Did India really try to take out Pakistan’s nascent nuclear weapons programme in the 1970s? No. India’s top nuclear brains believed an economically poor Pakistan didn’t have industrial base or capability to work with gas centrifuges - a thread on #MissionMajnu & the real story… 
India tested its first nuclear bomb in 1974, less than 3 years after Pakistan lost its eastern wing, which became Bangladesh. The feeling of helplessness was immense in Islamabad & Pakistan’s PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto felt the need to act…
Bhutto had already expressed Pakistan’s willingness to make a bomb in his famous interview to Manchester Guardian in 1965 - “If India makes an atom bomb, then even if we have to feed on grass and leaves — or even if we have to starve — we shall also produce an atom bomb”…
New Delhi had taken the plutonium route to make its bomb. In mid-1970s Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan came back to Pakistan from Europe with German gas centrifuge design…
Pakistan built its research nuclear research facility at Kahuta, not far from Islamabad. It was top secret. Even though it was close to border with India, it was surrounded by hills. Also, it make commute for scientists easy…
Having just the centrifuge design wasn’t easy. Centrifuges rotate twice the speed of sound to separate U-235 from U-238 isotope. It weren’t foreign govts that undermined Pakistan’s initial attempts to enrich uranium. It were the frequent earthquakes…
A Q Khan and others don’t get a lot of credit for achieving the incredible feat of stabilizing centrifuges as they rotated at super critical speeds. In mid-1978 Pakistan finally succeeded in working a centrifuge. From here it was race to enrich it & India had no idea…
Contrary to claims made in #MissionManjnu, Pakistan extracted uranium locally from Baghal Chur area of the Dera Ghazi Khan district & was able to produce uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas via tech acquired from Europe…
Cover over Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear programme blew up March 1979 when German TV ZDG ran a documentary on A Q Khan’s so-called network of suppliers. It was a mix of fact and fiction, which introduced the catchphrase of ‘Islamic Bomb’…
While Indian military was alarmed, New Delhi’s scientists dismissed Pak’s achievement, saying Pakistan didn’t even have any metallurgical industry…
“The Brahminical contempt for the abilities of Pakistan’s scientists and engineers also was intensified by the difficulties India’s well-educated had in trying to master large-scale uranium enrichment,” writes George Perkovish in his seminal book ‘India’s Nuclear Bomb’…
If any country did try to undermine Pakistan’s attempt then that was Israel. European executives who sold critical parts and components to A Q Khan were targeted with letter bombs and threats…
In 1981, Israeli jets destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. This have an idea to some Indian military officials including the hawkish Lieutenant General Krishnaswami Sundarji to replicate the raid…
But experts such as Sumit Ganguly of Indiana University Bloomington say they have found no evidence of that being considered seriously. But as per the myth, India had readied its Jaguar jets to attack Kahuta…
Perhaps the real crisis where Indian military actually came close to a war on the matter of Kahuta was in 1987 during the infamous Exercise Brasstacks when Indian mobilized 400,000 soldiers in Rajasthan…
That happened 2 years after Operation Blue Star when Indian military attacked the Golden Temple to drive out Sikh insurgents. While the issues was India’s domestic problem, it blamed Islamabad of backing Sikh separatists…
“Sundarji wanted to trigger a war and in garb of that, he was planning to strike Kahuta, the nuclear facility where weapons-grade uranium was being enriched,” Feroz Khan, author of Eating Grass: the making of Pakistani bomb, told me…
But Pakistan’s then PM M Khan Junejo and India’s Rajiv Gandhi defused the tension and a major mishap was averted. In the early 1990s both sides decided not attack each other’s nuclear installations…
Pakistan detonated its bomb in 1998 and became a nuclear power. All facts from my story for @trtworld
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*German TV ZDF
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