WHO HAS THE BOMB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300064-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 64
• Publication Date: June 3, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300064-1
03 PAGE TIME
3 June 1985
COVER STORY
Who Has the Bomb
and the phantom proliferators lead the way
Among the signs that illustrate prolif- ward nuclear disarmament, a promise
eration's disquieting reach: embedded in the treaty. To some of the
- In Moscow on an official visit last week, more militant Third World countries, that
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi failure smacks of hypocrisy. The biggest
charged that Pakistan's development of fear is that one of the restive nations
an atom bomb was "very close" to fru- might withdraw from the treaty at the
ition. Earlier this month, the Indian lead- September session; if that happened, it .
er had affirmed that such an achievement would mean a calamitous setback, the
by his country's chief regional rival "will first explicit unraveling of the world's ma-
completely change the present military , jor nonproliferation accord.
balance on the subcontinent. At no cost - In Washington and elsewhere, nonpro-
will we allow our integrity and security to liferation experts are concerned over an
be compromised." In 1974, India shocked erosion of confidence in the inspection
the world with a "peaceful" underground . apparatus of the International Atomic
nuclear explosion in the Rajasthan Des- Energy Agency; the system is designed
ert; Gandhi's pronouncements hold out to monitor adherence to nonprolifera-
the threat that India might resume test- tion standards. The concern focuses on.
ing, perhaps even begin to build and the "safeguards" sponsored by the
stockpile nuclear arms. I.A.E.A. to detect the diversion of peace-
- In Los Angeles, a federal grand jury has ful atomic technology to bomb-making
buried beneath the earth, a precaution
against accident-or perhaps surprise at-
tack. Paratroopers guard the installation,
and tanks block all routes into Kahuta.
Crotale surface-to-air missiles and anti-
aircraft guns bristle toward the skies,
through which Pakistani air force planes
fly round-the-clock patrols. Unauthorized
entry to Kahuta is impossible, sightseeing
in the vicinity ill advised.
Precise information about what goes
on inside Kahuta is virtually unobtain-
able; the site is one of Pakistan's most
closely held defense secrets. Nonetheless,
over the past decade the world has been
catc ' occasional, disturbtn ses
o clandestine dealin 2s and es%p onaee
coups that have left trails of suspicion
j leading inexorably back to Kahuta. All
those James Band operations have con-
veyed the same unsettling message: even
though the government of President Mo-
hammed Zia ul-Hag firmly denies it, Pa-
kistan appears to be developing the ca-
pacity to build an atom bomb.
But Kahuta is just one outcropping of
a far bigger nightmare: nuclear prolifera-
tion, the spread of atomic weaponry, has,
entered a new and ever more ominous
phase. As the 40th anniversary of the A-
bomb explosion over Hiroshima ap-
proaches, the world has special reason to
view what is happening with trepidation,
at the very least. On the Asian subconti-
nent, in the Middle East, in southern Afri-
ca and, to a lesser degree, in South Ameri-
ca, a number of countries have acquired
or are in the process of acquiring the ca-
pacity to build atomic weapons. At the
same time, the fragile international sys-
tem of self-restraint that the world has
built around its most deadly Pandora's
box of technology, a system that has
worked surprisingly well so far, is under
growing strain. Says a senior official of the
Vienna-based International Atomic En-
ergy Agency: "Proliferation has already
happened. The main problem of the late
1980s is not so much preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons, but making it
survivable."
The threat is spreading,
t. is called a research center, but the
Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Re-
search looks more like a fortress. Lay-
ers of barbed wire surround the
sprawling complex in the dusty hills at
Kahuta, 20 miles southeast of Pakistan's
capital, Islamabad. Much of the facility is
indicted a U.S. citizen for exporting to Is-
rael 810 high-speed precision switches
known as Krytrons, in contravention of
U.S. export laws. It is an open secret that
Israel has its own atomic weapons pro-
gram; Krytrons can be used as part of the
trigger mechanism for nuclear arms. But
Israel offered to return many of the
switches, and the U.S. State Department
accepted Jerusalem's explanation that it
did not intend to use the devices in its
atomic weapons program. Still, the inci-
dent demonstrates the ease with which
highly sensitive technology necessary for
nuclear-arms manufacture can, and does,
escape control. .
- In Washington next month, two
House Foreign Affairs subcommittees
will hold joint hearings on the global
spread of plutonium, the highly toxic
atomic explosive. An estimated 55 tons
of separated plutonium exists in the
West, a stockpile that is growing by five
to six tons a year. Among the issues
likely to be discussed by legislators at
the hearings is the potential that pluto-
nium traffic offers to nuclear terrorism.
