Pakistan and weapons of mass destruction

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan began focusing on nuclear development in January 1972 under the leadership of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (father of Benazir Bhutto). Pakistan's nuclear weapons development program was in response to neighboring India's development of nuclear weapons. Prime minister Bhutto called a meeting of senior scientists and engineers on January 20, 1972, in Multan. It was here that Prime Minister Bhutto rallied Pakistan's scientists to build the atomic bomb for national survival. At the Multan meeting, Prime Minister Bhutto also appointed a Pakistani nuclear Scientist, Munir Ahmad Khan, as chairman of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), who till then had been working as Director of Nuclear Power and Reactor Division at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna, Austria. This marked the beginning of Pakistan's pursuit of nuclear capability. Following India's surprise nuclear test, codenamed Smiling Buddha in 1974, the first confirmed nuclear test by a nation outside the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council, the goal to develop nuclear weapons received considerable impetus.
Consequently, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgical engineer, working at the Dutch research firm URENCO, also joined Pakistan's nuclear weapons-grade Uranium enrichment program, using stolen URENCO designs. The uranium enrichment program had been launched in 1974 by PAEC chairman Munir Ahmad Khan as Project-706. AQ Khan joined the project in the spring of 1976 and was made Project-Director in July 1976 after taking over from another Nuclear Scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. In 1983, Khan was convicted of the theft of the blueprints, though the conviction was overturned on a legal technicality.[1]
A few weeks after India's second nuclear test (Operation Shakti) on 28 May 1998, Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices in the Chagai Hills in the Chaghai district, Balochistan. This operation was named Chagai-I by Pakistan, the base having been long-constructed by provincial martial law administrator Rahimuddin Khan during the 1980s. Pakistan's fissile material production takes place at Kahuta and Khushab/Jauharabad, where weapons-grade plutonium is made, allegedly with using Chinese-supplied technology.[2]
Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons Program was established in 1974 when the Directorate of Technical Development (DTD) was set up in PAEC by chairman Munir Ahmad Khan, who was credited as the one of the pioneer of Pakistan's atomic bomb by a recent IISS, London's Dossier on Pakistan's nuclear program. DTD was assigned the task of developing the implosion design, trigger mechanism, physics calculations, high-speed electronics, high-precision chemical and mechanical components, high explosive lenses for Pakistan's nuclear weapons. The DTD had come up with its first implosion design of a nuclear weapon by 1978 which was then improved and later tested on March 11, 1983 when PAEC carried out Pakistan's first successful cold test of a nuclear device. Between 1983 and 1990, PAEC carried out 24 more cold tests of various nuclear weapon designs. DTD had also developed a miniaturized weapon design by 1987 that could be delivered by all Pakistan Air Force Aircraft