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.
