The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (7 page)

When our officers met their Chinese counterparts, who wore neither smart uniforms nor any badges of rank, they found this somewhat disconcerting and confusing. In fact, a Pakistani General at the time of the Delegation’s departure asked one of the very modest-looking individuals, who was dressed in unpressed trousers and jacket, to fetch his suitcase. The man actually moved to comply. I was horrified and stopped him, and apologized for my countryman’s blunder—he was a Lieutenant General in the People’s Liberation Army and a veteran of the Long March.
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Zhou Enlai, after enquiring why the Pakistanis only required fourteen days of ammunition from China—“How can a war be fought in that short time?”
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—went on to probe the generals:

“I would be interested to know if you have prepared the people of Pakistan to operate in the rear of the enemy…I am talking about a People’s Militia being based in every village and town. Since Pakistan lacks an industrial base to replenish supplies, this kind of defence is obviously well-suited to its needs.”

There was a stunned silence among the Generals. The concept of putting arms into the hands of the common man was totally alien to them; in fact, it was deemed a threat to law and order in Pakistan. The notion of a prolonged conflict involving the citizenry of Pakistan was not part of the defence strategy planned by these professional soldiers…When the generals met at my home for dinner that night they appeared to be upset, and one of them said: ‘War is a serious business and should be left to the professionals. Imagine a People’s Militia!…What does Zhou Enlai know about soldiering and military affairs anyway?’… I reminded him that Zhou Enlai had fought in more battles than one could count. For several years he was a Divisional Commander and then Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.
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A Pakistani military elite that emerged through Sandhurst and the British imperial army, and a Chinese leadership that had come to power through the Long March, guerrilla warfare, and Leninist re-education campaigns in Yan’an, hardly seemed destined to be “all-weather friends”. Yet in parallel to these talks about small arms, an act of procurement on a far more spectacular scale was already being contemplated, which was worth the risk of foregoing any number of American jet fighters. The area where the value of the Sino-Pakistani military relationship has been greatest has been the one about which they can say the least.

Before Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979, he wrote a last testament by hand in his prison cell. While much of the document focused on responding to the charges levelled against him by General Zia, who had seized power from Bhutto in a coup two years earlier, there were also a couple of references that would initially be mysterious to the text’s readers:

