Barely a few weeks after Pakistan’s humiliating defeat in the Bangladesh conflict of December 1971, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto convened a meeting in Multan with close aides and nuclear experts. Bhutto announced he was determined never to allow India to repeat what it had done in Bangladesh. He said that given the immense conventional superiority India would continue to wield, Pakistan had no option but to develop nuclear weapons. But Pakistan’s nuclear programme never had an exclusively Indian dimension. Writing his memoirs in his prison cell while awaiting the gallows, Bhutto stated that if he had not been overthrown he would have put the “Islamic Civilisation” at par with the “Hindu, Christian and Jewish Civilisations” by giving the “Islamic Civilisation” a “full nuclear capability”. But Bhutto avoided any reference to China’s nuclear capabilities. After India’s nuclear test in May 1974, China sent its first batch of 12 scientists to assist Pakistan in developing nuclear capabilities. Bhutto alluded to this cooperation in his memoirs where he spoke of a “historic agreement” in 1976 with China that would be “my greatest contribution to the survival of our people and our nation”. By the early 1980s, China had supplied Pakistan with enriched uranium to build a few weapons along with designs for these weapons. Even after China acceded to the NPT, it supplied Pakistan with 5000 crucial ring magnets to assist its nuclear enrichment programme. It is currently providing unsafeguarded plutonium processing facilities to enable Pakistan to miniaturise nuclear and thermonuclear warheads. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin project of arms control, noted: “If you subtract China’s help from the Pakistani nuclear programme, there is no Pakistani nuclear programme.” While China’s support for Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes is evidently part of its effort to “contain” India, Bhutto’s references to the Islamic dimensions of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions are now coming under closer international scrutiny. His political adviser, Khalid Hassan, has revealed how Bhutto solicited and obtained funding for Pakistan’s nuclear programme from Libya and Saudi Arabia. Around the same time, the then Indian prime minister, Morarji Desai, rejected a Libyan request for nuclear assistance in 1978. UN weapons inspectors are reported to have evidence about offers from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan to provide nuclear know-how to Iraq. Iran is also reported to have acknowledged obtaining “second hand nuclear equipment” from Pakistan for uranium enrichment. But, given the antagonism and suspicions that prevail between Iran and Pakistan, it appears that any equipment supplied by Pakistan to Iran would have been given primarily to enable Pakistan to retain some leverage and goodwill in Tehran. While the Americans have predictably been making a song and dance about Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons capabilities, they are remarkably reticent about growing evidence of Pakistan-Saudi Arabia collaboration in nuclear and missile development. The Petroleum Intelligence Weekly reported in July 2000 that Saudi Arabia was providing Pakistan and the Taliban 150,000 barrels of oil per day as undocumented economic assistance. Referring to this aid amounting to $1.4 billion annually, former CIA analyst Robert Baer notes: “Beginning in the 1970s Saudi Arabia poured over $1 billion into Pakistan to help Pakistan develop an ‘Islamic’ nuclear bomb to help it counter the ‘Hindu’ nuclear threat.” Saudi Arabia also provided nearly $1 billion to enable Pakistan to buy nuclear capable F-16s from the US in the 1980s. Saudi Arabia emerged as Pakistan’s closest economic patron in the aftermath of the international sanctions Pakistan faced following its May 1998 nuclear tests. A year later, in May 1999, Nawaz Sharif escorted Saudi Arabia’s defence minister, Prince Sultan, on a visit to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile facilities in Kahuta. This was the first ever visit of a foreign dignitary and only the third by a Pakistani prime minister to these facilities controlled and administered by Pakistan’s military. US analysts say the visit laid the basis for closer Pakistan-Saudi Arabia links in missile and nuclear related matters. In September 2000, a Pakistani delegation led by A.Q. Khan visited Saudi Arabia as guests of Prince Sultan. The Saudi-Pak nexus is being documented by those in the US not as sanguine as Colin Powell about its implications. Anthony Cordeman, author of a State Department study entitled “Weapons of Mass Destruction: The New Strategic Framework”, remarked that very senior Saudi officials have held conversations with officials involved in Pakistan’s nuclear programme. A former official of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, Thomas Woodrow, said: “Saudi Arabia has been involved in funding Pakistan’s nuclear and missile purchases from China.” He added Saudi Arabia was “buying nuclear capability from China through a proxy state, with Pakistan serving as the cut-out”. There are also now a number of reports by well informed analysts indicating that following the recent hurried visit of Crown Prince Abdallah to Islamabad, Pakistan has reached a “definitive agreement” to station nuclear weapons on Saudi soil, fitted with a new generation of Chinese supplied ballistic missiles, which would be under Pakistani command. These missiles would replace the aging CSS 2 missiles with a 2800-km range that China supplied to Saudi Arabia in 1987. Pakistan evidently intends to compensate the “strategic depth” it lost following the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan, by positioning missiles and nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the visit of former Chinese prime minister Zhu Rongji to Pakistan in 2001, General Musharraf made it clear that he would not hesitate to provide the Chinese navy a base in the Gwadar port at the mouth of the Persian Gulf which is being built with massive Chinese assistance. Saudi Arabia has also reportedly agreed to provide financial assistance for Gwadar. Given its growing demand for imported energy, it makes sense for China to forge closer strategic ties with Saudi Arabia, sing Pakistan as a “cut-out”. Are we seeing the emergence of a Beijing-Islamabad-Riyadh missile and nuclear axis that could fulfill Bhutto’s vision for Pakistan’s self-styled “Islamic Bomb”?