- In Geneva in September, delegates
from about 85 countries will meet to re-
view progress under the 1968 United Na-
tions-sponsored Nuclear Nonprolifera-
tion Treaty. The treaty is the most
important accomplishment of the world-
wide antiproliferation effort, but it expires
in 1995 and there is no guarantee that it
will be renewed. The atmosphere at the
review session could be tense. Third
World countries are expected to criticize
the superpowers for failing to work to-
purposes. Some experts fear that the
safeguard scheme is inadequate to the
task at hand, while others are worried
that the lack of confidence can itself
lead to further weakening of an inspec-
tion system that in large measure func-
tions on a basis of trust.
Proliferation invokes atavistic fears
and uncertainties because it involves ar-
cane and highly sophisticated technol-
ogies: breeder reactors, plutonium re-
processing plants,. uranium-enrichment
facilities.* Says Leonard Weiss, an expert
on the U.S. Senate staff: "Proliferation is a
set of symptoms with a number of causes.
It is both a political and technical prob-
lem. Therefore no single cure, or set of
cures, will work."
What experts agree on is the prob-
lem's perniciousness: "I used to think that
?Uranium.235 (U-235) and plutonium 239 (Pu-239)
are the radioactive elements used in atom bombs.
Uranium enrichment is the process by which the
concentration of U-235 in natural uranium is in-
creased, eventually to weapons-grade material.
From 33 to 55 lbs. of U-235 at roughly 93% purity can
be used in a Hiroshima-size bomb. Reprocessing is
the chemical, procedure for extracting Pu-239 from
the spent uranium fuel of nuclear reactors. where the
plutonium is produced as a waste product. A breeder
reactor uses plutonium as fuel rather than uranium:
by atomic fission, additional uranium placed in the
breeder is converted into more plutonium than was
consumed in the original reaction.
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of earthly problems," says Roger Mo-
lander. a nuclear expert formerly with the
U.S. National Security Council, who now
heads the Washington-based Roosevelt
Center for American Policy Studies. "But
that was before I understood nuclear pro-
liferation. It makes the superpower arms
race look like a comparatively minor
league problem." Says Charles Ebinger of
Georgetown University's Center for Stra-
tegic and International Studies: "It's prob-
ably the most pessimistic issue I've ever
dealt with. Nobody seems to come up with
any solutions, myself included."
The spread of nuclear technology over
the past four decades is both an impressive
and a daunting achievement. Five coun-
tries formally possess nuclear weapons
(the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain,
France and China); India's 1974 test ex-
plosion shows that it has at least mastered
the capacity to build them. All told, about
345 commercial nuclear power reactors
are in operation in 26 countries, and some
52 nations have nuclear research facilities.
At least eleven nations possess facilities for
the reprocessing of nuclear fuels. all yield-
ing varying amounts of plutonium. Large
enrichment facilities to turn uranium into
nuclear fuel, or bomb-grade material, exist
in the U.S., the Soviet Union, the Nether-
lands, France and China. Commercial re-
processing plants to extract plutonium
from used reactor fuel are located or
planned in France, Britain, West Germa-
ny, Japan, India and the Soviet Union.
Programs involving breeder reactors are
under way in the Soviet Union, India,
France, West Germany and Japan. (In
1983, the U.S. canceled its $4 billion
Clinch River breeder facility, located at
Oak Ridge, Tenn., because of long con-
struction delays, steep cost increases and a
declining need for additional nuclear pow-
er installations.)
The rate of proliferation could grow
rapidly worse. Small, easily concealed new
technologies for producing nuclear explo-
sives are becoming available in world mar-
kets. Among them: high-speed centrifuges
and still experimental laser systems for en-
riched-uranium production. Such systems
could be engineered to produce the explo-
sives needed to build the Bomb. Says Paul
Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Con-
trol Institute, a Washington-based think
tank: "History demonstrates that in the
nuclear field, any technology ultimately is
exported-and Third World countries
will get it."
Despite the overall pessimism that
the proliferation issue inspires,
there are some grounds for guard-
. ed hope. Since World War II, no
atomic weapon has been used in warfare;
nor have nations rushed to develop nucle-
ar weapons in the numbers that were pre-
dicted even 20 years ago. In the early
1960s, it was feared that-within a decade
ten or more countries might have pro-
duced atomic arsenals. In the eleven years
since India's nuclear test, no additional
country, as far as can be confirmed, has
succeeded in following suit.
dy, the Reagan Administration's ambas-
sador-at-large for nonproliferation issues,
provides grounds for both "cautious opti-
mism and vigilance." Says he: "The situa-
tion ought not to give us a sense of great
comfort for the future. But thus far [the
nonproliferation system] has worked pret-
ty well. Extraordinary vigilance and ex-
traordinary effort just might give us anoth-
er 20 years of the same."
