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New Book: Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb

Karl

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Interesting, Feroz H.Khan. Sounds Familiar? Since other H.Khan also lives in USA
 
Hitting Paydirt with Feroz Khan’s ‘Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb’ – Part I « Timothy Nunan

These are the excerpts from a review of the book. This is the ultimate insider's guide to the development of Pakistan's nuclear capability. According to author, the book was written upon the advice of President Pervez Musharraf and Director General Strategic Plans Division Khalid Ahmed Kidwai to give a clear account of the development of nuclear weapons. This was the time when AQ Khan's network was recently unravelled and World was awash with speculations about Pakistan's Nucelar Doctrine and use of this capability.

I have only included the interesting bits:

We actually live in what Paul Bracken calls a ‘second nuclear age’, less symmetrical and more decentralized than the Cold War.

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan off-limits in near all cases for all researchers, and even when cities like Islamabad, Lahore, or Karachi are navigable and safe for foreign (especially American) researchers, Pakistan hasn’t opened its contemporary archives in the same way that countries like Algeria, Serbia (covering Yugoslavia), Russia (for the USSR), China (albeit only up to around 1960 for foreign policy matters), or India (but not for the Indira Gandhi papers) have.

United States began to develop an anti-Soviet military alliance with Karachi from 1953 onward, it also partnered with Pakistan, under the Atoms for Peace program, to build the first nuclear reactors ever in the country. This coincided with tentative and ad hoc Pakistani-led steps to improve the state of nuclear expertise in the country, which was almost non-existent at the time and centered heavily around those few Pakistani expatriates who had studied at primarily British institutions in the 1940s and 1950s.

chair of the newly-created Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), Nazir Ahmad, would succeed in sending hundreds of young Pakistanis abroad to US research institutions like Argonne, outside of Chicago, within the country his tenure throughout the late 1950s was largely viewed as a failure: US regulations and Pakistan’s lack of cash only allowed Karachi to secure a small ‘swimming pool’-type reactor, rather than a more advanced heavy water reactor that could generate power and allow for more advanced research. US officials were reluctant, however: the byproducts from heavy water reactors could be used for military applications, and while Canada was willing to sell one, the price tag of $7 million was too much for PAEC to afford. In spite of the ostensible partnership between Washington and Karachi, then, there was already more than a touch of bitterness to the relationship: Atoms for Peace had offered heavy water reactors to India, but saw in Pakistan the threat of proliferation.

Canada had provided four heavy water reactors to India at give away prices in the name of financial aid.

These developments in the late 1950s intersected with changes in Pakistan’s leadership and its strategic outlook on its place in the region and the world. After a 1955 visit to India, Soviet leadership was beginning to develop a close relationship with India and recognized Kashmir as belonging to New Delhi, and yet because of the dominance of military issues in its relationship with the United States (and the ensuing backlash from Third World nationalists like Nasser at American bases in Pakistan), leaders like Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra understood that their country needed another external balancing force, a role that France took on briefly in the 1950s but which a relationship with Beijing increasingly filled after diplomacy between Zhou Enlai and Bogra following the Bandung Conference in 1955.

This more ambiguous course for Pakistani foreign policy, combined with domestic shifts inside America, led to profound shifts in the relationship between the two countries by 1962-1965. After discussions had begun in May 1962 to demarcate the Sino-Pak border, war broke out in October of that same month (at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis) between India and China. The United States responded by providing Nehru with military aid, at the same time pleading Ayub to make ‘a positive gesture of sympathy and restraint’ with regards to New Delhi. Even though military leadership argued that now was the time for decisive military action against India, Ayub withheld, believing, it seems, that the best route for the country was to use the détente with Moscow as a window to seek a US-negotiated resolution over the Kashmir issue. ‘From Ayub’s standpoint’, writes Feroz Khan, ‘his agreement not to intervene in Kashmir should have been rewarded with a serious negotiation leading to the settlement of the issue. Many in the U.S. government also thought the environment was propitious to settle the Kashmir dispute.’ And throughout 1963, US and British diplomatic teams led by Averell Harriman and Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations Duncan Sandys attempted to broker such a deal.

Yet the window was rapidly closing on such a future for the region: Ayub replaced his Foreign Minister, Mohammad Ali Bogra, with Bhutto in June of 1963, not long after the young rising star had helped negotiate a final agreement over the Sino-Pak border. When JFK was assassinated in 1963, sustained American attention to what were then called ‘India-Pakistan affairs’ declined. When war did take place between Pakistan and India in 1965, the United States failed, from Islamabad’s point of view, to intervene according to the terms of CENTO or SEATO. Washington, moreover, deliberately allowed Moscow to broker the peace deal between Delhi and Islamabad.

