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Citing accounts of controversial Pakistani nuclear
scientist A Q Khan, The Washington Post says that
Khan - then a metallurgist working at a Dutch
centrifuge manufacturer - was provoked to offer
his services to Bhutto by India testing its first
nuclear bomb two years earlier.
Khan, according to the US daily, said he and
two other Pakistani officials - including the
then Foreign secretary Agha Shahi - worked out
the details when they travelled to Beijing later
that year for Mao's funeral.
(Bhutto had been talking of Pakistan developing
a nuclear bomb years before India tested it in
1974).
Over several days, Khan was cited as saying,
he briefed three top Chinese nuclear weapons officials
- Liu Wei, Li Jue and Jiang Shengjie - on how
the European-designed centrifuges could swiftly
aid China's lagging uranium-enrichment programme.
China's Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions
about the officials' roles, the Post said.
"Chinese experts started coming regularly
to learn the whole technology" from Pakistan,
Khan states, staying in a guesthouse built for
them at his centrifuge research centre.
Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong
in central China, where they helped "put
up a centrifuge plant", Khan said in an account
he gave to his wife after coming under government
pressure, according to the Post.
"We sent 135 C-130 planeloads 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."
In return, China sent Pakistan 15 tonnes of uranium
hexafluoride (UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan's
centrifuges that Khan's colleagues were having
difficulty producing on their own.
Khan was quoted as saying the gas enabled the
laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium
in 1982. Chinese scientists helped the Pakistanis
solve other nuclear weapons challenges, but as
their competence rose, so did the fear of top
Pakistani officials that Israel or India might
pre-emptively strike key nuclear sites.
Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's former military
ruler, "was worried", Khan said, and
so he and a Pakistani general who helped oversee
the nation's nuclear laboratories, were dispatched
to Beijing with a request in mid-1982 to borrow
enough bomb-grade uranium for a few weapons.
After winning Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's
approval, Khan, the general and two others flew
aboard a Pakistani C-130 to Urumqi.
Khan says they enjoyed barbecued lamb while waiting
for the Chinese military to pack the small uranium
bricks into lead-lined boxes, 10 single-kilogram
ingots to a box, for the flight to Islamabad.
According to Khan's account, cited by the Post,
Pakistan's nuclear scientists, however, kept the
Chinese material in storage until 1985, by which
time the Pakistanis had made a few bombs with
their own uranium.
Khan said he got Zia's approval to ask the Chinese
whether they wanted their high-enriched uranium
back. After a few days, they responded "that
the HEU loaned earlier was now to be considered
as a gift ... in gratitude" for Pakistani
help, Khan said.
The laboratory promptly fabricated hemispheres
for two weapons and added them to Pakistan's arsenal,
he was quoted as saying.
(IANS)
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