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May 3rd - - The News (Pakistan) - Bhutto was father of Pakistani bomb

NBM-dossier
If anyone claims the title of “Father of the Pakistani bomb”, it should be former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on the political side and Munir Ahmad Khan on the technical side. Dr AQ Khan is wrongly given this credit, claims a dossier on the Pakistan nuclear programme launched here on Wednesday.

“Dr AQ Khan is not the father of the Pakistan bomb. It is ZA Bhutto,” it said in its full report, focussing on the efforts of Bhutto since 1958, when he became a minister in the Ayub cabinet. Surprisingly, the dossier has paid rich tributes to the services of Bhutto for developing the nuclear programme. The dossier, in a chapter on Pakistan’s nuclear programme and imports, reveals that Dr AQ Khan can only be accorded many epithets, including “founder of Pakistan uranium enrichment programme”.
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03 May 2007: The News
 
By our correspondent

LONDON: If anyone claims the title of “Father of the Pakistani bomb”, it should be former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on the political side and Munir Ahmad Khan on the technical side. Dr AQ Khan is wrongly given this credit, claims a dossier on the Pakistan nuclear programme launched here on Wednesday.

“Dr AQ Khan is not the father of the Pakistan bomb. It is ZA Bhutto,” it said in its full report, focussing on the efforts of Bhutto since 1958, when he became a minister in the Ayub cabinet. Surprisingly, the dossier has paid rich tributes to the services of Bhutto for developing the nuclear programme. The dossier, in a chapter on Pakistan’s nuclear programme and imports, reveals that Dr AQ Khan can only be accorded many epithets, including “founder of Pakistan uranium enrichment programme”.

“It is not appropriate to call him, as many do, the father of Pakistani bomb. Rather, two of his countrymen can rightly claim that title. On the political side, ZAB, the minister of mineral resources (1958-62), foreign minister (193-66), prime minister (1973-77). On technical side, Munir Ahmed Khan, a US-trained scientist who was the chairman of PAEC from 1972-1991. Ironically, MA Khan directed the Pakistan bomb project between two positions at the IAEA. First between 1957 and 1972 as a staff member, then as a member of board of governors,” the dossier said.

It said PAEC was founded in 1954. But it was under ZA Bhutto’s leadership as minister for mineral resources that PAEC set up the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Technology in 1960 and sent hundreds of students abroad to obtain degrees in physics and other nuclear-related science disciplines.

“The first civilian research reactor PARP in Rawalindi became operational when Bhutto was foreign minister. By that time, ZA Bhutto had already been lobbying in earnest to harness nuclear technology for weapons purposes. After the Chinese nuclear test in 1964, he concluded that if India would go nuclear Pakistan would have to follow the suit. He famously declared in a newspaper interview in 1965 that “Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry in order to develop a programme of its own. When named president and chief martial law administrator in December 1971, in the aftermath of traumatic military defeat by India, one of ZA Bhutto’s first priorities was to launch a nuclear programme. He convened a meeting of several dozen scientists and officials in Multan in Jan 1972 and asked them to produce a bomb within five years, putting MA Khan in charge of PAEC.”

The dossier has also recounted the services of Bhutto in developing the bomb. After the (first) Indian test in 1974, a cabinet meeting the following month confirmed the official launch of the Pakistan’s nuclear programme, which was until then a “hedging option”. This explains why notwithstanding ZA Bhutto’s initiation of the programme in 1972, the US later concluded that the nuclear design in development work began soon after the Indian test. That test was the tipping point that transformed the 1972 capacity decision into a proliferation decision. Bhutto was determined to a level-playing field and to demonstrate Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities, it added.

It said Dr Khan appeared on the scene very late after he brought a gift of centrifuge enrichment technology. He was not a nuclear physicist but a metallurgist by training. In 1972, as a recent PhD student, he was offered job and gained critical knowledge of centrifuge operations by working on it. On September 17, 1974, he wrote a letter to ZA Bhutto, volunteering his services to help Pakistan with the enrichment route to developing fossil material for a nuclear weapons.