Kennedy hastens to add that "there
are countries that have gone forward in
ways that we don't like. We're very con-
cerned." Indeed, a new generation of nu-
clear powers, and would-be powers, is ma-
turing. Known among experts as the
"phantom proliferators," these countries
are contributing the most significant un-
certainties about the future of nonprolifer-
ation. The phantoms are India, Pakistan,
Israel, South Africa and, to a lesser degree,
Argentina and Brazil.
All of them have mastered, or are well
on their way to mastering, the skills to pro-
duce atomic explosives. Unlike such na-
tions as West Germany and Japan, which
have also conquered the technology, the
phantoms have declined to forswear the
right to build atomic weapons by signing the
their most sensitive nuclear activities are
taking place outside the scope of Interna-
tional Atomic Energy Agency inspection.
Some of the phantoms are widely as-
sumed to have atom bombs already or to
be close to that goal. The major example
of that ambiguous status known as having
"a bomb in the basement" is Israel. The
Israelis probably developed an atomic
weapon as early as 1968, in all likelihood
using reprocessed plutonium from their
top-secret, French-built research reactor
at Dimona, in the Negev desert. By 1973,
Israel was believed to possess at least 13
nuclear weapons.
This month the well-regarded Aero-
space Daily, a Washington-based industry
newsletter, added new allegations about
the Israeli nuclear arsenal. The Daily
claimed that Israel has an unspecified
number of nuclear-tipped, mobile Jericho
II intermediate-range ballistic missiles
based in the Negev desert and on the
Golan Heights. The Daily, also said
that Israel possesses nu-
clear artillery shells. If
true, that would mean Is-
rael's atomic capability
has been drastically un-
derestimated. Jerusalem
had no comment on the
newsletter's claims.
Another candidate
for bomb-in-the-base-
ca, auuvuiic:cu III 17 iv i.nai n nau oevei-
oped a new process for uranium en-
richment. Since then the government in
Pretoria has fiercely protected its putative
breakthrough from virtually all curious
foreign eyes. In 1977 the Soviet Union,
apparently acting on evidence received
from one of its spy satellites, notified the
U.S. of an installation in South Africa's
Kalahari Desert that resembled a nuclear
test site under construction. Washington
used one of its own satellites to inspect
further. Four months later, under pres
sure from the U.S., South Africa stopped
work on the site. In September 1979, a
U.S. satellite detected an intense burst of
light, similar to the flash created by a
small nuclear explosion, over the South
Atlantic. A special White House panel
of investigators discounted the possibil-
ity of an atomic blast, but the U.S. intelli-
gence community has never been totally
convinced.
The history of Pakistan's nuclear ef-
fort shows the bedeviling complexity of
proliferation and the difficulties involved
in containing it. Pakistan's nuclear pro-
gram got under way in 1955. Over the next
nine years, 37 Pakistani scientists were
trained at atomic facilities in the U.S., and
in 1965 Pakistan began operating its first
nuclear reactor, a small research installa-
tion supplied by the U.S., under interna-
tional inspection safeguards. In 1976 the
Kahuta center was established.
The chief architect of the Kahuta pro-
gram was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the populist
politician who became President in 1971
and was overthrown by Zia in 1977. (In
1978 the popular Bhutto was
hanged by the Zia government for
allegedly conspiring to have a po-
litical opponent killed.) Bhutto
was obsessed. by India's nuclear
progress. In 1965 he had declared, -
"If India builds the Bomb, we will
eat grass or leaves, even go
hungry. But we will get one of
our own."
ment status, South Afri- Sensitive object: a Krytron
z
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In 1972, following Pakistan's
de eat in the third India-Paki-
stan war, Bhutto made his move.
ess than two months after be-
coming President he convened a
secret conference of Pakistani
scientists and bureaucrats in
the city of Multan. There, he
launched Proiect 706, Pakistan's equiva-
lent of the U.S.'s Manhattan Project.
