read this for some nuggets.
http://www.satribune.com/archives/jan11_17_04/opinion_wajid.htm
All Those Responsible for the Great Nuclear Betrayal Must be Taken to Task
By Wajid Shamsul Hasan
EVER SINCE India experimented its first nuclear device in 1974 Pakistan’s natural reaction to it has been a thorn in the eyes of the West.
Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Dec. 1971-5 July 1977) was made a horrible example for pursuing his goal of an “Islamic Bomb”. He was not deterred by threats to his life nor did he seek the nuclear glow for self-glorification. His vision for the West-dubbed “Islamic Bomb” mushroomed out of Indian atomic smoke. He had believed that had Pakistan a nuclear device in 1971 its chauvinistic neighbor would not have dared to invade and dismember Pakistan.
ZAB’s primary objective for nuclear teeth was to make Pakistan’s defence impregnable and also to be of substantive help to the Islamic world. Pakistan’s then Army chief General Ziaul Haq who hanged him, had once confessed that the amount of attention Pakistan army received from ZAB had "no parallel in the history of Pakistan army prior to 1971".
He was, in fact, a harbinger of colossal change in Pakistan’s defence preparedness—he replaced bullock cart backwardness into the atomic age. Bhutto had underscored the need for strengthening of the nation’s defence capability supplemented by self-sufficiency and economic development. His answer to meet the challenge was to develop “a local industrial potential for equipping its armed forces with more sophisticated weapons.”
Bhutto got the crucial nuclear blue print to enable the Pakistani scientists to enrich uranium and build indigenously the components of a nuclear device. He persuaded Dr. AQ Khan to leave his prosperous foreign job and lead his search for Pakistan’s nuclear glow. Although ZAB believed in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, he opted to build a nuclear bomb when India detonated its nuclear device in 1974.
Besides that, Bhutto also wanted to reduce the size of the Pakistani military establishment, prune it of dead wood and “fat and flabby generals” and convert it into a reasonable sized modern fighting machine with a nuclear arsenal and missile system as a sure deterrent backed by a National Service program to raise enough men from the people—earlier trained-- to be instantly available to defend the country in case of an invasion.
Bhutto knew that his vision of a nuclear Pakistan would receive the toughest opposition from the nuclear monopolists who had sinisterly nodded a go-ahead signal to India and Israel to have “the Hindu” and the “Jewish” bombs. ZAB, therefore, adopted a multi-faceted program to achieve the impossible. On the one hand—as an obvious cover- to his nuclear ambitions through uranium enrichment, he skillfully negotiated a Nuclear Reprocessing Plant agreement with France. Powers that be used General Zia and the mullas to overthrow his government and then forced Paris to cancel the Nuclear Reprocessing Plant agreement.
However, under the cover of French deal, he continued with his real program-- a secret not even shared or disclosed to his wife. It was his wisdom and sagacity that Pakistan’s indigenous nuclear pursuit remained undetected for a very long time until when it was just a few screws away from accomplishment. Bhutto had hinted at the detonation of a nuclear device late in 1978 in his last speech as the Prime Minister in the Parliament before General Ziaul Haq’s coup of July 1977. His overthrow obviously postponed that event and caused great uncertainty and doubts in the minds of Pakistan’s nuclear apparatus that had spent sleepless nights to do the impossible against heaviest of odds.
The nation owes its nuclear deterrent to him and the infrastructure that he had created risking his own life. It is both an irony and perhaps the greatest betrayal that the very infrastructure that Bhutto had established, its man-power, its national heroes and those who made Islamic Bomb a reality, are being dragged into public infamy and treated most shabbily by no other than the Generals who they gave nuclear teeth to scare the world into acquiescing into their blackmail.
I remember meeting one of those associated with his grand design just months after Bhutto’s execution—a military man at that—I asked him how soon Pakistan could have the “toy”. The gentleman asked me what was the time in my watch. It was 5 in the evening. His answer was historically laconic; “We can have it in just two hours from now”. That was the status of the progress on the West-branded Islamic Bomb.
Although Ziaul Haq established his credibility with his foreign masters by hanging his own benefactor, he and his generals could not give up Bhutto’s nuclear program. They knew that if they tried to undo it, they would be lynched in public. Not only that, being motivated mostly by instinct of self-preservation, they also found a life insurance policy under its cover. General Zia used it to shoo off war-ready Indians from Pakistani borders on several occasions by playing nuclear poker that is, saying at the same time, I have it and I don’t have it.
It is a natural psyche of the generals not to feel secure without a weapon. By 1988 Pakistan had the capacity to make the bomb but not the capability to carry it to its target. Obviously they needed another Bhutto to deliver for them. When ZAB’s daughter Benazir Bhutto became prime minister following Zia’s fall from the sky, the generals begged her to use her influence and good offices with China and North Korea where ZAB continued to be a household name as the leader of the Third World to get Pakistan assistance to develop its missile technology.
