TEN MORE NATIONS MAY HAVE NUCLEAR ARMS ON THE DRAWING BOARD - IF NOT IN HAND

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000100380002-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 26, 2011
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: June 6, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/04/26: CIA-RDP91-00587ROO0100380002-0
E APPEARED ! CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
ON PAa 6 June 1985
'Ten more nations may have nuc ear arms on eA
drawing board if not in hand
e John K. Cooley Companies in France, Switzerland, lgium, anSoeclal to The Christian Science Monitor West Germany all have reportedly helped Pakistan work
London
As the United States, the Soviet Union, China.
Britain, and France build up their existing nu-
clear arsenals, about 10 other countries are ap-
proaching or achieving the capability to make -
and deliver - home-grown nuclear weapons.
This is the conclusion of a six-month investiga-
tion by ABC News, which discloses new prolif-
eration of nuclear-weapons capability in- Latin
America, South Asia, and the Middle East: -
President Kennedy_predicted in 1963 that by,
the end of the 1970s "15 to 20 to 25 nations"
might have the bomb.
This was never realized because the 1968 Non-
IProliferation Treaty and safeguards of the Inter-
national Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have
helped many states decide that "they would be
better off without nuclear weapons," says David
Price, an analyst at the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute, an arms control
foundation. .
But Leonard S. Spector, a. leading US expee~
on nonproliferation, wrote in, the. Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists in, January, "Although no new
nation tested a first nuclear device during 1984
all of the threshold countries appear to have
taken steps, in some case significant, toward de-
veloping or expanding nuclear weapons capa-
bilities."
Mr. Spector, author of "Nuclear Proliferation
Today," included in the category of "threshold
countries" Pakistan, India, Israel, Argentina,
'Brazil, Iraq, Libya, and South Africa.
Investigation in and about the threshold na-
tions disclosed new information, .some of which is
highly frustrating for the `Reagan administra
Lion's anti-proliferation hopes and disappointing for the
IAEA safeguards system.
Today's greatest proliferation danger may lie in South
Asia, according to experts in Vienna and Stockholm.
India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi told a reporter
(earlier this year, "If we [had] wanted to make bombs in
these 11 years" since India's test of what it referred to as
a "peaceful" nuclear device on May 18, 1974, "we could
have.
toward keeping the promise of the late Prime Minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to "make an Islamic bomb, even if
we have to eat grass to do it."
An engineer in Freiburg, West Germany, recently con-
victed and fined for illegal exports of sensitive nuclear
equipment, allegedly helped Pakistan acquire a uranium
hexafluoride plant, an important link in enriching ura-
nium 235 to the high degree needed for weapons.
French firms and Belgium's Belgonucleaire earlier
provided assistance for the Pinstech reprocessing plant,
near Islamabad, Pakistan. It produces plutonium which
will soon be enough for two bombs a year. In Kahuta,
Pakistan, an enrichment plant is reportedly in operation,
and diplomats and newsmen have in past years been
beaten up for getting too close to it.
Munir Ahmed Khan, chairman of the Pakistan
Atomic Energy Commission, at first declined to discuss
Kahuta with this writer. Later he told ABC that "we are
(carrying out research and development in enrichment
using the centrifuge process." Centrifuges are normally
used to separate uranium 233 from less fissionable iso-
topes of uranium. Highly enriched uranium 235 can be
used in nuclear weapons.
British experts and US intelligence sources have re-
for
Europe
po that Pakistan has been comb-
shaped-steel a ates. These fit over the two steel emi-
t spheres enclosing the nuclear explosive, somew at e
the sections of a soccer ball.
Western intelligence lieves China provided a bomb
design to Pakistan. This was one factor ate the
administration and ongress to delay an agreement or
nuclear-power reactors that President uuuaieai in
Peking last AREil. In the design, a conventional explosive
is placed between hemispheres and plates, causing the
implosion that produces a nuclear blast.
Last June, Nazir Ahmed Vaid, a Pakistani, was ar-
rested in the US and later deported after trying to buy 50
krytrons, devices that can be used to trigger nuclear
weapons. -
Israel recently admitted it had imported about 80
i krytrons but said they were used for nonnuclear explo-
i sions. An American' is being prosecuted in Los Angeles
for allegedly smuggling the krytrons to Israel.
It is widely assumed that Israel's frequnt statement
that it "will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons
into the Mideast" thinly masks a considerable Israeli nu-
clear arsenal ready for instant assembly.
Carl Duckett~ a former deputy director at the Central
In ce A&MqX said in 1981 that the CIA estrmata
that weapons-grade uranium (more an unds,
enough for four bombs) allegedly went to Israel m a
'firm called NUMEC in Apollo, Pa. srae 'ura-
nium from its phosphates and is believed by speciiMU
to im op rt u rican uranium as well:
Israeli-developed techniques, such as laser separation
of uranium isotopes, are believed by the same specialists
Mr. Gandhi said India has not taken such a step. But
in recent press interviews, he has said that India is con-
sidering how to respond to the possibility that Pakistan
1 has a nuclear weapon.
US government experts see no evidence that India has
produced any more "devices" since 1974. They do be-
Ilieve, however, that through its safeguarded and
unsafeguarded network of advanced nuclear installa-
tions, India has increased its capability to produce
enough weapons-grade plutonium to soon produce 10 nu-
clear bombs a year.
1
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/04/26: CIA-RDP91-00587ROO0100380002-0