Was Bangladesh or Bhutto behind the Pakistani bomb?

This month, we complete 50 years of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. A recent, and well-timed, book by Ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta revises some of our closely held assumptions and interpretations of that war.

First, Dasgupta tells us that then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not necessarily need Army Chief General Sam Manekshaw’s advice to delay the military intervention from summer of 1971 to later after the monsoons. Second, Dasgupta says that India did not fail to use the Simla talks after the war to convert the ceasefire line (now, Line of Control) into an international boundary because New Delhi never desired to do so in the first place.

Since we are revising our opinions about the war and its aftermath, there is another related issue that demands our attention. It is widely understood that the humiliating military defeat in 1971 was the primary reason why Pakistan decided to build nuclear weapons. “Never again would Pakistan suffer a similar humiliation” — this became the key sentiment behind Pakistan’s efforts to acquire the bomb. However, in this explanation, we miss a massive Sindhi confounder by the name of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

“The person who spearheaded the idea of nuclear Pakistan,” writes Feroz Hassan Khan, the author of the most comprehensive book on the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme, “was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto”. Bhutto emerged as a campaigner for nuclear energy and the weapons programme well before 1971. He was among the few in Pakistan who was closely following the bomb debate in India after the Chinese nuclear weapon test in 1964. It was back in 1965, in an interview to the Manchester Guardian, that Bhutto said: “If India makes an atom bomb, then even if we have to feed on grass and leaves — or even if we have to starve — we shall also produce an atom bomb as we would be left with no other alternative. The answer to an atom bomb can only be an atom bomb.”

Bhutto, however, would not wait for India to make the bomb first. When his request to purchase a nuclear reprocessing power plant from France — Bhutto was then the minister of foreign affairs — was turned down for financial reasons, he sent Munir Ahmad Khan, a nuclear scientist, to convince then President Ayub Khan to build the Pakistani bomb. Ayub Khan, who held Bhutto responsible for dragging him into the costly 1965 war with India, was not interested in the arguments of the pro-bomb lobby led by Bhutto. Munir Ahmad Khan, unsurprisingly, failed to persuade the president.

Bhutto’s intransigence in the negotiations with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of East Pakistan, significantly contributed to the rebellion by Pakistani Bengalis and, eventually, the 1971 war. This part of the story is well known, and has been documented by many, including Dasgupta.

However, there is another story worth recounting. While representing the Pakistani delegation in Security Council during the closing hours of the 1971 war, Bhutto was instructed by then President Yahya Khan to accept the Polish resolution. The said resolution, historian Srinath Raghavan writes, would have stopped Indian forces short of Dhaka. India would neither have obtained an unconditional surrender nor would it have captured 93,000 prisoners of war.

Bhutto did not heed Yahya Khan’s instructions because he calculated, Raghavan concludes, that a humiliating defeat for the Pakistani military “would clear the ground for his own political ascendance.” On December 20, 1971, Bhutto stepped in as the president of Pakistan and in January 1972, he called a meeting of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) scientists in Multan. This Multan meeting is generally regarded as the first official step Pakistan took towards the bomb.

One can see that Bhutto was not just influential in starting the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme, but also in the making of the humiliating 1971 defeat — a classic confounder if you ask any causal inference theorist. It wouldn’t be outrageous to claim that if Bhutto had come to power before 1971, he would have started the weapons programme without needing an excuse offered by a humiliating military defeat. In other words, Bhutto’s political ascendancy was sufficient for starting the nuclear weapons programme in Pakistan. It also implies that the 1971 defeat was not necessary, though it could also have been sufficient, for initiating the Pakistani quest for the bomb.

Do military defeats lead to an initiation of nuclear weapons programme? There is not much evidence to suggest so. Argentina lost the Falklands War against Britain in 1982. However, its pursuit of nuclear weapons predates the defeat. Like Pakistan, Argentina saw a transition from military to civilian leadership following the defeat but, here, it led to greater nuclear cooperation with Brazil, and eventually the abandonment of weapons pursuit in both countries.

In 1990, Saddam Hussein’s army collapsed spectacularly in the Gulf War, but that defeat only led to dismantlement of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme. Egypt’s nuclear weapons pursuit began well before the defeat in the 1967 war against Israel and it ended, according to the dataset compiled by Christopher Way and Jessica Weeks, shortly after the (slightly ambiguous) defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Syria also suffered defeat in the same wars of 1967 and 1973, but its nuclear weapons pursuit did not begin until 2000.

Military defeat was certainly followed by a nuclear weapons programme in Pakistan but on closer scrutiny, the relationship seems more circumstantial than causal. The ascendance of Bhutto to power appears to be a much more powerful force behind the Pakistani bomb.

ONE CAN SEE THAT BHUTTO WAS NOT JUST INFLUENTIAL IN STARTING THE PAKISTANI NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAMME, BUT ALSO IN THE MAKING OF THE HUMILIATING 1971 DEFEAT