As one of the countries that built nuclear weapons, in defiance of global norms of nonproliferation, Pakistan has merited a great deal of attention when it comes to its nuclear weapons program. What explains Pakistan's nuclear acquisition? What explains Pakistan's proliferation, both as an independent state and as a state whose most powerful actor ran an independent black-market network that proliferated to other state entities? Should Pakistan's management of the bomb be a cause of worry for the international community going forward? In Pakistan's Nuclear Bomb, Hassan Abbas answers all these questions skillfully through a detailed scholarly examination. Exploring why Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons, and then allegedly proliferated nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, Abbas argues that a host of factors, including political upheavals, civil-military tensions in Pakistan, threats from India, and turbulent Pakistan-US relations, facilitated and enabled proliferation dynamics.
Neatly structured, the book is exhaustive in tracing Pakistan's journey from nuclear reluctance to nuclear maturity. Before delving into the country's nuclear weapons program, Abbas looks carefully at the making of Pakistan's strategic culture, shaped by India-specific threats. However, Abbas underplays, to a degree, India's intransigence on Kashmir and its massive, brazen intervention in East Pakistan. Abbas writes, “The historical roots of Pakistan's insecurity indicate that its motivations in its competitiveness toward India fall more in line with Stephen Walt's interpretation of the balance of power concept” (p. 22)—a problematic assertion.
While Abbas is right in highlighting the many factors that, over the years, contributed to the eventual fall of Dhaka, his treatment of India's military aggression in 1971 lacks nuance. By trivializing India's military incursions in East Pakistan and putting the onus on Pakistan, Abbas lays the groundwork for a problematic dissection of Pakistan's nuclear excursion. First, Abbas's treatment of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh downgrades the security factor from its position as the principal, veritable reason for Pakistan's nuclearization. Second, it misconstrues, if not misplaces, the role of Pakistan's security apparatus when it comes to its nuclear program, which explains the varying degrees of civil-military controls on Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Pakistan's threat perceptions and insecurities merit a deeper examination since they are at the heart of its seeking deterrence capability against India. Abbas's dissection of this subject leaves the reader with an incomplete understanding of Pakistan's security motivations for pushing for a nuclear deterrent of its own.
Abbas succinctly takes the reader through a story of resilience that explains well how a small country like Pakistan managed to acquire nuclear weapons at the height of its relationship with the United States, navigating the minefield of sanctions. In my own historical work examining US nuclear nonproliferation policy toward Pakistan, The Blind Eye,Footnote 1 I argue that no Pakistani leader, civilian or military, compromised on the country's nuclear weapons program, with each playing a critical role in getting Pakistan more than it had bargained for. Given that Pakistan's need to develop a deterrent was not pushed as the political choice and desire of an individual, or of an organization, it is important to reassess the utility of the domestic politics or bureaucratic factor in understanding the country's decision to acquire nuclear weapons. I do not find evidence of domestic politics influencing civilian or military actors in shaping the direction of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program based on their epistemological reasoning and ontological positioning.
Abbas brilliantly outlines how the country's nuclear program graduated and matured across phases and decades. However, he pays little attention to how Washington's geostrategic interests gave Pakistan the space it needed to race toward the bomb. Abbas writes that Washington's nonproliferation efforts were partly unsuccessful because the A. Q. Khan network was a step ahead of the obstacles. This assertion is weak, for it ignores the extent to which the United States knew about Pakistan's nuclear status and turned a blind eye in order to enlist Pakistan's support in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Thus, Pakistan's proliferation odyssey cannot be examined in isolation from a critical appraisal of US nonproliferation policy's enforcement failure, which stemmed and continues to stem from relegating nonproliferation principles and prioritizing geopolitical interests.
Abbas dedicates several chapters of the book to the proliferation linkages that Pakistan had with Iran, North Korea, and Libya, devoting a separate chapter to each country, in which he ably attempts to separate Pakistan's interests from those of A. Q. Khan. While many scholarly examinations of the A. Q. Khan network provide detailed insights into the workings of the network, Abbas's study makes an important contribution to the literature on Pakistan's role as a proliferator state, with varying degrees of civilian and military complicity, in the examined cases of proliferation with North Korea, Libya, and Iran.
