March, 23 2005	Wednesday	12 Safar 1426

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

WASHINGTON, March 22: The United States and other Western powers allowed Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons because they needed Islamabad’s support to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan, says a think-tank report distributed in Washington on Tuesday. The United States and the erstwhile West Germany had prior knowledge of Pakistan’s clandestine efforts to buy nuclear material but decided to ignore them, says the Observer Research Foundation, which is affiliated with Washington’s Brookings Institution.

The report claims that even the present US Vice President Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defence during the Afghan war, had blocked an in-house report on Pakistan’s proliferation activities to help sale of F-16 aircraft to Islamabad.

“Washington’s priorities changed dramatically following the occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet forces in 1979,” says the report, adding: “The Americans were far too obsessed with driving out the Soviets to waste time worrying about stopping Pakistan from going nuclear.”

In the case of Iran, the report says, the US seems to have taken a diametrically opposite stand. While Iran insists it intends to use enriched uranium only in power stations, Washington argues that Iran is making fuel for atomic warheads. Britain, France and Germany are also putting diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to scrap uranium enrichment.

Pakistan’s nuclear programme, which began after India’s first nuclear test in 1974, also had the tacit support of China, the report claims.

The genesis of Pakistan’s programme, the report says, goes back to former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who way back in 1965 said, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leave; even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no alternative.”

The report claims that “Pakistan relied heavily on clandestine deals with nations like Germany, the US, China and North Korea to buy, sell and barter nuclear know-how and materials.”

Pakistan had maintained such extreme security to its nuclear programme that its army, which guarded the installations it did not even allow the then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to visit Kahuta, where a uranium enrichment centrifuge facility was established, the report says. Centrifuges are used to purify uranium for use as fuel for nuclear power plants or weapons.

The report’s author Wilson Johnson says that there are no authentic estimates available to determine how much money Pakistan has spent on its programme but it runs into “a few hundred billion dollars.”

According to him the money came from countries like Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE.