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Khan oversaw construction of a facility at Kahuta that is capable, according to some estimates, of producing more than 30 lbs. of weapons-grade uranium annually. In February 1984, he announced that Pakistan had mastered the uranium-enrichment process, and later boasted that there is "nothing that stands in our way technically to stop us from enriching to 90% weapons-grade uranium." But he has repeatedly stressed that "Pakistan is not at all interested in nuclear weapons." The fact is that Pakistan has built an enrichment plant without an evident use -- except making bombs.
There have been indications that Pakistan is at work on the task of actually assembling an explosive device. In April 1984, after six months of surveillance, U.S. Customs agents in Houston detained Nazir Ahmed Vaid, a Pakistani businessman. In a case similar to this month's Los Angeles indictment involving Israel, Vaid was charged with attempting to ship to Pakistan 50 Krytrons labeled "bulb/ switches." In September he was given a suspended sentence of two years and five years' probation. He was then deported to Pakistan. Only later did prosecutors learn that documents that had been in their possession for months linked Vaid to the Pakistani nuclear program.
The progress of Project 706 has drawn attention to the gaps that have all along existed on the nonproliferation front. One of the major problems has been lack of effective agreement among suppliers about what technologies are safe to export, and under what circumstances. Following India's 1974 test blast, the U.S. and six other countries agreed on the need for tight export controls on sensitive nuclear equipment. High on the "trigger list" was plutonium-reprocessing and uranium- enrichment technology. The supplier group has since expanded to 21 countries.
Updating the list to keep pace with new technology has proved to be a disconcertingly slow process, however. It was not until last year that the trigger list was expanded to include the equipment used in the centrifuge process. Long before then, Pakistan had acquired the technology, albeit illegally.
Throughout the last few years of the Pakistani saga, the Reagan Administration has been severely criticized in Congress for giving military assistance to the Zia government without extracting further concrete assurances about Pakistan's nuclear program. The official U.S. position remains that Pakistan does not have atomic weapons and has not assembled the nuclear explosives to make them. But a top U.S. official says that the Administration remains "concerned" about Pakistan's efforts to obtain weapons technology. Washington discounts Indian suspicions of Pakistan's nuclear intentions as part of the long-standing rivalry between those two countries. Says a State Department official: "If you just listen to the Indians, you'd come away with the impression that Pakistan has had the bomb for some years." He notes that the U.S. "would not sit idly by" if Pakistan attained the ability to test a bomb, but does not specify what Washington's actions would be. Nonetheless, says Proliferation Expert Weiss, "we're addressing Pakistan's real security needs, but we didn't extract a high enough price for it. Zia is acting as if he's got us over a barrel. We're acting as if we agree with that assessment."