During her two tenures—despite being bitten once—Benazir --like her father—did not care for self-interest and defied foreign powers that be, in getting Pakistan enough from both China and North Korea to develop effective missile systems with all ranges—capable to hit Delhi and also Tel Aviv as Gen ® Hameed Gul publicly claimed recently.
Since the inception of Pakistan’s nuclear program under ZAB, the strategy has been to keep the world guessing—not to accept that we were making it while fabricating it indigenously in the closet. It was, however, Zia who had started exposing Dr AQ Khan’s nuclear prowess to blackmail India. Until then like India or Israel, Pakistani nuclear scientists too had been living under the veil.
Unfortunately under Zia, money flooding into him from Washington and Riyadh to wage the American Jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, made his greed and that of his generals insatiable and instead of being professional men devoted to the defence of the country, characteristics of South American generals like Panama’s erstwhile Noriega to roll into drug money etc., became a fashion with them as well.
Why I have ventured to draw parallels with Noriega relates to a story published by Washington Post contributed by its Pakistan correspondent Kamran Khan in which he had quoted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (after his ouster first time in 1993) of telling WP that on one occasion his Chief of Army Staff and his military intelligence chief submitted to him an exhaustive blueprint for clandestine ‘export’ of drugs from Pakistan to tide over its foreign exchange and balance of payment problems besides giving them huge amounts to modernize the Pakistan military.
No hold barred is the philosophy that the jackboots pursue in politics, in defence and in their personal lives. The unscrupulous manner in which they have used Pakistan’s nuclear program to blackmail others has obviously brought Pakistan to a status of a rogue state. And when following the Indian footsteps, Islamabad detonated its nuclear device in May 1998, nothing much was said to India but Pakistan was singled out as a punitive target.
Western media thinks tanks wired to anti-Pakistan hawks in Washington and other key capitals have been building up a case to nip Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in the bud. On occasions pre-emptive strikes at nuclear sites were mooted as possible options before Pakistan ends up as yet another Yugoslavia. One can understand the method behind this madness, Pakistani men who matter cannot be excused for the nuclear bravado that they have been resorting to blackmail others to the extent that Pakistan’s Army and ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) have been described as “rogue” institutions posing a serious threat to peace in South and Central Asia.
Ever since 9/11 that converted the pariah military dictator into a ‘soldier-statesman’, he has managed to pressurize Washington to stand by him to ‘secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal from falling into the hands of Taliban, Osama Bin Laden or their supporters’. In her book ''Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan,'' Mary Anne Weaver quotes Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former commander in chief of Central Command, who told her: ''It's so important that we work with Musharraf: not so much because of what Musharraf is or is not, but because what would come after him would be a disaster.''
Managers of Dr AQ Khan Research Laboratories did not show better wisdom. They let the cat out of the bag. It substantiated the allegation that Pakistan was peddling advance nuclear technology to other countries by quietly circulating a sales brochure to aspiring nuclear weapons states and a network of nuclear middlemen around the world with a covering letter that bears an official-looking seal that says "Government of Pakistan" and a photograph of the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. It promoted components that were spin-offs from Pakistan's three-decade-long project to build a nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium, set in a drawing that bears a striking resemblance to a mushroom cloud.
Other nations capable of exporting technology would have ensured that such sales would be strictly controlled but Pakistani rulers have set their own rules punctuated with greed and overwhelming bravado. And today the whole edifice of Pakistan’s nuclear house built so painstakingly by Bhuttos faces the threat of extinction for the clandestine export of technology allegedly to Iran, Libya and Iraq.
Not only that, to add insult to injury, our generals who have always had their noses in Pakistan’s nuclear pie, seem to be washing their hands off by putting the entire blame of peddling nuclear technology as the act of greedy individuals and letting American interrogators question and humiliate national heroes like Dr. Khan.
All those responsible for such a colossal fiasco, persecution of Dr AQ Khan and other scientist heroes need to be made to pay for their great betrayal. It needs to be mentioned here that Pakistan’s nuclear program was developed under the direct security of the military. Even today a lieutenant general is over all in charge of the nuclear operations and that without the approval of the right quarters, even the birds do not flap their feathers in the atomic domain.
Not only that, the nation should be taken into confidence to save Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal before it is destroyed. The present leadership has completely failed to protect the vital strategic interests. It should be forced to quit to make room for a leader like ZAB and return of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif who should pool together what is best in them and the masses for securing Pakistan’s nuclear program and Pakistan’s future.
(folks encourage these Pakis to take on Mushy the RAW agent)
:p 
