“Now I am become the death, the destroyer of worlds’. These were first words uttered in awe when man first saw the devastation of an atomic detonation. They were spoken by the scientist that led the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb – J Robert Oppenheimer. He spoke them as the mushroom cloud rose on July 16th 1945 upon the detonation of the first ever atomic bomb. He was of course quoting from the Bhagavad Gita.
I was reminded of this quote this week because co-incidentally I watched two movies in which this quotation was repeated. The first was the latest Indiana Jones film, the other was the 1990 film – ‘The Hunt for Red October’. Both American films dealing with nuclear oblivion.
As I write the British Foreign Secretary is in America, talking about a rule based international order.
The Pakistani nuclear physicist AQ Kahn, father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, admitted in an interview with the Washington Post that the Chinese Government had provided Pakistan with both the raw materials to make atomic bombs and the DIY kit with which to do it. That Trump is aggressive towards China and Pakistan is good.
When I was an intern in the US Congress for Congressman Eliot Engel in 1995 I used the extensive facilities of the Library of Congress to research the lobbying work of the Government of Pakistan in Washington as part of my degree thesis. I stumbled upon a document in which AQ Kahn boasted Pakistan had the bomb – a document I still possess.
Working with the Congressman and with the then Minister Political and First Secretary at the Indian Embassy, my Congressman sponsored resolutions in Congress and to the White House and State Department to have Pakistan declared a terrorist State. Those efforts fell on deaf ears. Make no mistake – the US Government knew in 1995 if not earlier that Pakistan not only had the bomb but Kahn was proliferating.
The British Foreign Secretary has rightly pointed out that States like Russia are emboldened when the US and UK does not take firm aggressive action. Just look at the Russian invasion of Crimea and Georgia.
That is why on 1st January this year Trump rightly tweeted (and hence it is US policy as all his tweets are) “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
It is ironic in 1947, knowing that American scientists had developed the atomic bomb two years earlier, that Britain in bitterly partitioning India, did not foresee Pakistan would one day posses the same weapons and point them with animus at her mother India.
