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USA’s secret efforts to prevent Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal

In remarks with striking parallels to current US debates, officials in President Jimmy Carter’s administration voiced fear about Pakistan’s trajectory and tried both pressure and aid incentives to seek a change in its behavior.

In a secret November 1978 memo, then secretary of state Cyrus Vance instructed US diplomats in Western Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan to warn governments that Pakistan or its covert agents were seeking nuclear material.

Vance acknowledged that Pakistan was motivated by concerns over historic rival India. But he voiced alarm that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, before being deposed as prime minister in a coup, said that Pakistan would share nuclear weapons around the Islamic world.

“We believe it is critical to stability in the region and to our non-proliferation objectives to inhibit Pakistan from moving closer to the threshold of nuclear explosive capability,” Vance wrote, the year before the overthrow of Iran’s pro-Western shah and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Britain was waging a parallel campaign, Vance said. Britain banned the export of inverters — which can be used in centrifuges that produce highly enriched uranium — and urged other countries to follow suit, Vance said….

Pakistan nonetheless pursued nuclear weapons and detonated a bomb in 1998 in response to a test by India. The Pakistani scientist who built the bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had access to sensitive technology in the Netherlands.

Khan admitted in 2004 that he ran a nuclear black-market selling secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Khan, who is considered a hero by many Pakistanis, later retracted his remarks and in 2009 was freed from house arrest.

The declassified documents were released after requests by the National Security Archive at George Washington University and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars…..

President Barack Obama’s administration recently suspended about one-third of its $2.7 billion annual defense aid to Pakistan to put pressure for more action against Islamic militants.

July 28, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, Pakistan, USA