A Quantum of Discomfort
By Ahmad Faruqui , PhD
Dansville , California
Seymour Hersh has penned a piece on the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in The New Yorker. This being a taboo topic in Pakistan, the author is being attacked on the veracity of his sources.
Perhaps he should tackle an even more taboo subject in his next piece –hat has Pakistan gained by going down the nuclear road?
In 1972, it seemed to be a brilliant idea. The Pakistani Army lay defeated in the east. The Indian menace loomed large on the western border. What could be done to prevent the juggernaut from carrying out a second invasion and finishing off Pakistan?
The new president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was a firebrand politician. Years ago, he had talked about developing a nuclear bomb even if it meant eating grass for a thousand years. Bhutto gathered the nation’s nuclear physicists in Multan and told them to build the bomb.
Some disagreed, some were uncertain and some were gung-ho. Among those who disagreed was Professor Abdus Salam who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979. The news that Pakistan had embarked on its Manhattan Project spread quickly, drawing in a relatively unknown metallurgist working in Denmark.
A native of Bhopal who had migrated to Pakistan, Dr. A. Q. Khan was as incensed at the Indians as Bhutto. He pleaded with the president to bring him into the project.
While the Pakistanis were marshalling their resources, the Indians beat them to the punch. In 1974, the “ Smiling Buddha” exploded peacefully at Pokhran, just a hundred miles from the border Rajasthan.
Dr. Khan arrived in Pakistan in 1975. Since then, a cottage industry has grown trying to piece together evidence about what happened next. But the puzzle has defied a solution. A key piece may have been added evidence recently disclosed by the Washington Post. It draws upon notes that were provided to the paper by Khan.
Of course, Khan is struggling to clear his reputation ever since Musharraf accused him of single-handedly running a nuclear proliferation ring. Khan wants history to record that the Pakistani establishment was in with him all the way.
Despite his self-serving agenda, Khan cannot be ignored. When Bhutto visited the ailing Chairman Mao in 1976, Khan says that the two leaders struck a nuclear deal. In 1982, during General Zia’s rule, China provided Pakistan with enough weapons-grade uranium and blueprints to manufacture two atomic bombs.
As documented elsewhere, Pakistan also acquired weapons-grade uranium from other sources and may have passed along Western know-how about centrifuges to China. Along the way, Pakistan acquired ballistic missile technology from North Korea. Thus, when India carried out five nuclear explosions in May 1998, Pakistan responded with six of its own.
And so it was that the sub-continent was openly nuclearized. The arms race that had been underway ever since independence now entered the realm of quantum physics.
In both countries, even the most ardent supporters of nuclear weapons rest their case by arguing that the weapons are too horrific to ever be used. Saying that they are simply intended to be a deterrent, the Indo-Pakistani Dr. Strangeloves sleep peacefully at night.
However, as Albert Einstein argued, no weapons were invented so that they would never be used. O n the 6 th of August, 1945, a small atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing some 80,000 innocent civilians immediately. Another 200,000 died eventually.
Three days later, a similar disaster befell Nagasaki. The late Robert McNamara, former US defense secretary, wrote about the apocalyptic power of nuclear weapons in Foreign Policy magazine in 2005.
Quoting a Japanese source, he says that “ Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of nearby Urakami River, their hair and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks.”
Why did so many civilians have to die? McNamara says that they “were unfortunately ‘co-located’ with Japanese military and industrial targets. Their annihilation, though not the objective of those dropping the bombs, was an inevitable result of the choice of those targets.”
The nuclear weapons have placed Pakistan in a quandary. They were supposed to help the nation survive an Indian invasion. And now the survival of the weapons themselves has become a priority.
But there is controversy as to who poses the biggest threat to the weapons. The Americans say it is jihadis and the Pakistani nationalists say it is the Americans.
Hersh quotes Musharraf as saying that an elaborate system of tunnels has been developed by the military to protect the weapons from a nuclear strike. The weapons are kept in a disassembled state so that no one can launch them on short notice. A ten-member National Command Authority would have to approve a nuclear strike with the president casting the deciding vote, if necessary.
But despite the plethora of safeguards, Pakistan’s insecurity continues to grow. Hersh states that President Zardari wishes that the US, which is providing extensive civilian nuclear technology to India, would provide conventional military technology to Pakistan.
Pakistan ’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has not restored equilibrium to the military equation. Precious capital that could be used to accelerate economic and human development is being used to beef up conventional forces. The nuclear economic dividend remains a myth that tantalizes.
The country’s security managers, both civilian and military, made a huge gamble when they decided to go nuclear. Any independent observer would conclude that the nuclear weapons are a net liability on the nation’s security balance sheet.
Even in the US, policy makers from the president on down have concluded that nuclear weapons have no military value and bring with them an unacceptably high risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch.
New research has shown that the US and the USSR almost went to war with nuclear weapons after the Cuban crisis in the early sixties. Talks are now underway between the major nuclear powers to phase them out.
These days, Pakistan and India show no interest in talking to each other, much less in talking about nuclear disarmament. Their democratic leaders need to start talking, to prevent the people who elected them from being blown up in a nuclear holocaust.
