334 { China’s Quest
and acquiescing to India’s further subordination of Pakistan and, perhaps,
genuine Indian hegemony over the entire subcontinent. Given the gross
asymmetry between India and Pakistan in economic strength and popula-
tion, it was unlikely that Pakistan could deter India via conventional military
strength. A Pakistani nuclear deterrent, however, might suffice, or at least
offer a stronger Pakistani deterrent. Nor would assistance to Pakistan’s nu-
clear weapons efforts violate any international agreements signed by China.
China would not sign the NPT until 1992. China’s formal, declared position
regarding nuclear nonproliferation in the 1970s was that it was essentially an
effort by the Soviet and American hegemony-seeking superpowers to main-
tain their joint nuclear monopoly via collusion in order to uphold their nu-
clear blackmail against the Second and Third Worlds. It was, thus, a good
thing if countries of the Third World, oppressed by superpower hegemony,
acquired the full range of modern means of self-defense. American and
Soviet hegemonists might be unhappy with efforts to undermine their joint
“nuclear blackmail.” But that displeasure could be offset by keeping assistance
to Pakistan’s nuclear program clandestine. Moreover, by officially denying
nuclear cooperation with Pakistan and keeping it secret, China could plau-
sibly deny superpower charges of Chinese proliferation.
According to a report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, around
October 1974 China dispatched twelve nuclear scientists to assist Pakistan’s
nuclear energy program.^42 India had tested its first atomic bomb in May. Two
years later, in May 1976, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto led a top-level
scientific-military delegation to China, including a Nobel Prize–winning
Pakistani nuclear physicist who was then Bhutto’s scientific advisor. Two
public agreements were signed, one on military, the other on scientific co-
operation. Barely a week later, a high-level Chinese scientific team arrived in
Islamabad.^43 According to Indian sources, in June 1976 China and Pakistan
signed a secret nuclear technology cooperation agreement. Bhutto confirmed
existence of a mysterious but immensely important international agree-
ment concluded in 1976 and related to Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. In his
death cell testament (he was about to be hanged by the military group led
by Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq that had ousted him from power), Bhutto re-
ferred to “the agreement of mine concluded in June 1976” which was “the
single most important achievement which I believe will dominate the portrait
of my public life” and which “will perhaps be my greatest achievement and
contribution to the survival of our people and nation.”^44 Bhutto does not say
who the parties to that agreement were or what it was about other than that
it related to Pakistan’s nuclear program. He stresses, however, his own role
in the development of Pakistan’s nuclear program, from his service as head
of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s to July 1977, when he
was overthrown by a military coup. Bhutto believed that he was overthrown
on CIA orders by military chief Zia-ul-Haq because of his efforts to push