During the 1960s, the PAEC, under the leadership of Ishrat Hussain Usmani, was no slouch: it managed, with additional funding, to secure the construction of a Canadian-style reactor near Karachi. It continued to send hundreds of young Pakistanis abroad to the United States for training, and constructed research centers in Lahore and Dhaka (then part of East Pakistan). Perhaps most impressively, it also secured the construction of a major research campus, the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH), near Islamabad, a gorgeous modernist neo-Mughal complex designed by the American architect Edward Durrell. Yet concrete steps towards weaponization – seen as more important following China’s nuclear test in 1964 and the threat of an Indian response to that test – were not yet forthcoming.

A split in security thinking developed between figures like Ayub and young guns like Bhutto. The former group, which Khan dubs the ‘nuclear cautionists’, emphasized that Pakistan still financially relied on being embedded in international networks like the IMF, and its alliance with the United States, to meet many of its financial and security needs. Given the precarious state of power generation and food in Pakistan, the promise of nuclear power was great. Still, Ayub argued in 1967, ‘nuclear weapons and territorial nationalism are incompatible’, a belief that led him to simply not make a decision on a crash program throughout the late 1960s. The latter group, which Khan dubs ‘nuclear enthusiasts’, looked to the events of 1962-1965 as proof that Pakistan had to develop a bomb for national survival. The alliance with the United States, they argued, had simply not worked in order to guarantee the country’s security. ‘Where is the security?’, pleaded Bhutto. ‘We were supposed to be a second Japan. I do not see where this second Japan is.’ As the soon-to-be-exiled Bhutto would famously quip in a 1965 interviw with The Guardian, later in the decade,

if India acquires nuclear status, Pakistan will have to follow suit even if it entails eating grass.
 
Hi, I have the paper version of this book and have read it. It is very well written and shows how close Pakistan was to losing its nuclear weapons program. Kahuta suffered a major earthquake in the early 80's, that knocked out all their centrifuges, and Pakistan at that time had no HEU. If India or any other country had attacked, they would have ended the nuclear weapons program.
 
I have ordered this book online. Since Singapore does not have such a book. I hope it's a good read..
 
The book costs 105 $
Thats a bit steep?
I want to buy it,but not at this price.
 
The book costs 105 $
Thats a bit steep?
I want to buy it,but not at this price.

You are probably talking about the price of the "Hardcover". Get the "Paperback" price. Its almost a third of the price mentioned by you.
 
@Karl : Dude are you a Pakistani in Maldives or a Maldivian in Pakistan ? :what:

Or are you a Maldivian in Maldives - But you sure as hell seem to have a lot of interest in Pakistan & no posts on some of the Maldivian topics ! :blink:
 
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This is the second part of Book review, again I have selected only the more interesting parts - minus the commentary by reviewer:

The book is a dense technical and institutional history of the places and personalities – PAEC, Khan Research Laboratories, Bhutto, Zia, A.Q. Khan – that went into the construction of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, but also a compelling and in-depth history of Pakistan itself.

The book also makes for the centrality of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistani history.

It is important to understand the debates that Bhutto and his circle emerged from victoriously. Following the debacle of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, there were several good arguments for and against Islamabad pushing harder to obtain nuclear weapons after the end of that war.

‘Nuclear cautionists’
stressed the need for Pakistan to remain tethered into international financial, monetary, and development networks to continue to develop, and argued that conventional military supplies from the West could halt entirely if Pakistan began to develop a military nuclear program. Better to accept slow improvements in civilian nuclear technology through Atoms for Peace, they argued, and there was little need to upset the country’s framework of foreign relations and its outside cash flow from donors all for another adventure, just years after the 1965 debacle.

Khan teases out Ayub’s thinking on these matters in more detail by looking both to his 1967 ‘political autobiography’ as well as his diaries from the time. On the one hand, Ayub comes across as someone interested in a non-aligned position for Pakistan (the country would join the Non-Aligned Movement in 1979, but by then, arguably, the idea of a serious Non-Aligned group had lost much of its lustre). He writes in Friends Not Masters, the political biography:Nuclear weapons and territorial nationalism are incompatible and deadly danger to the survival of the human race.

