Why Did the US Allow Pakistan
to Build Nuclear Weapons?

Back in October of 1964, the Chinese exploded their first hydrogen bomb, above ground, on a remote desert (though death-clouds of cancer-causing fallout do not recognize the word "remote."). Before then, back in 1962, there had been heavy fighting 'tween China & India after a three-year border dispute in the Himalayas near the border of Tibet. India was badly trounced in that battle.
So, hostility has continued since then, but without overt warfare, between India and China along India's northeast border.
On India's northwest border lies Pakistan, always a source of grrrr-ing and hostility since the creation of the two nations in the summer of 1947, when India and Pakistan ceased being a Crown Colony of the British Empire. Gandhi had been strongly against the partition of India and Pakistan, and in the creation of the two nations there was vast bloodshed as Muslims forced Hindus and Sikhs from Islamic Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs forced Muslims from Hindu India. 10,000,000 thus migrated and a million perished during the initial formation of the nations.
During the 1970s, India completed plans for exploding its own nuke, which it did in May of 1974. At least it was done underground, in the Rajasthan desert.
Why didn't the United States prevent India from exploding its own nuke? It probably could have done so, even with the Soviet Union then still glowering in the background. The U.S. was able to position satellites to observe antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s, and certainly would have watched the Rajasthan desert as India prepared its underground blast. I think that, because of a kind of perverse money-groveling logic, that, setting aside the pious tsk-tsking of public officials over the spread of atomic bombs, the more countries that have nuclear weapons the better it is for the armaments business.
Nukes, strife, fear, paranoia, border-bashing, feuding factions and mini-wars stir up big arms deals and military contracts of every stripe or color, always a time of glorious profit for an important segment of the American economy. (The United States is the world's major arms exporter, an issue that rarely gets covered except in an occasional op ed piece in a newspaper. One op ed piece occurred in The New York Times in 1999 where Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias– the former President of Costa Rica– wrote "American-made arms are often turned against civilians or used to strengthen dictators. Indeed, the true weapons of mass destruction are the jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and other military exports that the United States ships to nondemocratic countries– a record $8.3 billion worth in the 1997 fiscal year." $8.3 billion in '93, I wonder what it is in 2001?)
Now, shift your attention from nuke-noia to the India/Pakistan enmity. During the ensuing decades the two nations have fought now and then over control of Kashmir, which lies on the northeast border of Pakistan and the northernmost portion of India. India controls it, but Pakistan wants it, and war seems never that distant.
Meanwhile by the early 1970s China had taken a meddling interest in the affairs of Pakistan. It was China's interest in Pakistan which apparently helped start the American "tilt" toward Pakistan (at the expense of India) during the Nixon era. Christopher Hitchens has recently retraced for us (in his recent book on Henry Kissinger) the ghastly "tilt" of secret U.S. diplomacy under Kissinger and Nixon in 1971, apparently in order to appease China, allowing Pakistan to conduct slaughter in the break-away country of Bangladesh. (Recall George Harrison's 1971 fund-raiser for the starving victims in Bangladesh). Nixon was then planning his '72 trip to China, and wanted to show China he would turn a stony face toward the transgressions of a Chinese client.
Meanwhile, the Soviets had their interests entangled in Afghanistan, that fierce country to Pakistan's northwest. Afghanistan during the counterculture '60s was the source of groovy clothing and fabrics. I recall Jimi Hendrix' gold-brocaded Afghan vest, and my wife Miriam to this day uses an elegant Afghan tote bag we purchased thirty-odd years ago in the Village.
By the end of the 1970s, as traced by Jeff Cohen's essay on page 5 in this issue of the Journal, the United States set a trap for the Russians in Afghanistan. Cohen writes of a "1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, conducted by the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur (LNO). In the interview –translated by author and CIA critic William Blum – Brzezinski boasts that the CIA was supporting guerrilla activities inside Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention (of 1979), taking steps to 'induce' the Soviets to intervene." You should read Cohen's interesting piece.
So, the Soviets did take over Afghanistan, and the United States, in response, committed a huge karmic blunder. It allowed the CIA to fund and arm Islamic fundamentalists (including Osama bin Laden) and urge them to confront the Soviets in the name of religious purity. It was Allah vs. Atheism.
