The Pakistan Atomic Program: A Story Of Determination And Hope

It was October 1954. On the very day when the then Prime Minister of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Bogra met the American President Eisenhower in the White House and joined the America's Atom for Peace (Atom for Peace) project in the field of nuclear energy research and development. It announced the formation of Atomic Energy Commission for development. This was the beginning of Pakistan's nuclear program or actually it was a pledge by Pakistan that it would not use nuclear energy for the production of weapons. At that time, there was a lot of talk about this issue in Pakistan, because according to many observers, the main goal of President Eisenhower's Atomic for Peace plan was to deprive all other countries of the world, except the United States, of the ability to have nuclear weapons, and on them. They were to be prevented from producing nuclear weapons by imposing sanctions. Pakistan's acceptance of Eisenhower's plan shocked many people in Pakistan because it was the beginning of Pakistan's surrender at the feet of America. Soon after this, the period of closeness and cooperation between America and Pakistan in the military, political and economic fields began. In the same year, Pakistan joined the two US military agreements 'CENTO' and 'SETO' and in return for heavy military and economic aid, the US established military bases on Pakistan's soil and sent its military advisers to Pakistan and along with this, Pakistan The United States appointed its experts in Pakistan's Planning Commission to prepare a five-year economic plan. Thus America had taken Pakistan completely under its control. The result of the complete capture of America was that at that time the leadership of Pakistan did not even think for a moment about the development of nuclear weapons. In general, US defense treaties at the time were considered a means of countering aggression. In the 1960s, there were reports that India was rapidly moving towards nuclear tests, but despite this, Pakistan's leadership flatly refused to step into the field of nuclear weapons. In 1964, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto came to Delhi leading a condolence delegation from Pakistan on the death of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. was When asked what Pakistan was doing to acquire a nuclear capability, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto revealed that in 1963 he had proposed in the cabinet that Pakistan should start a program to develop nuclear weapons but President Ayub Khan and his pro-American finance minister Muhammad Shoaib and other ministers rejected his proposal outright and made a clear decision that Pakistan would not acquire nuclear weapons capability. In 1968, when President Ayub Khan visited France, French President Charles de Gaulle offered to build a nuclear reprocessing plant in Pakistan, but Ayub Khan rejected this offer. This advice was given to him by his Chief of Staff General Yahya Khan, President Ayub's Senior Scientific Adviser Dr Abdul Salam and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission MM Ahmed. There is no doubt that it was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who came to power in 1971 after the collapse of Pakistan as a result of the Bangladesh war, and who initiated the plan to make Pakistan a nuclear power. Soon after becoming President, Bhutto made a whirlwind tour of Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, and I accompanied him on that trip. The visit had two main objectives. One objective was to renew relations with Muslim countries and the other was to obtain financial support from Muslim countries for Pakistan's nuclear program. At the end of his visit in Damascus, he told Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad that his visit was the beginning of a journey of renaissance and that the Islamic world could gain nuclear power with the expertise of Pakistan and the wealth of Muslim countries. . Soon after this visit, he formally launched Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability program in 1973, replacing the head of the Atomic Energy Commission and dismissing the chief scientific adviser, Dr. Abdul Salam, to replace him with Dr. Abdul Qadir Khan was invited to Pakistan. For Pakistan's nuclear programme, he persuaded the French government to renew an earlier offer to build a nuclear reprocessing plant. The United States did not like the speed with which Bhutto was advancing in the nuclear program, and the then US Secretary of State Kissinger openly threatened that if Bhutto insisted on the nuclear reprocessing plant plan, he would not stay. will But the research work on the nuclear capability program that Bhutto had started continued. Pakistani scientists started uranium enrichment in 1974 at Kahota Laboratory. His hard work paid off in 1978 and by 1982 he was able to achieve 90% enrichment.