Who Has the Bomb

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A turnaround in U.S. policy came after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Overnight, Pakistan was much more essential as a U.S. ally. In 1981 the Reagan Administration offered President Zia a six-year, $3.2 billion military and economic assistance program. The U.S. also agreed to sell 40 advanced F-16 fighter-bombers, which, like most high-performance military aircraft, could carry nuclear weapons. In approving the assistance, Congress attached a rider that the aid would be cut off if Pakistan exploded an atomic device or came into possession of one. That rider expires, along with the aid package, in 1987. Says the Carnegie Endowment's Spector: "Both the Carter and Reagan Administrations had to make trade-offs with other foreign policy issues. It is those events that have stayed America's hand and allowed creeping proliferation."

The history of Pakistan's nuclear effort shows the bedeviling complexity of proliferation and the difficulties involved in containing it. Pakistan's nuclear program got under way in 1955. Over the next nine years, 37 Pakistani scientists were trained at atomic facilities in the U.S., and in 1965 Pakistan began operating its first nuclear reactor, a small research installation supplied by the U.S., under international inspection safeguards. In 1976 the Kahuta center was established.

The chief architect of the Kahuta program was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist politician who became President in 1971 and was overthrown by Zia in 1977. (In 1978 the popular Bhutto was hanged by the Zia government for allegedly conspiring to have a political opponent killed.) Bhutto was obsessed by India's nuclear progress. In 1965 he had declared, "If India builds the Bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry. But we will get one of our own."

In 1972, following Pakistan's defeat in the third India-Pakistan war, Bhutto made his move. Less than two months after becoming President, he convened a secret conference of Pakistani scientists and bureaucrats in the city of Multan. There, he launched Project 706, Pakistan's equivalent of the U.S.'s Manhattan Project.

The program developed rapidly along several fronts, some evidently peaceful in intent, others less so. By 1973 the country possessed a Canadian-built commercial nuclear reactor fueled by natural uranium. At about the same time, Bhutto entered negotiations with France for a commercial-scale plutonium- reprocessing plant. It would be capable of extracting from spent fuel more than 300 lbs. of plutonium annually, enough for as many as 30 atom bombs and far more than necessary for Pakistan's peaceful nuclear program.

The agreement with France was signed in 1976. About two years later, under pressure from Washington that was in turn inspired by growing congressional concern, the French decided to stop work on the reprocessing project. By that time, however, Pakistan had reportedly obtained blueprints covering up to 95% of the project, and some French firms apparently continued to give quiet assistance to the effort until the end of 1979. Pakistan has continued to work on the plant, but no completion date can be predicted.