The program developed rapidly along
several fronts, some evidently peaceful in
intent, others less so. By 1973 the country
possessed a Canadian-built commercial nu-
clear reactor fueled by natural uranium. At
about the same time, Bhutto entered negoti-
ations with France for a commercial-scale
plutonium-reprocessing plant. It would be
capable of extracting from spent fuel more
than 300 lbs. of plutonium annually, enough
for as many as 30 atom bombs and far more
than necessary for Pakistan's peaceful nu-
clear program.
The agreement with France was
signed in 1976. About two years later, un-
der pressure from Washington that was in
turn inspired by growing congressional
concern, the French decided to
stop work on the reprocessing
project. By that time, however,
Pakistan had reportedly obtained
blueprints covering up to 95% of
the project, and some French
firms apparently continued to
give quiet assistance to the effort
until the end of 1979. Pakistan
has continued to work on the
plant, but no completion date can
be predicted.
During the reprocessing tus-
sle, Pakistan pulled off its most
audacious espionage coup. It
came to light after a quiet scien-
tist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, re-
signed in March 1976 from his
post as a metallurgist at the Physi-
cal Dynamics Research Labora-
tory, known as ED.O., in Am-
sterdam. The firm was involved
j in research and development at
one of Western Europe's most ad-
vanced atomic installations, the
URENCO uranium-enrichment fa-
cility at Almelo, also in the Neth-
erlands. The plant is today one of
Western Europe's major sources
of low-enriched uranium for nu-
clear reactors. High-speed gas
centrifuges like those at URENCO
-thousands of devices lined up in
rows like washing machines in a
laundromat-can also be used to
produce the highly enriched ura-
nium needed for atomic weapons.
During his three-year stint at F.D.O.,
Khan had copied the plans of the centri-
fuge process and sent them back to Paki-
stan. He had revealed to his countrymen
the names of more than 100 European,
Canadian and U.S. firms that could pro-
vide the necessary equipment for a plant.
Using a network of phony businesses as
cover, Pakistan began to acquire and
transfer to Islamabad technology from
Western Europe and North America._
Items in the covert pipeline ranged from
special steel tubing to precision-
measur-ing equipment to specialized electronics.
In 1978, some 400 tons of uranium oxide,
the basic feedstock in producing enriched
uranium, was secretly obtained from Ni-
ger, with the connivance of Libya.
Pakistan reportedly received
hundreds of millions of dollars for
Project 706 from Libya's Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi, who in re-
turn was permitted to send his sci-
entists to study Pakistan's enrich-
meat advances. Nominally, the
i Libyan payments were made in
return for Pakistani military as-
sistance. Then, in 1977, after Zia
came to power, Libya's connec-
tion with Project 706 was cut. Zia
disliked and distrusted Gaddafi,
and turned instead to Saudi Ara-
bia for financial assistance. Saudi
Arabia's payments were officially
rendered in return for Pakistani
i military help.
Assembling the centrifuge equipment
took years. Khan quietly resurfaced as
head of the Kahuta operation in 1976. In
November 1984, a Dutch court sentenced
him in absentia to four years in prison for
;espionage, but the sentence was subse-
quently annulled on a legal technicality.
A further example of Khan's activi-
ties came to light last year in Canada, dur-
ing the trial of three Pakistani-born natu-
ralized Canadians on charges that they
had tried to circumvent local export con-
trols. Two officials of the Pakistan Atomic
Energy Commission allegedly asked the
trio in July 1980 to buy various compo-
nents for a device that can be used to spin
high-speed centrifuges. The equipment is
manufactured by General Electric Co. at
a plant in Hudson Falls. N.Y.. and at U.S.
factories of Westinghouse Electric Corp.,
RCA Corp. and Motorola Inc. The three
.Canadians made ten shipments to Paki-
stan. They were arrested while attempt-
ing to ship the eleventh. The trio later de-
nied that they knew the ultimate purpose
of the exports.. One of them said that the
equipment was for use in a textile plant
and a food-processing factory. In the end,
two of the men paid fines of $3,000 each.
.on a minor charge: failing to obtain an ex-
port permit.
Khan oversaw construction of a factb-
ty at Kahuta that is capable. according to
some estimates, of producing more than
30 lbs. of weapons-grade uranium annual-
ly. In February 1984, he announced that
Pakistan had mastered the uranium-en-
richment process, and later boasted that
there is "nothing that stands in our way
technically to stop us from enriching to
90% weapons-grade uranium." But he has
repeatedly stressed that "Pakistan is not
at all interested in nuclear weapons." The
fact is that Pakistan has built an enrich-
ment plant without an evident use-ex-
cept making bombs.