Ayub remained grim-minded on topics like ‘the population bomb’ and food shortages. Somewhere in his quicksilver mind, it seems, nuclear technology could prove itself the tool that impoverished, former colonial countries needed to avert impending disaster. ’We are too poor not to afford nuclear technology,’ Ayub is reported to have said in a 1962 speech at the inauguration of the Atomic Energy Center in Dhaka.

By 1971, however the strategic context had changed dramatically, and many of the arguments that Ayub and Co. had presented against nuclear advocates like Bhutto (who became President in 1971) now seemed quaint. Neither the United States (a CENTO partner of Pakistan’s) nor Pakistan’s ‘all-weather’ ally, China, had intervened in Islamabad’s favor during the 1971 war, and Bhutto repeatedly likened the treaty agreement ending the war to the Treaty of Versailles. A new grand strategy, one centered more around nuclear weapons but also around an eclectic series of relationships with states beyond just Washington, Moscow, and Beijing came more to the forefront, too.

Bhutto moved decisively: within a few months of assuming power, he called for a conference of Pakistan’s nuclear scientists in Multan,at the residence of Nawab Sadiq Hussain Qureshi, the chief minister of Punjab, Bhutto spoke to some four hundred of the country’s nuclear scientists and engineers about Pakistan’s atomic future. Accounts of what precisely happened differ: according to Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, then a young nuclear scientist fresh from studies in the United Kingdom, Bhutto explicitly mentioned the bomb, saying, ‘We are fighting a thousand year war with India, and we will make an atomic bomb even if we have to eat grass. So in how many years can you do it?’

At this, Mahmood recalls, ‘There was excitement; with some saying five years, some seven, some said ten. People were raising their hands. Someone was jumping. There was shouting, like in a fish market. Bhutto said, “OK, OK, five years.” Then someone shouted three years.’ Encouraged by the audience’s eagerness, the president candidly communicated the gravity of the decision, but also promised the assembled scientists and engineers his full support. “I shall provide you the resources and the facilities, so can you do it?”

Others, like Dr. Ishfaq Ahmad, recall a more muted approach. Bhutto, he recalled, only indirectly referred to a nuclear weapon by hinting that he expected the scientists to meet the challenge ‘if something happens.’ By this, everyone attending understood him to mean, ‘If India explodes a nuclear device.’ In such an eventuality, Bhutto went on to say, ‘I expect you to deliver. You’d better deliver.’

Major institutional changes went underway at the Multan meeting itself. Bhutto dismissed Ishrat Hussain Usmani as the head of PAEC, replacing him with the more maverick Munir Ahmad Khan and directly subordinating PAEC to Bhutto’s office.

Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed into force in 1970, meant that the old American Atoms for Peace and Canadian supply chains that had built KANUPP were to close off. Combined, it seemed to many in Islamabad that – yet again – Pakistan was being made to pay for Delhi’s sins. How to build a crash nuclear program without any of the advantages of sharing that its competitors did?

Bhutto was careful not to outrage Washington, Moscow, or Beijing: Bhutto offered Nixon the use of Gwadar as an American regional port, which Nixon refused. (Fifty years later, the port portends to become an oil refining and processing center for China.)

Bhutto tried to be both socialist and Islamic at the same time: ‘party workers would wear Awami dress (Shalwar Kameez) and for all formal occasions, a new standard dress, Maoist-style tunic and trousers, leaving behind the traditional Sherwani and cap that Jinnah had adopted.’

Bhutto made a major trip to the Middle East in January 1972 – part of a reposition of Pakistan as a premier Islamic country – and in January 1973, met with Colonel Gaddafi in Paris, where the two agreed on a a deal of several hundred million dollars in Libyan assistance for the Pakistani nuclear program, Nigerien yellow cake, and (apocryphally) uranium from Chad in exchange for Pakistani training of Libyan nuclear scientists. The crowning achievement of this approach, however, was Bhutto’s chairing of the Islamic Summit Conference in Lahore in February 1974, a symbolic act that nonetheless allowed Bhutto to corral roughly half a billion dollars in financing for fuel cycle facilities from the Arab countries and Iran. Soon, with the help of returned Pakistani nuclear scientists and metallurgists from Europe, and unorthodox methods from the Pakistani foreign service, the cash raised from these networks would be used to obtain advanced European technology with which the enrichment process would proceed.

Second part of the review ends here.
 
Eating Grass_Making of the Pakistani bomb..jpg
 

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