Declassified -
How India Tracked Pakistan’s Development of a Nuclear Device
Newly declassified documents reveal how New Delhi tracked Islamabad’s
pursuit of a nuclear device.
By Vivek
Prahladan January
06, 2017
Today,
South Asia’s fragile nuclear peace risks insolvency, with both India and
Pakistan armed with expansive nuclear arsenals. Moreover, given their mutual
rivalry, the prospect of limited nuclear exchange continues to loom large in
the region. India’s deterrent strategy accounts for a two-front nuclear
exchange with both China and Pakistan. How Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine merges
into its strategic identity remains an open question. When Kenneth Waltz
wrote of the “spread” of
nuclear weapons rather than their “proliferation” in 1981, Pakistan was
yet to count itself among nuclear weapon states.
Making deterrence work amid
nation-state rivalry counts on the ability of the respective intelligence
communities of nuclear states to constantly attenuate uncertainty about their
rival’s present as well as prospective nuclear arsenal and doctrine. Today,
both India and Pakistan continue to deploy considerable intelligence
resources to track the other’s nuclear arsenal.
India, for instance, has taken a keen
interest in Pakistan’s pursuit of a nuclear device going back to the 1970s and
even earlier. Based on newly declassified Indian documentation I was able to
access, what follows is an account of what Indian external intelligence knew
about Pakistan’s intentions between the 1970s leading up to the 1990s – the
decade that would end with both countries coming out as the world’s sixth and
seventh declared nuclear powers.
For Indian intelligence in the 1970s,
the focus in Pakistan was about its reprocessing capacity and centrifuges. This
shifted in the 1980s to focus on the capability to produce an explosive device,
and, finally, in the 1990s, focused on the nascent Pakistani missile program
routed through China, which was eventually outsourced by China to North Korea.
Soon after the 1998 tests by both
countries, Indian intelligence was looking at supply chains for Pakistan’s
Shaheen-II ballistic missile, almost four years ahead
of its first test in 2004.There was already specific knowledge
available with India on Shaheen-I, including on the hardware that was involved
in steering the missile. Additionally, New Delhi was not entirely convinced
that Pakistan would not use choose to use non-nuclear chemical warheads for its
missiles
The trail of documents begins with a
Joint Intelligence Committee Report (dated February 24, 1976) titled
“Pakistan’s Capability to Produce Nuclear Weapons.” This paper was an update to
a JIC Paper from March 1975. It assessed that in absence of assistance for
plutonium-239 or uranium-235, “Pakistan could not be in a position to explode a
nuclear device at least for four years from now.” Further, the report noted
that all was not well with Karachi Nuclear Power Plant. It had developed
faults due to “leakage in boiler flow down valve which resulted in
reactor poisoning.” It was shut down six times in 1975 with the
largest one in mid-1975 when Canadian experts were recruited to repair the
leakage of heavy water from the heat exchanger.
Moreover, in 1976, diplomatic cables
from the Indian Embassy in Ottawa reveal that India was becoming aware of
Chinese scientists’ presence in Pakistan. A Hungarian diplomat informed an
Indian diplomat in Ottawa that the Canadian government was aware that Chinese
scientists were being given access to facilities with Canadian material in
Pakistan, despite the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP-I) coming under
IAEA safeguards.
Pakistan was also sharing Canadian
technical knowledge with the Chinese in return for military supplies. Henry
Kissinger, then-U.S. secretary of state, had visited Pakistan in 1976,
where he was attempting to forge Afghan-Pakistan rapprochement following the
visit of Prime Minister Bhutto to Kabul. Kissinger’s secondary agenda was
to probe the France-Pakistan nuclear agreement. According to briefings received
by Indian officials in Washington, Kissinger and Bhutto agreed that on the
nuclear issue, “both sides will avoid confrontation.”
By September 1977, India’s external
intelligence Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) had begun to report on Pakistan’s
plans in detail, issuing a report called “Pakistan — Clandestine Purchase of
Nuclear Equipment and Materials.” Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC)
had set up a purchasing channel in Bonn, Germany, and Abdul Waheed, a cousin of
General Zia-ul-Haq, oversaw the funds for these clandestine contracts. $11
million was already spent by Pakistan in Western Europe on
plutonium technology, including the purchase of a “shearer” for use in its
reprocessing facility.
The Pakistan explosive device program
was coming together and, in 1981, a “Monthly Report” from the Indian Embassy
in Islamabad warned New Delhi that “it is very likely that
Pakistan will succeed in exploding a nuclear device, possibly this
year.” The embassy also informed that “Zia was extremely keen to explode
the nuclear device at the earliest possible.”
In the same year, J. N Dixit, who
would go on to become India’s national security advisor (2004-2005), circulated
a report entitled “Pakistan race to Nuclear Weapons” to all heads of missions.
The note concluded that the question of whether “Pakistan has indeed embarked
on a nuclear weapons program” could be answered affirmatively. Dixit assessed
that “Kahuta, Islamabad, and Sihala form a sort of protected centrifuge
triangle.” Kahuta was protected with Crotale surface-to-air missile systems.
Pakistan had also gained the capacity to produce uranium hexafluoride.
India anticipated that
Pakistan could conduct an atmospheric or underground test in Sindh,
Balochistan, or the Northwest Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa today).
Meanwhile, Soviet satellites had revealed information on Pakistani tunneling in
the Ras Koh range. Alternately, the Indians anticipated that China could
have hosted the first Pakistani test at Lop Nor. As one former official in
the office of then-Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi told me:
…we were following AQ Khan’s
movements. A deliberate subterfuge has been created by Pakistan that AQ Khan
was running a rogue operation, so called “nuclear Walmart.” A.Q Khan was
leading inter-governmental delegations. We knew where he went, whom he talked
to i.e. each of his visits to North Korea and then his debriefings in China.
A 1981 brief prepared by the Indian
Embassy in Washington also revealed Indian anxieties at U.S.
President Ronald Reagan’s upgrading of U.S.-Pakistan relations, fortified by a
$3 billion military aid package that included F-16 fighters and airborne
warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft. In Zia’s talks with members of the
U.S. Congress, “the nuclear question figured prominently,” the
brief noted. In this year, Secretary East Eric Gonsalves had led an Indian
delegation to Canada wherein India pointed out the Libyan connection to the
Pakistan nuclear program. Indian information was that “Pakistan could have a
plutonium-based explosion by the end of the year and have enriched uranium by
1983.”
U.S. officials meanwhile assured
India that Reagan had conveyed to Zia “quite clearly that Pakistan’s
acquisition of nuclear weapons would damage the entire new relationship worked
out between the two countries.” Zia had publicly mentioned his proposal for a
mutual inspection of nuclear facilities between India and Pakistan. Lawrence
Eagleburger, Reagan’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, told
Indian officials that “the [U.S.] administration found credibility in Zia’s
nuclear disavowal,” but the Indians remained unconvinced.
In conclusion, Indian cold war era
intelligence document reveal that Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program has thrived
even in an environment of internal and regional uncertainties. Its leadership
has historically fielded questionable nuclear peace proposals as a prelude to
nuclear escalation. Speculative nuclear brinkmanship remains perhaps the last
remaining viable argument available to the Pakistan government and military to
influence new patterns of equilibrium taking place in the subcontinental
region. The Cold War continuum suggests that China’s dominant voicing within
Pakistan’s securitization will fasten Pakistan’s deterrence operationalization
and will to re-demonstrate capability. Undoubtedly, Pakistan continues to view
itself as the nuclear sword-bearer among the Islamic nation-states.
Dr. Vivek Prahladan is Visiting
Researcher at Keio University in Japan. Further archival documentation and oral
accounts on Indian nuclear history can be found in the author’s book, The Nation Declassified: India and the Cold War
World (Har-Anand, India, 2017).
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