Countering Soviet Encirclement } 335
forward with Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities in spite of US opposition. Bhutto
insisted that Pakistan’s nuclear program was “peaceful,” but also said things
like this: “What difference does my life make now when I can imagine eighty
million of my countrymen standing under the nuclear cloud of a defense-
less sky.” Though written in an elliptical style probably designed to protect a
Pakistani pledge of secrecy to Beijing, Bhutto clearly claims credit for laying
the basis for Pakistan’s production of atomic defense capability via the myste-
rious June 1976 international agreement.
Cooperation with China was not the only, or possibly even the most im-
portant, element of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons drive in the 1970s. During
that decade, Pakistani agencies began setting up a global network for clan-
destinely acquiring the equipment, components, and materials necessary for
nuclear weapons production. Western countries—such as West Germany,
the Netherlands, France, and the United States—were the key target areas
for these covert acquisition efforts. China’s assistance apparently supple-
mented these efforts. After counterproliferation efforts by US agencies in the
late 1970s thwarted Pakistani efforts to extract plutonium from spent reactor
fuel, Pakistan turned to uranium enrichment via gaseous diffusion. Chinese
personnel reportedly helped Pakistan overcome the technical difficulties
associated with gaseous diffusion, and supplied uranium hexafluoride to feed
into the completed apparatus.^45 China also seems to have supplied Pakistan
with the design for an atomic bomb—specifically for the type of 25-kiloton
(Hiroshima-sized) atomic bomb tested by China in October 1966. CIA spies
reportedly found that design, complete with Chinese script and other indica-
tions that it came from China, in the baggage of Abdul Qadir Khan when
they covertly searched it during his trip abroad in the early 1980s.^46
Chinese assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear programs apparently continued
throughout the 1980s. Even after China joined the NPT regime in 1992, it
insisted on continuing nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, though now under
IAEA inspection and confined to the nonmilitary sphere. It can be argued
that China delayed entry into the NPT until it had provided Pakistan with the
basics of a self-sufficient nuclear weapons capability. Even when China agreed
in 1997, under great US pressure, to stop nuclear cooperation with Iran, it
insisted on continuing such cooperation with Pakistan.^47 By the 1990s, the
Soviet Union was no longer in the picture, but Beijing’s calculations regarding
maintaining a balance of power in the subcontinent favorable to China
remained essentially unchanged. Those calculations trace back to 1974–1976
and were enshrined in what must have been a decision made by Mao Zedong.
The Kingdom of Iran was China’s other key anti-Soviet partner in
Southwest Asia. Common support for Pakistan was an important factor
bringing China and Iran together in the early 1970s. China’s threat to enter
the 1965 India-Pakistan war had made Iran’s monarch (known by the Persian
title shah), Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, cognizant of China’s role in the South