There have been indications that Pa=
kistan is at work on the task of actually
assembling an explosive device. In April
1984, after six months of surveillance,
U.S. Customs agents in Houston detained
Nazir Ahmed Vaid, a Pakistani business-
man. In a case similar to this month's Los
Angeles indictment involving Israel, Vaid
was charged with attempting to ship to
Pakistan 50 Krytrons labeled "bulb/
switches." In September he was given a
suspended sentence of two years and five
years' probation. He was then deported to
Pakistan. Only later did prosecutors learn
that documents that had been in their
possession for months linked Vaid to the
Pakistani nuclear program.
The progress of Project 706 has drawn
attention to the gaps that have all along
existed on the nonproliferation front. One
of the major problems has been lack of ef-
fective agreement among suppliers.about
what technologies are safe to export. and
under what circumstances. Following In-
dia's 1974 test blast. the U.S. and six other
countries agreed on the need for tight ex-
port controls on sensitive nuclear equip-
ment: High on the "trigger list" was
plutonium-reprocessing and uranium-
enrichment technology. The supplier
group has since expanded to 21 countries.
Updating the list to keep pace with
new technology has proved to be a discon-
certingly slow process, however. It was
not until last year that the trigger list was
expanded to include the equipment used
in the centrifuge process. Long before
then, Pakistan had acquired-the technol-
ogy, albeit illegally.
Throughout the last few years of the
Pakistani saga, the Reagan Administra-
tion has been severely criticized in Con-
gress-for giving military assistance to the
Zia government without extracting fur-
ther concrete assurances about Pakistan's
nuclear program. The official U.S. posi-
tion remains that Pakistan does not have
atomic weapons and has not assembled
3
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the nuclear explosives to make them. But
a top U.S. official says that the Admin-
istration remains "concerned" about
Pakistan's efforts to obtain weapons tech-
nology. Washington discounts Indian sus-
picions of Pakistan's nuclear intentions as
part of the long-standing rivalry between
those two countries. Says a State Depart-
ment official: "If you just listen to the In-
dians, you'd come away with the impres-
sion that Pakistan has had the bomb for
some years." He notes that the U.S.
`.would not sit idly by" if Pakistan at-
tained the ability to test a bomb, but does
not specify what Washington's actions
would be. Nonetheless, says Proliferation
Expert Weiss, "we're addressing Paki-
stan's real security needs, but we didn't
extract a high enough price for it. Zia
is acting as if he's got us over a barrel.
We're acting as if we agree with that
assessment."
The trouble with Weiss's complaint
lies in the assumption that only the U.S.
can solve what is a global problem. Says
David Fischer, a former assistant director-
general of the I.A.E.A.: "The U.S. can no
longer legislate the world nuclear industry.
That may mean more nonnuclear diplo
macy rather than nuclear denial."
Well before the incoming Reaganauts
decried the U.S. Nuclear Nonproliferation
Act, West European critics maintained
that the law, constituted a sledgehammer
approach. They resented U.S. efforts to.
force them down the same road. As Ber-
trand Goldschmidt, a French physicist
and former chairman of the I.A.E.A., puts it,
"Applying nonproliferation measures is a
delicate matter. It's like using drugs in
medicine. If you are too strict, you can push
countries into autarky."
What solutions are available? An
emerging school of thought views the
open acknowledgment of new nuclear ar-
senals as not such a bad development. es-
pecially in the case of Israel. Officially,
Jerusalem's long-standing position is that
it will not be the first country in the Mid-
dle East to introduce nuclear weapons to
the area. Shai Feldman, an expert on
strategy at Tel Aviv University, argues
differently. He contends that "you can
only have a credible nuclear deterrent if
the other side believes you have the capa-
bility and the will to employ nuclear
weapons under certain circumstances.
And the only way to have a credible doc-
trine is to have the public behind you."
Accordingly,- Feldman feels, Israel
should "develop the means and then
openly proclaim its willingness to use nu-
clear weapons."
If the challenge of proliferation is grim,
the situation could be much worse. Playing
for time in the effort to curb further growth
of the nuclear nemesis has never been time
wasted. But _ the harsh fact cannot be
brushed aside: proliferation is not an ar-
cane and unpleasant prospect to be avoid-
ed but a reality that must be confronted.
The world's spreading nuclear capability
is far more dangerous than it used to be.
Full recognition of that state of affairs is
necessary if mankind is ever to quiet its nu-
clear fears. -By George Russell.
Report ed byJay Branegan/Washington and Dean
Brelis/Islamabad, with other bureaus
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