Earlier this week, the book launch of “Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb” was arranged by the Centre for International Strategic Studies at the Islamabad Club.

The book titled after Zulfikar Bhutto’s dramatic remarks in 1965 “we will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get our own bomb,” traces the emergence of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon arsenal over the past four decades amidst international criticism to halt the quest for national security.

Feroz Khan, a former director of Arms Control and Disarmament Affairs at the Strategic Plans Division of GHQ, attempts to elucidate the technical hurdles towards the development of nuclear energy and the geo-politics, which necessitated the need for this strategic culture.

“Our nuclear weapons programme, as like other nuclear weapon states, shrouded in secrecy and opacity, has been meticulously described in the rich account,” noted Ali Sarwar Naqvi, former Ambassador to the IAEA, the international body responsible for promoting peaceful use of nuclear energy.

This is a seminal “Pakistani narrative that challenges all the disinformation and propaganda against our programme,” argued Dr Maleeha Lodhi, former ambassador to the United States.

While examining this perspective in detail, Dr. Lodhi stated that “Khan explodes several myths popularised by outsiders about the programme being stolen from the West or enabled by China.”

The development of nuclear technology is affirmed to be the result of the expertise and endeavour of an indigenous cadre of Pakistani scientists.

The East Pakistan debacle of 1971 and Indias nuclear test in 1974 turned a “minority opinion into consensus” on the imperatives of acquiring nuclear technology.

While India’s nuclear activities were internationally accepted and tolerated, Lodhi maintains, Pakistan faced “wide-ranging sanctions and unprecedented international pressure to change the course of its nuclear policy.”

Recounting his experience on negotiating tables, former Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said that Pakistan could have taken the high moral ground and agreed to become signatory to Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) agreements, banning the test of nuclear weapons, but the internal civil-military lobby was against an asymmetrical balance of international security.

As Feroz Khan writes, the international pressure to prevent Pakistan from pursuing its uranium enrichment programme, through sanctions and restrictions on access to technology only accelerated the development of nuclear energy.

Khan also touches on the AQ Khan Proliferation network, spanning from North Korea to the Middle East and Europe, which further exacerbated international anxiety against Pakistani weapons, prompting the need to improve command and control systems.

Despite the heavy battle on the diplomatic front, Dr. Lodhi applauded the “rare national consensus that survived changes of government and domestic turmoil.”

The credit for the development of nuclear capability cannot be ascribed to a single person, she added, but the “collective determination of hundreds of people in the civil-military establishment,” which supported the scientific community’s effort to achieve nuclear self-sufficiency, and to the people of Pakistan, who bore the cost of economic sanctions.

The book celebrates the technical effort of numerous engineers and scientists. “The enormity of scientific talent is evident by the contribution of close to 30 Pakistani scientists to experiments attached to the Habron-Collider Project at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva,” Ambassador Naqvi told the audience.

The Habron-Collier is an underground machine that smashes sub-atomic particles, in an attempt to discover the ‘Higgs-Boson,’ a tiny missing particle which could demystify physics models on how various forces in the universe work. (This avant-garde research, on why certain elementary particles have mass, while others do not, materialised with the intellectual support of Pakistani Nuclear Scientist Abdus Salam in the 1990s).

So, the haunting question remains that with such imagination, aptitude and resources, how come this expertise and endeavour has not been transferred to the development of other state projects and institutions?

According to Dr. Lodhi: “Had the country’s economic progress received similar priority and been pursued with the same discipline and consensus, Pakistan would not have been in a shambles.”

This paradox doesn’t escape Feroz Khan, who realises that while nuclear capability can provide a deterrent against external aggression and security threats, it cannot protect Pakistan from its internal turmoil and disorder.