In the light of recent developments which have taken place, my single most important achievement, which I believe will dominate the portrait of my public life, is an agreement which I arrived at after an assiduous and tenacious endeavour spanning over eleven years of negotiations. In the present context, the agreement of mine, concluded in June 1976, will perhaps be my greatest achievement and contribution to the survival of our people and our nation.
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They were not mysterious for long. It was already clear by the early 1980s that this achievement was securing Chinese support for the development of a Pakistani bomb. The final, decisive meeting is immortalized in a photograph that shows Bhutto and a frail Mao Zedong shaking hands, the last shot taken of a meeting between Mao and any foreign leader.
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Then terminally ill, he would die a few months later, but the agreement stuck. Discussions between the two sides had been underway since that defining year. “1965 was critical for us,” recalled Aga Shahi, one of the architects of the policy, in a later interview. “We made a pact with Beijing that ushered in decades of assistance we could not have got elsewhere.”
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Pakistan’s decision to move ahead with a nuclear programme in the first place was itself closely intertwined with the decision to throw its chips in with China. The “pro-bomb camp”, led by Bhutto and others in the foreign ministry, and the “anti-bomb camp”, led by Finance Minister Muhammad Shoaib and a number of close economic advisers to Ayub Khan, were also at odds over the development of rela
tions with Beijing.
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The latter group wanted to tread cautiously, minimizing the risks to the US-Pakistan relationship and Pakistan’s standing in the international community. The former believed that the US-Pakistan alliance was doomed to disappoint, and with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other restrictions on nuclear trade in the offing, the window of opportunity to compete with India was closing. Bhutto’s famous pronouncement in 1965, that “If … India builds the atom bomb…. Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own”, would hence bind Pakistan’s fate up with the strategic calculations of its eastern neighbour for decades to come.
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The final impetus for the deal, though, was provided by India’s nuclear test in 1974. “Smiling Buddha”, as the first detonation of an Indian bomb was codenamed, threatened to tip the South Asian military balance decisively in favour of New Delhi, and bracket India with nuclear-armed China instead. But as in so many other areas, Chinese assistance to Pakistan helped to ensure that India would instead be re-hyphenated with its other neighbour. During the Pakistani foreign minister’s visit to Beijing after the nuclear test, China gave its consent to help Pakistan develop a “nuclear blast” capacity.
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Reinforcing Pakistan’s balancing role was not the only motivation for Beijing: at least in theory, nuclear cooperation was a two-way street. Not so long before, China too had been stuck on the outside of the nuclear club. The threat of US atomic weapons being used on the Chinese mainland loomed large during the Korean War and the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1955, prompting Beijing’s decision to acquire nuclear capabilities of its own.
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Yet crucial Soviet assistance to China’s strategic weapons programme had been abruptly curtailed as ideological tensions between Mao and Khrushchev grew. At one point, China’s bomb designers made daily trips to Beijing railway station in the hope of picking up a Soviet prototype that was promised but never arrived.
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Moscow also reneged on its agreement to provide the uranium hexaflouride (UF6)—the gaseous uranium compound required for enrichment—that China needed for its first bomb. UF6 became the “weakest link in the chain”
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of China’s nuclear industrial production. A few final clues for implosion were gleaned from the reassembled scraps of some shredded documents the Soviet weapons specialists left behind in China before their abrupt departure.
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After that the Chinese scientists were on their own.

Within a few years China would become the fifth country in the world to test a nuclear bomb, and Beijing moved quickly to acquire all the
accoutrements of a strategic weapons programme. However, the sudden cut-off of scientific cooperation with the Soviet Union, and the absence of contact with the Western nuclear powers, left the Chinese scientists well aware that their nuclear programme was still lagging far behind those of the countries against which they had established it to defend themselves.
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Weaknesses in their uranium enrichment capacities would be one of the main drivers for China’s decision to join the IAEA in 1984, which promised access to superior enrichment technology.
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Vulnerabilities in the Chinese weapons programme would also provide part of the impetus for agreeing to intelligence and military cooperation with the United States in 1979.
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Beijing even asked Iran to pass on copies of its nuclear contracts with the West, in the hope that they might furnish some clues. But Pakistan promised something different—full spectrum collaboration: “One critical factor the two nations had in common was denial of certain Western technologies. Thus, their relationship was mutually beneficial—every piece of technology Pakistan managed to acquire would be available to the Chinese for reverse engineering.”
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In September 1976, A.Q. Khan joined the Pakistani delegation at Mao’s funeral, where he and his colleagues met three leading Chinese nuclear officials, Li Jue, Liu Wei and Jiang Shengjie. Jiang Shengjie was the nuclear fuel bureau chief, and one of China’s top nuclear scientists.
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Liu Wei managed the development of China’s nuclear plants and had been in charge of the “Bureau of Architectural Technology”, one of the two organs that originally launched China’s nuclear weapons programme, overseeing the experimental nuclear reactor and cyclotron supplied by the Soviets. The most senior figure was Li Jue, who was in charge of research and development for China’s nuclear weapons programme. He had run the Ninth Bureau—the “most secret organisation in the entire nuclear program”—during the critical phase of its development, overseeing uranium enrichment, nuclear testing, and the weapons research facility, China’s own Los Alamos.
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This was one of A.Q. Khan’s first overseas trips as a representative of the Pakistani government. He had only made his permanent return to Pakistan at the end of the previous year, bringing with him the designs for virtually every centrifuge he could lay his hands on at URENCO’s facilities in the Netherlands. By July he had established his own research laboratory reporting directly to the Pakistani prime minister, and by September he had settled on the Punjabi town of Kahuta, about 20 miles south-east of Islamabad, as the location for his secret plant.
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While Pakistan’s needs were certainly on the table in the meetings, so too were China’s. He briefed them on how European-designed centrifuges could help China’s enrichment programme. “Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology” from Pakistan, A.Q. Khan states in his account.
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Pakistani experts were sent to Hanzhong, near the ancient Chinese capital of Xian, where they helped “put up a centrifuge plant”. “We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges,” he wrote. “Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time.”
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But what Pakistan got in return was far greater.

In 1982, a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft belonging to the Pakistani military left Urumqi, capital of the north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang, headed for Islamabad carrying five lead-lined, stainless steel boxes, inside each of which were 10 single-kilogram ingots of highly enriched uranium (HEU), enough for two atomic bombs.
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It is likely that this was the only time a nuclear weapon state transferred HEU to a non-nuclear country for military use. China had already sent 15 tons of uranium hexaflouride to Pakistan—somewhat more than a bomb’s worth—to ensure that the nuclear project continued on schedule: “China’s gas was most likely used in Pakistan’s first round of enrichment while the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission was still struggling with UF6 production,” according to one Pakistani nuclear expert’s account.
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Their scientists had also been closely involved in technical cooperation, as a regular visitor to Khan Research Laboratories explains: “The Chinese were working on triggering mechanisms, the centrifuges, vacuum systems. They brought rocket propellant and super-hard metals like maraging steel…. They brought in fissile material and Khan gave them the data on enrichment and metallurgy. They helped Pakistan import and experiment with high explosives and Khan gave them his work on the centrifuge rotors.”
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Chinese officials stayed at Khan’s guesthouse at Kahuta, which was done up in the style of a Chinese hall.
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But by 1982, General Zia was nervous about the slow pace of Pakistan’s progress. The Israeli strike on Osirak, destroying Iraq’s latent nuclear programme, drew fears that India could do the same thing—or even the Israelis themselves.
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Five days before the operation, the Israeli ambassador to the UN had warned that “there is abundant evidence indicating that [Pakistan] is producing nuclear weapons”.
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Israel had
made plans for a pre-emptive attack. As had India.
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Even Moscow was now a potential threat—Pakistan had already embarked on its programme of support for the
mujahideen
’s anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, with the obvious risk of retaliation. Zia sent his military aide, Lieutenant-General Syed Ali Zamin Naqvi, to request weapons-grade fissile material and the bomb design from China, in an effort to speed Pakistan’s efforts along.
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Deng Xiaoping agreed. In each area where the Soviets had pulled the plug on Beijing, the Chinese would prove to be far more obliging to the Pakistanis.

The scope of this cooperation was ascertained relatively quickly by Western intelligence agencies. The papers that eventually turned up in Tripoli in plastic carrier bags had even been in the hands of US agents before. Until he was told to stop by Zia, A.Q. Khan had the habit of carrying weapons designs in his briefcase.
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During one trip abroad in the early 1980s, US intelligence officers gained access to his luggage in a hotel room and found drawings of a bomb and the instructions to make it, the very documents that would later be sold to Libya and possibly other customers too.
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Their Chinese provenance was as clear then as it would be three decades later. In fact, so thoroughly had US intelligence penetrated Pakistan’s nuclear programme that American weapons experts were even able to create a detailed model of the bomb, which they showed to Pakistan’s foreign minister in 1987 as a demonstration of just how much they knew.
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The drawings themselves were shown to Zia by Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, as early as 1982.
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In spite of this, the political pressure on Pakistan and China from the United States could at best be described as modest. The three sides had been working as a virtual alliance against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan since the 1979 invasion, and proliferation issues were of lower salience than the opportunity to deal the Soviets a fatal blow. The US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, articulated the stance most pithily in his argument to President Carter, “Our security policy cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”
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The Chinese were informed of this stance in the course of bilateral meetings in 1980: