The revelations in The Washington Post that Pakistan has twice detonated a high explosive device this year – the second as late as the third week of September – will surprise only those in this country and abroad who have sought to minimize the extent of Islamabad’s nuclear ambitions and the zeal and the resources it has deployed to realise them. Even they will have to concede that the Post’s story is far too precise in its details and the sources it quotes far too authoritative to be brushed aside with a limp wave of the hand. The successful detonation of the high explosive device marks a dramatic leap forward in Pakistan’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon. This, coupled with US intelligence reports that the Pakistanis have managed to enrich uranium to 93.5 per cent at its atomic plant at Kahuta near Islamabad when only a 90 per cent level is required to make a bomb, should make it abundantly clear that Pakistan has now well and truly become a nuclear weapon power in all but the name. Any other conclusion will only serve to deceive ourselves and the world at large that these breakthroughs do not significantly change the security climate in the Indian sub-continent.
In retrospect it is obvious that India has in fact been a victim of this deception. New Delhi sometimes conveyed the impression that it was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to all those who vouched for Pakistan’s nuclear innocence. This is particularly true of the United States which has gone on record again and again to affirm that Pakistan’s nuclear programme poses no military threat. As late as October 27, President Reagan had given a written assurance that Islamabad “does not possess a nuclear explosive device.” Earlier Mr. Reagan had warned that US aid to Pakistan would be jeopardised if any uranium were enriched beyond 5 per cent. These assurances, it is now plain, were meant to hoodwink India to prevent it from initiating any legitimate action to counteract Pakistani moves. And yet New Delhi should have known better. It had it on the authority of no less a person than the head of the Kahuta project, Dr. Abdul Qader Khan, that when a country has the wherewithal to enrich uranium to three per cent it can enrich it to 90 per cent or more. Nor was it a secret that to this end Islamabad had sought, and presumably obtained, cooperation from several countries, including China and France. Finally, the Pakistanis themselves were telling anyone who cared to listen that they had already developed a triple delivery system for nuclear bombs – the Mirage III fighter bombers, the Chinese A-5 fleet and especially the F-16s. In the face of such incontrovertible evidence, India has no alternative other than to mobilize such resources as may be required to push through an accelerated nuclear weapons programme. This is a hard decision to take for a country which is in the forefront of the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. But there is no other way to check the efforts of the rulers in Islamabad and their patrons in Washington and Beijing to destabilize the Indian subcontinent.