Pakistan's Nuclear Program: Laying the Groundwork for Impunity

26 Pages Posted: 6 Apr 2017

Date Written: November 21, 2016

Abstract

While there are numerous histories of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program available (e.g. Bhutto 1979; F. Khan 2012a, 2012b; International Institute for Strategic Studies 2007; Corera 2006; Levy and Scott-Clark 2007; Salik 2009), in this chapter I make two modest interventions to the existing corpus. First, whereas conventional scholarship (inter alia Kapur 2007) presume Pakistan to be a covert nuclear power since 1990, I argue that Pakistan has been a covert nuclear power for much longer, perhaps since as early as 1979. Second, marshalling evidence from the U.S. National Security Archives, I show that India was very much aware of Pakistan’s nuclear developments throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These admittedly reserved alterations of the conventioal wisdom imply that scholars should reconsider how they view earlier conflicts between India and Pakistan such as Operation Brasstacks throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas Cohen and others argue that Brasstacks was not a nuclear dispute because “Pakistan had not yet acquired a nuclear weapon,” the evidence I put forward here suggests that this crisis was, in fact, a nuclearized crisis (Cohen 2016, 250).

Keywords: Pakistan, nuclear program, Pakistan-US relations

Suggested Citation

Fair, C. Christine, Pakistan's Nuclear Program: Laying the Groundwork for Impunity (November 21, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2946051 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2946051

C. Christine Fair (Contact Author)

Georgetown University ( email )

Washington, DC 20057
United States

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