WASHINGTON, May 27: Former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto faced tremendous pressure from the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on his efforts to acquire nuclear capability for Pakistan but refused to give in.
A new set of previously classified memos, made public on Friday, show that the nuclear issue had begun to affect US-Pakistan relations in the mid 1970s.
The memos, released by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, show that Mr Kissinger tried to prevent Mr Bhutto, from acquiring nuclear technology as early as 1976. One memo quotes Mr Kissinger as telling Prime Minister Bhutto that the US was against Pakistan’s efforts to buy a reprocessing plant from France.
In 1976, Mr Bhutto negotiated and concluded a deal to buy nuclear reprocessing plant from France. In August 1976, Mr Kissinger met Mr Bhutto at Governor House Lahore to dissuade him from acquiring the plant. Mr Kissinger said that it was offensive to US intelligence when Mr Bhutto insisted that Pakistan needed the reprocessing plant for its energy needs; but Mr Bhutto demanded that the US should also not insist that Pakistan give up the reprocessing plant.
Expressing his displeasure at Pakistan’s dealings with France, Mr Kissinger tells Mr Bhutto: “What concerns us is how reprocessing facilities are used at a certain point.” After the Pakistanis cite earlier assurances on safeguards for nuclear facilities, Mr Kissinger says he is concerned about “realities” not “words”; safeguarded deals are not enough because one side could break an agreement.
Although Mr Bhutto tells Mr Kissinger: “We don’t want to explode a bomb,” the memos show he thought that Pakistan should continue its nuclear development programmes. “An embryonic capability … may prove helpful” in getting India to accept a nuclear-free zone, Mr Bhutto is shown as arguing.
Right from the beginning, Mr Kissinger appears concerned that Mr Bhutto is developing a nuclear capability. In early memos, Mr Kissinger is shown as arguing that how much of a national interest the United States have in leading an effort to curb Pakistan’s attempt to make a nuclear bomb but he becomes more worried in the wake of the Indian test in 1974.
The memos also show that during the 1971 India-Pakistan war President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Mr Kissinger, tilted to Pakistan.
US relations with Pakistan are a major element in Mr Kissinger’s first volume of memoirs but the relationship seldom surfaces in the third volume, Years of Renewal, probably because there was no great crisis during the period covered by the volume.
Since the India-Pakistan war in late 1971 a “tilt” toward Pakistan had been a hallmark of the Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy and Mr Kissinger sustained it under the Ford administration, says William Burr of the National Security Archive.
Sharing with Prime Minister Bhutto his ‘hostility’ toward the government of Indira Gandhi, Mr Kissinger says that if the latter had another “go” at Pakistan, the Soviets would benefit from changes in the regional balance of power.
Despite his dislike for Indira Gandhi, differences between Mr Bhutto and Mr Kissinger are evident. When Mr Bhutto argues that US détente policy gave the Soviets an opportunity to “strike in various places,” Mr Kissinger strongly defends the policy as a strategy to “moderate” the competition with the Soviets as well as weaken the peace movement at home and communist movements abroad.
The problem, Mr Kissinger argues, is not détente but a “collapse of executive authority” preventing executive officials from doing their “duty … to maintain an equilibrium” internationally.
