Abdus Salam: A Reappraisal

PART II
Salam’s Part in the Pakistani Nuclear Weapon Programme

Norman Dombey+
Physics and Astronomy Department
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
December 10 2011

ABSTRACT

Salam’s biographies claim that he was opposed to Pakistan’s nuclear weapon programme.
This is somewhat strange given that he was the senior Science Advisor to the Pakistan
government for at least some of the period between 1972 when the programme was initiated
and 1998 when a successful nuclear weapon test was carried out. I look at the evidence for
his participation in the programme.

+
Email [email protected]

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Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons. It conducted a series of test explosions in May 1998 in
the Ras Koh Hills in Chagai, Balochistan and is believed to have had operational nuclear
weapons since March 11 1983, when it successfully carried out a cold test1, 2 of a weapon
design. What part, if any, did Salam play in this?

On January 20 1972 immediately after the Indo-Pakistan war which led to the secession of
Bangladesh, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the new President, called Pakistan’s senior scientists to a
conference at Multan3 and asked them to begin work on a weapon. Munir Khan4 had told
Bhutto back in 1965 that IAEA’s inspections of Indian nuclear facilities could only be
understood in terms of an Indian weapon programme but Ayub Khan had refused to follow
suit. Salam was at Multan. The then Chairman of the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission
Ishrat Hussain Usmani refused at Multan to have anything to do with nuclear weapons: he
asked how could Pakistan make a nuclear weapon when it had no industrial infrastructure.
Bhutto immediately replaced him as Chairman of PAEC with Munir Khan who was told to
report directly to Bhutto.

When Salam was first appointed by Ayub Khan as Presidential Science Advisor, he and
Usmani had worked closely together to establish civil nuclear power in Pakistan and had set
up the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) at Nilore, near
Islamabad, whose first reactor went critical in 1965. They had also collaborated on a
scholarship scheme which sent Pakistani nuclear students to western countries to study
advanced topics. So Salam found himself at the Multan meeting with two close associates,
one of whom was totally opposed to Pakistan using its scarce resources on a weapon
programme while Munir Khan, who had been a friend of Salam since the 1940s, was leading
the programme.

Which way did Salam jump? The official story given in his biography by Gordon Fraser5 is
that he sided with Usmani6. Similarly, the biography by Jagjit Singh7 says that “Both Usmani
and Salam disagreed with this [nuclear weapon] policy which they felt was a flagrant misuse
of atomic energy”8 That is what Salam himself would say if asked. Moreover he and IAEA
Director Sigvard Eklund had been awarded the Atoms for Peace Medal in 1968; he had been
awarded the Peace Medal of Charles University, Prague in 1981, and he had met his second
wife Louise Johnson at an anti-nuclear proliferation meeting in London in 1962.

Yet another version is given by Weissman and Krosney9, where it is claimed that Bhutto sent
an emissary to try to convince Salam that the Multan meeting was a pretence and that it was
really peaceful in intent.

1
R M S Azam, When Mountains Move – The Story of Chagai, Pakistan Defence Journal June 2000
http://www.defencejournal.com/2000/june/chagai.htm
2
For a discussion of cold testing see N Dombey and O Rabinowitz, Testing Times The World Today, February
2011, p.27
3
Gordon Correra, Shopping for Bombs Hurst & Co London , 2006, p.9
4
For Salam’s relationship with Munir Khan see Part I, p.8
5
Gordon Fraser Cosmic Anger Abdus Salam –The first Muslim Nobel Scientist Oxford 2008
6
Fraser (ibid), p.250
7
Jagjit Singh, Abdus Salam A Biography Penguin Books India 1992
8
Singh (ibid) p. 36
9
Steve Weissman and Herbert Krosney, The Islamic Bomb Times Books New York,1981, p.46

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Both stories are inherently implausible. As Presidential Science Advisor10 Salam naturally
played a central role in Bhutto’s principal scientific project after January 1972, namely the
nuclear weapon programme. Furthermore there is substantial evidence to back this up.
In 1980 the American columnist Jack Anderson published an article11 in the Washington Post
(which was published in Europe in the International Herald Tribune) entitled ‘Pakistan Near
Entry in the Atomic Club’. He had very good contacts in the US government and quoted US
intelligence sources drawing attention to A Q Khan’s theft of centrifuge blueprints from
Almelo in Holland. Anderson wrote ‘Under Khan’s guidance, and with the help of 1979
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr Abdus Salam, the Pakistanis are so far along the nuclear
trail that military-scientific teams have already been looking for suitable desert expanses for
an underground test explosion.’ At the time very few knew about A Q Khan. Anderson
pointed to Libya’s help for the project and that it was likely that Pakistan would share its
nuclear capability with Libya: this turned out to be the case.

I happened to be visiting ICTP when Anderson’s article was published and I drew Salam’s
attention to the article. He immediately wrote a letter to Anderson with a copy to me denying
any knowledge of A Q Khan’s activities and saying that he had never even met him. At least
the latter was probably true since Salam’s contacts were with Munir Khan and the PAEC, not
with the enrichment plant at Kahuta where A Q Khan was based. As far as I know Salam’s
letter was not published either by the Washington Post or the International Herald Tribune.
Anderson (together with Jan Moller) subsequently repeated the claim that Salam had helped
develop the bomb12 after the tests. Anderson and his CIA-informants clearly had not taken
Salam’s denial of involvement very seriously

Evidence that Salam approved of the Pakistani weapon programme [if not that he directly
participated in it] comes from the Iraqi scientist Khidir Hamza. Hamza was on the CIA
payroll13 for a time so extracts from his his book14 have to be double checked but neither he
nor the CIA seems to have any reason to fabricate his encounters with Salam. Hamza writes
that Salam had worried about Jafar, the head of Iraq’s enrichment programme, who was
imprisoned by Saddam for 20 months. That was true: Jafar had worked as a post-doctoral
research fellow in particle physics at Imperial College where he would have met Salam, from
July 1970 until he returned to Baghdad in 197515. Hamza also writes that Salam said on a
visit to Baghdad ‘Why don’t you guys finish the job and make an atomic bomb….Israel has a
few at the very least. You have not only the right but the duty to defend your country’16. That
was indeed the logic of the Pakistani programme with the substitution of India for Israel’.
Salam had visited Baghdad in April 1975 to attend a conference on the peaceful uses of
nuclear energy: just because he had fallen out with Bhutto the previous year about the
treatment of Ahmadis doesn’t mean that he disagreed with Bhutto’s nuclear strategy. Hamza
also records that Salam told a story about a visit to China just after the first Chinese H-bomb
test17. Salam did visit China in summer 1966 en route to the Conference on High Energy

10
In 1973 the Pakistani constitution was changed from a presidential system to a parliamentary system: Bhutto
became Prime Minister while Salam became Governmental Science Advisor.
11
Jack Anderson, Washington Post, April 11 1980 p.B9
12
Jack Anderson and Jan Moller, Deseret News, June 28 1998
13
N. Dombey, Saddam’s Nuclear Incapacity , London Review of Books 17 September 2002
14
Khidir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker TOUCHSTONE New York 2001
15
Profile: Jafar Dhia Jafar, Science 309 2158 (2005)
16
Hamza op. cit. p.104
17
Hamza op. cit. p104

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Physics in Berkeley, California in August/September that year. China first tested a weapon
with a thermonuclear component in May 196618 so that checks.

There is now more information available about who did what in the Pakistani programme.
The well-connected journalist Shahid-ur-Rehman wrote ‘Long Road to Chagai’19 which was
based on interviews with most of the key players, including A Q Khan: there is also the
detailed article by Rai Muhammed Saleh Azam1 in the Pakistan Defence Journal which is
probably the PAEC response to the way A Q Khan was claiming much of the credit for
himself and Kahuta. This gives the PAEC view about who did what. The two accounts agree
in their description of Salam’s central role in the project in the early stages of the programme.

In both accounts, Hafeez Qureshi, the head of the Radiation and Isotope Applications
division of PINSTEC was summoned by Munir Khan in March 1974 and told that ‘he had
been picked up to start work on a project of national importance’. His office would be
located at Wah near Rawalpindi, a site chosen since ‘you would need a lot of explosives’:
Wah was where the Pakistan Ordnance Factories was based. Salam was present at the
meeting, as was Riazuddin, then a senior official in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.
The work at Wah came to be known as the work of ‘the Wah Group’ and ‘started by carrying
out research and development of the explosive for use in the nuclear device’. Qureshi went on
to head the teams who carried out cold tests between 1983 and 1990. He was interviewed by
Shahid-ur-Rehman.

The counterpart to Qureshi’s explosives group was the Theoretical Group under
Riazuddin, described by Shahid-ur-Rehman as ‘Pakistan’s greatest living scientist’ [this is
after Salam’s death] who ‘prepared the first design of a bomb’.

Shahid-ur-Rehman interviewed Riazuddin several times and while he got somewhat confused
about the technical terms used, tells a consistent story. He reports that a few months after
Multan, Salam visited Pakistan for a meeting with Bhutto and Munir Khan. Then in October
1972 Salam summoned Riazuddin and Masud Ahmad, who were both working at ICTP, to
his office--at the time Riazuddin was a Senior Associate and Masud was a Fellow—where he
‘informed them about the Pakistan government’s political decision to start working for the
nuclear option’. In particular ‘in the tradition of the Manhattan Project, a Theoretical Group
would be set up to carry out R and D for the bomb project and Dr Riazuddin would head it.’
On his return to Pakistan Riazuddin met Munir Khan for a briefing ‘and plunged into the R
and D of designing the bomb while continuing in his position at the Quid-e-Azam
University…Masud was directed by Dr Salam to return to Pakistan and join PAEC. He
returned, loaded with books on the Manhattan Project provided by Dr Salam and was posted
at PINSTECH.’

Shahid-ur-Rehman asked Riazuddin to specify the work of the Theoretical Group. Riazuddin
replied ‘We were the designers of the bomb, like the tailor who tells you how much of the
material is required to stitch a suit. We had to identify the fissile material; whether to use
plutonium or enriched uranium; which method of detonation; which explosive; what type of
tamper and [explosive] lens to use; how material will be compressed; how shock waves will
be created; what would be the yield”.

18
R S Norrris, A S Burrows and R W Fieldhouse, British, French and Chinese Nuclear Weapons, Vol. V.
Westview San Francisco 1984, p. 420
19
Shahid-ur-Rehman, Long Road to Chagai Shahid-ur-Rehman (Islamabad) 1999

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“The work of the theoretician is to achieve the maximum yield with the minimum critical
mass; to identify the scarce materials [needed]. For example, the critical mass can be greatly
reduced by using beryllium as a tamper since it is a very good neutron reflector…..However,
beryllium reflectors are difficult to make because it is very brittle and toxic and difficult to
handle. Thus the first design prepared by Theoretical Group used U-238 as reflector”.

According to Riazuddin an early decision was taken to use implosion to detonate the weapon,
rather than using the simpler gun method which was less economical in fissile material. The
decision was taken in December 1973 when Salam took a copy of the New Yorker article
‘The Curve of Binding Energy’20 with him to Pakistan. The article was based on interviews
with the Los Alamos weapon designer Ted Taylor: in it Taylor discusses the merits of
different fissile materials and modes of detonation.

So it seems that Riazuddin was the principal designer of the implosion mechanism for the
Pakistani weapon. Riazuddin had spent his whole career working with Salam: first at Punjab
University as an undergraduate; then he obtained an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics at the
Punjab University and a Ph. D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge, both under Salam’s
supervision, and finally at ICTP. Both Riazuddin and Munir Khan spoke at Salam’s
memorial meeting at ICTP after his death. It is not likely that such close colleagues and
friends would disagree about such a fundamental issue as the weapon programme without
affecting their friendship.

Salam did break with Bhutto in September 1974 when a law was passed declaring that
Ahmadis were not Moslems. In response Salam resigned most of his governmental posts. But
from the weapon programme’s inception in January 1972 until at least September 1974 and
possibly beyond21 it seems that he not only accepted its logic that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
were necessary given that India had overwhelming conventional capability but actively
helped to achieve the programme’s goal.

Given Salam’s use of ICTP’s resources to further his prospects of a Nobel Prize, this raises
the question of whether Salam, Riazuddin and Masud Ahmad, and possibly others, were
using ICTP resources to develop Pakistani nuclear weapons. If this were the case, it would
have been in violation of IAEA’s fundamental objective22 that “It shall ensure, so far as it is
able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not
used in such a way as to further any military purpose”. The IAEA’s main function23 is “To
encourage and assist research on, and development and practical application of, atomic
energy for peaceful uses throughout the world”.

The question of whether ICTP’s resources could be used for nuclear weapon purposes was
raised by Steve Coll in the Washington Post on December 24 199224. He asked “whether
some of these Third World government scientists, in addition to peaceful research, are
carrying out in Trieste work related to nuclear weapons, missile systems or other military

20
John McPhee, Profiles, “I-THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY,” The New Yorker, December 3, 1973,
p. 54; “II- December 10, 1973, p. 50 III-;December 17, 1973, p. 60
21
R S N Singh claims that Salam initiated cooperation between China and Pakistan on weapon-related issues on
a visit to China in 1978
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/geopolitics/Pakistans-Nuclear-and-Missile-Weapons-Programme.html
22
IAEA Statute, II
23
IAEA Statute, IIIA
24
Steve Coll, The Washington Post, December 24 1992, p. A08

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technologies? Salam was strangely noncommittal in his reply. He did not try to deny that this
was possible. Salam said that his research center follows a "policy of ignoring" whether
visiting Third World nuclear and other scientists are working on civilian or military projects.
"We have this official policy that work must be done for peaceful purposes, but it's more
official than kept up because it's difficult to keep up," Salam said. This is because there is no
practical way to distinguish between military or peaceful purposes in the kind of
sophisticated nuclear physics and science research that the Trieste center sponsors”. This
statement seems to me to be dissembling. Compare this with the statement by his successor
when the same question was raised:25 “ICTP does not work, and has never worked, on
nuclear technology. ICTP categorically denounces all destructive use of science, nuclear and
otherwise, and plays no role in anyone learning anything specific about any weapons
programs. All its nuclear-related programs are held in cooperation with IAEA, the world’s
watchdog agency in charge of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; without exception,
these activities are on peaceful applications in agriculture, climate, energy, medicine and
water. The decision on what is an allowable program is made within the guidelines of IAEA,
and the selection of participants is done by IAEA subject to its rules”.

The question which needs answering is not whether ICTP had a programme of nuclear
technology for civilian purposes which could also be used for weapon purposes. A
screwdriver can be used for military purposes but that does not make it a weapon. The
question is whether Salam, Riazuddin and Masud Ahmad used ICTP’s resources in support of
the Pakistani nuclear weapon programme.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US and at the Commisariat d’Atomique Energie’s
laboratory at Saclay nuclear weapon programmes and civil nuclear programmes co- exist side
by side. But everyone participating in them knows on which he or she is working. Funding is
clearly delineated. The record of how Salam won his Nobel Prize does not suggest that he
was particularly scrupulous in determining whether a particular activity was undertaken for
the benefit of science in developing countries or to advance his own research in elementary
particle theory. What about his activities as Science Advisor to Pakistan’s Government? A
Pakistani physicist who was close to Salam, Riazuddin and their colleagues told me26 that
“pre-1974, Salam was anti-Hindu, anti-India, pro-Pakistan, pro-Bomb. He was present at the
1972 meeting with Bhutto in Multan, then brought together a bunch of good Pakistani
physicists and made them into a theoretical task force that looked into various physics issues
dealing with the bomb, and used ICTP as a platform for this. I know that Salam never did any
Bomb-related calculations, but he did attend meetings of the group and asked questions. Post-
1974 he changed fundamentally, gradually becoming critical of defence funding and also of
the Bomb. He also felt friendlier towards India. He lost his clout almost entirely by the end of
the 1970's”.

That’s likely to be an accurate picture. It leaves open the extent to which ICTP was used for
the Pakistani weapon programme and if it were, who knew.

Salam’s main legacy is ICTP and the support it gives and has given to young theoretical
physicists from developing countries for fifty years. It seems to me that if ICTP had indeed
been used as an adjunct of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, it is important to take appropriate
steps to ensure that this situation could not recur with any other developing country.

25
K.R. Sreenivasan, ICTP Press Release 27/07/2005
26
email to N Dombey, 26 June 2011