Indian Defence Review

In 2009, soon after President Obama announced that Pakistan’s nuclear materials “will remain out of militant hands”, the US ambassador in Islamabad sent a secret message to Washington. Anne W. Patterson was deeply worried. Her concern was a stockpile of highly enriched uranium kept near an aging research nuclear reactor in Pakistan. There was enough material to produce a nuclear bomb.

In her cable, sent on May 27, 2009, Ms Patterson reported that the Pakistani government was dragging its feet on an agreement reached two years earlier wherein Islamabad had agreed that the United States would remove the material. The US Ambassador had been told by a Pakistani official: “If the local media got word of the fuel removal, they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons”.

The cable does not tell us the end of the story. Hopefully the fuel has been removed since then. It however, remains a fact the Pakistani nuclear program has given ‘sleepless’ nights to successive US Presidents.

But perhaps even more interesting than the Wikileaks cables is a series of US documents published by the National Security Archives (NSA) of the George Washington University on how Pakistan acquired the bomb in the 1970’s (most of the documents date 1978-1979).

This period witnessed the military coup by General Zia-ul-Haq who imposed martial law on 5 July 1977. He first ruled as Chief Martial Law Administrator and later as the President of Pakistan (from September 1978 till his death).

It corresponds to Jimmy Carter’s Presidency in the United States¹.

The new documents show that though the Carter Administration was deeply upset with Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, the arrival of the Soviets in Afghanistan at the end of the seventies, made the US officials ‘forget’ that Pakistan had become nuclear. Later, it was too late to stop the nuclear train.

The documents prove that, already in the 1970’s, (as today), the Pakistani nuclear weapons program has been a source of anxiety for US officials in Washington; especially so in the late 1970s, when they discovered the infamous AQ Khan’s network.

The Carter Administration would have been even more worried, if they had known that Khan and his team were spreading nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea with the help of China, but it is another story.

The entire process started after Pakistan’s defeat during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. President Bhutto realized that Pakistan would never be able to defeat India in a conventional war. He decided to secretly go for nuclear weapons. In 1973, Pakistan began negotiations to buy a nuclear reprocessing facility (used for producing plutonium) from a French firm.

In May 1974, after Pokhran I², in a section ‘Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons’, a Special National Intelligence Estimate, the CIA talks of expecting Pakistan to ‘press ahead’ with its nuclear weapons program (at that time ‘far inferior to its prime rival, India, in terms of nuclear technology’, says the report).

In August 1974, US intelligence agencies estimated that Pakistan would not have nuclear weapons before 1980, even if it gets ‘extensive foreign assistance’. But a year later, the CIA predicted that Pakistan could produce a plutonium–fueled weapon as early as 1978, as long as it had access to a reprocessing. It was therefore enough to stop the transfer of reprocessing plant to end the process.

Unfortunately the US intelligence agencies made some wrong assumptions. As explained by the NSA papers, they gave “virtually exclusive emphasis to the plutonium route for acquiring the fissile material required for building the bomb. Thus, intelligence analysts assumed that countries like Pakistan would try to acquire reprocessing technology so that they could chemically extract plutonium from the spent fuel rods taken from nuclear power reactors. This was a reasonable premise because plutonium has played a central role in modern nuclear arsenals. Nevertheless, during the early 1960s, US intelligence had assumed that China would first build and test a plutonium weapon, but as it turned out, Beijing found it more expedient to produce highly-enriched uranium for the nuclear device which it tested in October 1964.”

The documents confirm that Zia’s main objective was the consolidation of the nuclear program initiated by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who had bragged “we are ready to eat grass” to possess the coveted weapon.

Thanks to AQ Khan who managed to steal the blueprints for a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility, the Pakistani dream became a reality right under the eyes of the Americans who “wanted to maintain good relations with that country, a moderate state in an unstable region”.

The National Security Archive, which obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, writes how Washington discovered that Pakistan, which had not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)³ suddenly had the key elements to make a bomb: “Once in power, the Carter administration tried to do what its predecessor, the Ford administration, had done: discourage the Pakistani nuclear program, but the CIA and the State Department discovered belatedly in 1978 that Islamabad was moving quickly to build a gas centrifuge plant, thanks to ‘dual use’ technology acquired by Khan and his network.”

It is worth mentioning some of the stages of the process during the years 1978-1979. Reading these historical documents, one realizes that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and his colleagues believed that ‘a package of tangible inducements’ would dissuade Pakistan from taking drastic steps.

In March 1979, Warren Christopher met with General Zia and Foreign Minister Shahi and spoke ‘tough’. Shashi said it was ‘an ultimatum’.

In 1978, besides its European allies, Washington tried to put pressure on China to in turn pressurize Islamabad to cooperate and stop working on the bomb. Beijing was requested to stop selling sensitive technology to Pakistan. A year earlier, the US Ambassador to Pakistan reported on a discussion with Chinese ambassador Lu Weizhao who gave him some assurance; the State Department then commented on Beijing’s promise to not help Pakistan develop a reprocessing plant: it seemed ’credible’. How wrong they were!

After all those months and years, to acquire the bomb was for Pakistan a question of ‘survival’; they often argued that it was their ‘unfettered right’ to develop nuclear technology.

Another briefing of National Security Archives points out: “the China’s role as a leading provider of sensitive technology to Pakistan has repeatedly strained US-China relations, and has complicated efforts to expand US-China trade.”

Business may have been more ‘complicated’ for the Americans, but the fact remains that China has been Pakistan’s main support to acquire the bomb.

Another document obtained by NSA under FOIA reported that in June 1983 “there is unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program.”

While the Carter Administration worked hard on a nonproliferation policy, Pakistan still managed to build its nuclear arsenal. It certainly brought deep frustration to Carter and his team.

Another document admits that during the 1980s, “the US was criticized for providing massive levels of aid to Pakistan, its military ally, despite laws barring assistance to any country that imported certain technology related to nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan waived the legislation, arguing that cutting off aid would harm US national interests”.

The moral of the story is that when a State is desperate to get nuclear technology, it is difficult to stop it, with sticks or with carrots.

Notes

1. Carter served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981.
2. India’s ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ in Pokhran, Rajasthan.
3. Like India.
4. Although 1984 was a more likely date for the CIA.