. A message was sent to New Delhi, the capital, which read simply, “The Buddha is smiling.” Gandhi later insisted it was a “peaceful nuclear explosive,” but that benign nomenclature did not stop world condemnation or the anxiety spike in Islamabad.
India’s detonation demonstrated the utter folly of believing that nuclear technology could be divided neatly between civilian and military programs. Up to this time, only five countries openly possessed nuclear weapons: Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. President John F. Kennedy’s prediction in 1963 that fifteen to twenty countries would have nuclear arms by 1975 had not come true, thanks largely to the technical and political barriers to proliferation. The chief regulatory mechanism was the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which had taken effect in 1970 as part of a so-called grand bargain to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. The treaty allowed the five weapons states to keep their arsenals but required them to begin reductions through future negotiations. In exchange for pledging to forgo nuclear weapons, other countries were offered access to technology and expertise to develop civilian nuclear programs to generate power and conduct scientific and medical research. More than seventy countries had ratified the treaty by the time of the Indian test, and among them were Iran and most Arab states, in addition to Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. China and France had refused to sign, and so had a handful of countries with nuclear-weapons ambitions of their own, including India, Pakistan, and Israel, which was widely suspected of already possessing the bomb. The Indian test threatened to undermine the treaty, and a contingent of policymakers in Washington wanted to issue a sharp rebuke to Delhi and impose economic sanctions. They were convinced tough action was necessary as a lesson to India and other countries that defying the international prohibition against developing nuclear weapons would not go unpunished. But President Nixon and his powerful secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, refused to go along with new sanctions or even permit a harsh condemnation. Dennis Kux, who drafted the initial response, later wrote that Kissinger determined that “public scolding would not undo the event, but only add to US-Indian bilateral problems and reduce the influence Washington might have on India’s future nuclear policy.”
Kissinger’s decision was the first in a series of failures by American policymakers to take the significant steps required to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. In the case of India and other countries that would follow, bilateral considerations trumped concerns about nuclear weapons, setting the stage for what would become regular complaints from have-nots over a basic inequity and inconsistency concerning possession of nuclear weapons. Israel’s rumored arsenal was ignored for political expediency, and India’s test did not provoke new sanctions or tough talk from the United States. The lack of American retaliation was not lost on the Pakistanis, and in the years to come Bhutto and his successors came to understand just how far they could go without provoking the United States.
Canada did take action, freezing all assistance to a second reactor being built in India and blocking new parts for an existing one. Ottawa felt betrayed because India had used spent fuel from a Canadian-supplied reactor to produce the plutonium for its nuclear device. The reactor was supposed to be used solely for peaceful purposes, but the diversion of fissile material to a secret weapons program underscored the difficulty in enforcing the separation of civilian and military nuclear uses, particularly in a country like India, which had refused to sign the treaty. The blame was shared by the Atoms for Peace program, which had provided vital knowledge to Indian scientists. Homi Sethna, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission later in the 1970s, described the impact of Eisenhower’s program by saying, “I can say with confidence that the initial cooperation agreement itself has been the bedrock on which our nuclear program has been built.”
Though India’s bomb was intended primarily as deterrence against China, the Pakistanis saw it as a direct threat, prompting Bhutto to declare that his country would not be intimidated or submit to “nuclear blackmail.” The test hardened Bhutto’s resolve to move forward, erased any doubts among the generals, and ultimately opened the door for A. Q. Khan’s return. But even as the Multan project took on more importance, it became more difficult because the Indian test stiffened some of the international community’s resolve to get tougher on proliferation. Like India, Pakistan’s weapons program centered on fissile material from reprocessed plutonium extracted from spent fuel from its own Canadian-built power reactor, which had just come on line near Karachi. The next step was to build a reprocessing plant to extract the plutonium from the reactor’s spent fuel, but the British had already refused to sell Pakistan the necessary technology because of fears it could be used for weapons. Negotiations with the French for the construction of such a plant suddenly came under more international scrutiny.
The Canadians demanded that Pakistan open its Karachi reactor to full inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, even though Pakistan had not signed the nonproliferation treaty. The Pakistanis called the demands unreasonable and refused to comply, prompting Canada to cut off spare parts for the reactor and stop shipping uranium fuel rods that would have brought the core to full strength. Still, the means for imposing tighter restrictions on the Pakistanis and other potential proliferators were limited. The IAEA lacked authority over countries that had not signed
the nonproliferation treaty, and it had no authority to regulate or even monitor the export of nuclear-related technology to such countries.
The Indian test marked the official start of what Austrian writer Robert Jungk described as the Age of Proliferation, an era in which the threat of nuclear weapons no longer rested with the five original nuclear states but with India and Israel and likely Pakistan. No one could be sure when it would stop or how to stop it. Before the Indian explosion, a handful of countries had been working on a list of specific technologies and equipment that should be subject to tighter export controls because of their nuclear applications. The controls would prohibit sales to any country that had not signed the nonproliferation treaty and had not accepted IAEA safeguards, but the regulations were informal and difficult to enforce, particularly because many countries regarded the sales of such advanced technology as commercial transactions, with little regard for proliferation dangers. Nonetheless, a month after the Indian test, fifteen countries gathered in Vienna for an emergency session to hammer out the final list of restricted technology. Two months later, a remarkably short time for a broad international agreement, the group published two separate memos establishing a category of equipment and technology that would come under tighter controls; it was known as a “trigger list” because any attempt to buy the goods would trigger the restrictions. But the regulations were only as effective as the ability and willingness of the individual countries to enforce them.
This was, in fact, one of the moments when the world might have stopped Pakistan from following the nuclear path. Some experts argue it was already too late—once India went nuclear, there was no chance to stop Pakistan from matching its neighbor, bomb for bomb. The more convincing argument is that strong international condemnation of India coupled with genuine enforcement of tougher restrictions on sales of nuclear-related technology could have at the least tacked many years onto the time it would take Pakistan to match India’s bomb. But that didn’t happen because more powerful forces took over in Pakistan and the United States.
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