Pakistan’s nuclear programme owes its existence to the PAEC and its scientists and engineers.
ISLAMABAD: This is with reference to Dr Pervez Hoobhoy’s article of March 22 titled “Pakistan can’t handle Fukushima”. Pakistan’s nuclear programme owes its existence to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and its scientists and engineers. They have given Pakistan an indigenous nuclear fuel cycle and the capability to build nuclear weapons. Nuclear power costs money and a vast industrial base which Pakistan lacks. Even India, with a much larger industrial base, took 10 years to complete the partially completed Rajasthan-II reactor. This happened partly because Canada cut off all assistance after India tested its nuclear device in 1974. However, the Canadians had given India all the necessary drawings and transfer of technology.
As of now, both China and India are investing in western nuclear power technology. If nuclear power generation is a fraction of Pakistan’s total power output, it is because, from 1972 onwards, Pakistan has had a nuclear weapons programme as the first priority for national defence.
It is not the PAEC’s fault if successive governments have been unable to allocate the funds needed to set up or import nuclear power plants, and no one else except China is willing to sell these to Pakistan. The PAEC along with the IAEA, prepared a long-term nuclear power plan in 1973, which called for setting up 24 nuclear power reactors by the turn of the century. This was effectively scuttled by India’s 1974 nuclear test and the resultant sanctions by western supplier states.
No government in Pakistan could, after India’s 1974 test, shift funds from the weapons programme to the nuclear power programme. Since 1975, apart from the country’s missile programme, the PAEC has given Pakistan complete mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, uranium exploration, processing, conversion, (enrichment project manned by PAEC personnel), fuel fabrication and reprocessing. The Khushab reactors were built by the PAEC, as well as over 20 other labs and projects in the weapons programme.
In addition to this, Pakistan’s cotton and wheat crops, the backbone of the economy, have been the result of the seeds produced by the nuclear agriculture centres of the PAEC. What else can one organisation do for a country given that it is constantly suffering from a dearth of funds?
Mansoor Ahmed
Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University,
Published in The Express Tribune, March 25th, 2011
