We didn't have such universities , research facilities, & skilled people for nuclear Program, few Islamic countries helped us financially as it was called Islamic nuclear bomb before.
Nuclear program was inevitable after we lost East Pakistan. We did it through legal & illegal channels .
Somewhat correct, but sounds like Western interpretation.
PINSTECH was established in 1965, more or less a decade before Pakistan began pursuing nuclear weapons. But it took some time to bring the quality of the Institute at the point where nuclear scientists would be able to produce qualitative research and do innovative experiments. We very much had skilled people, just not in quantity during the early period. Rafi Muhammad Ch., Abdus Salam, Ishfaq Ahmed, & Munir Ahmed Khan succeeded each other to head PINSTECH. All of them were foreign educated and trained in Western nuclear labs. Each of them is subsequently responsible for quantifying and qualifying a large number of nuclear scientists. Munir Ahmed Khan was perhaps more fortunate as he was also appointed to head PAEC and the weapons programme by ZAB, thus receiving relatively larger funds than his predecessors. Post Munir Ahmed Khan all of the other heads of PINSTECH have also been foreign educated. The current head has had his education from Uni. of Peshawar but later worked with the European firm.
The term "Islamic Bomb" is misleading. It is drawn from Bhutto's following statement: “We know that Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability. The Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilisations have this capability. The communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilisation was without it, but that position was about to change.” His reference appears to be civilisational, not religious. But later bureaucracies, certain executives, and certain heads of R&D establishment played with Bhutto's reference to make themselves look like Muslim Heros and perhaps continue gaining funds from other Muslim states (For the second there is actually no evidence. Pakistan just did not either officially accept it or reject it).
I think Bhutto would have pursued nuclear weapons even if East Pakistan had remained in the union. He had been pushing for nukes since the 1960s when Pakistan had enough credible evidence that India is going to build the bomb. The biggest opposition to nuke weapons programme was the military and the finance ministry during this period.
The legal and illegal channels terminologies are again Western defined. No country in the world has been able to produce nuclear weapons on their own. They all have had outside help in one form or the other, including the US. As long as they were cooperating it was legal. Once states like China and India began showing signs of developing nukes they introduced 'legalities' and 'illegalities.' The very non-proliferation regimes that were intended to prevent India's nuclearization today seek to accommodate it. Pakistan has been the only country to be actively challenged by them. Today AQ. khan is propagated as the "most dangerous man in the world," even though, barring his success in Pakistan, almost all of his proliferation projects have failed. On the other hand, American scientists like Morris Cohen, Theodore Hall, Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, and German-British scientist Klaus Fuchs, amongst many others, provided American-British nuclear weapons secrets to the USSR, which eventually succeeded in developing its bomb based on their data, thus initiating the Cold War. Funny how they were never referred to as the 'most dangerous men and woman' in the world.