For much of the 1980s the "secret" war went on in Afghanistan. Why secret? Because the Reagan administration forced passage of the United States version of the ghastly British Official Secrets Act in the early '80s, which in effect sealed off from public knowledge such things as secret wars and secret military-intelligence activities. There had been, in the post-Watergate era of investigation and muckraking, a opening of the door to CIA and military foreign activities. Reagan shut it, and it has only been the horror of 9-11 and the ensuing war that has opened the door somewhat to the screw-ups of the CIA and the arming of Islamic extremists during the long secret campaigns of the 1980s.
By the early 1990s, after the Soviets had pulled out of Afghanistan, and at the advent of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States abandoned all its millions of landmines and its high-tech weaponry and equipment in Afghanistan, and turned its back, rather psychopathically, on what it had wrought. This was cruel psychopathy indeed, as those expensive, but very deadly weapons, in the hands of the factions of a country known for its warrior mentality, fueled further years of slaughter, and enabled the ghastly totalitarian government of the Taliban to take over. Leaving all that weaponry, after all, had been "good for business." You want to issue contracts for new weapons, don't you, rather than to collect and reuse "used" weapons? Thanks, CIA, thanks Carter, thanks Reagan, and thanks Bush the First.
Meanwhile, as the 1990s fueled forward, India and Pakistan certainly had not forgotten their mutual hostility. Afghanistan was taken over by the woman-hating freedom-hating music-hating image-hating Buddha-bombing totalitarians known as the Taliban, and international terror networks were fanatically forged out of the very factions that the CIA had urged and funded to burn the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
In India, in early 1998 a coalition lead led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged as the largest party in parliament winning a total of 270 of 547 seats. The BJP was known for its threats to use nuclear weapons, and forced its will right away. On May 11 and 13, 1998, India set off five nuclear explosions 330 miles southwest of New Delhi.
Since the first Indian nuke-tests back in 1974, Pakistan had been striving to create its own nuclear weapons. It had plenty of help, especially from China. Canada, France, England, West Germany, and krytron tubes made in the U.S.A. (used for triggering the explosions) all helped Pakistan in its relentless lust for nuclear parity with its enemy India.
So, when India set off its nukes as a kind of "In Your Face!" statement after a right wing government took over in 1998, Pakistan responded.
US spy satellites observed activity at the Pakistani nuclear test site in the late spring of 1998 which caused intelligence agencies to believe that the Pakistanis were on the verge of testing a nuclear bomb. It would be the first Pakistani test ever (though it had claimed since 1994 that it had nuclear weapons).
Why did the United States and other nuclear countries in the West allow the moily nation Pakistan to become a nuclear power? If a nation, for instance, had nationalized its sugar industry, or, shudder shudder, it's oil companies (see the current situation in Venezuela) the US most likely would have tried immediately to topple it. So why didn't Bill Clinton do something about it, or urge his surrogate Tony Blair to do something? Clinton was probably too busy facing impeachment for getting blown by a female subordinate while eating pizza in the room where Franklin Roosevelt planned the Social Security legislation and where John Kennedy put together the Test Ban Treaty. And so, Pakistan set off a bunch of nuclear blasts, five in all, on May 28 and 30 of '98. They were atomic blasts, rather than h-bomb blasts. Small consolation.
Both India and Pakistan have missiles capable now of nuking each other.
Speeding forward to 2001, Pakistan apparently has more than 20 nuclear bombs and missile-tips, and the United States was forced to get an accurate fix on them because of the lust of Osama bin Laden to own one or more and send them against our nation.
All of this is very good for the U.S. arms, surveillance equipment, aircraft, ship, aircraft-supply and ship-supply business. Extremely good. It's good too for guys like John Ashcroft (who was too right wing even for conservative Missouri) who would like to wad up, if they could get away with it, and toss the Bill of Rights into the wastebasket.
And it's also good for the U.S. oil businessmen in Saudi Arabia so dear to the Shrub's vision of modern Manifest Destiny– "Own the oil and bomb the soil." Robert Kennedy, Jr. has recently pointed out that it wouldn't take much of a improvement in U.S. automobile fuel efficiency for the nation to obliterate totally the need for Saudi oil.
Why not just stop purchasing Saudi oil, or why not even close down Saudi oil production for a few years? It's pretty clear that the Saudis funded Osama bin Laden's terror network. You won't hear Laura Bush talk about the woman-hating regime of Saudi Arabia, or you won't hear the oil-batty minions of Mr. Bush and his father talk about blockading Saudi Arabia and bringing down its ghastly freedom-hating, anti-Semitic, and utterly corrupt regime, the paymasters of the attack on the United States.


More Articles by Edward Sanders