*** Will Communist China Give Nuclear Aid to Pakistan?

During the late 1970s, for example, the CIA acquired information suggesting and later confirming that China had aided the Pakistani nuclear weapons program by providing it with weapons design information. According to recently declassified State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) reports published today by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, years earlier, not long after China's first nuclear test (October 1964), INR wondered whether China would help Pakistan, among other countries, acquire a nuclear capability. INR experts believed that China had limited resources and seemed "cautious and indecisive" on the question of nuclear assistance, but they saw "reasons for continued concern."

A year later, intelligence reports concerning visits to China by Pakistani defense and science advisers sparked the question, "Will Communist China Give Nuclear Aid to Pakistan?" INR analysts downplayed their significance, arguing that both countries would see risks in nuclear weapons cooperation, although assistance for peaceful purposes was possible. One of the visitors to Beijing, the future Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam, later played a central role in the 1972 Pakistani nuclear weapons decision, but INR could not foresee that.

Document 19: Thomas L. Hughes to the Secretary, "Will Communist China Give Nuclear Aid to Pakistan?" 12 August 1966, Intelligence Note 506, Secret, Distribution List Attached

Source: RG 59, UD-UP 131, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Reports Coordination and Review Staff, Intelligence Reports, 1961, 1963-67, box 2, IN-500-579 

Intelligence reports about recent visits to Beijing by Pakistani defense and science officials raised questions whether China was or would be providing nuclear aid to Pakistan. The latter was already developing close relations with China, a matter which was of great concern to U.S. policymakers, but INR analyst Thomas Thornton concluded that Pakistan was highly unlikely to seek a significant degree of Chinese nuclear assistance: it would cause severe strains in U.S. relations with Pakistan and there are "few things that would be as certain to trigger an Indian decision to produce nuclear weapons as would a Sino-Pakistani arrangement for nuclear arms collaboration." Moreover, China was unlikely to be responsive: "We remain unconvinced by the evidence thus far obtained that there is any definite plan for Sino-Pakistani cooperation of any type in the nuclear area, but if there is, it is most likely in the peaceful area."

One of the visitors to China, presidential science adviser Abdus Salam, a future Nobel Prize winner in theoretical physics was later ostracized because of his adherence to a minority Muslim sect. Whether Salam played an affirmative role in Bhutto's decision in 1972 to build the bomb has been a matter of controversy, but Feroz Hassan Khan's history places Salam in the center of events. Moreover, once Bhutto had made the decision to go ahead, Salam recruited top scientists to help carry it out.