When Pakistan actually assembled the bomb in 1987 a CIA operative, Richard Barlow, brought it out. Instead of being appreciated he was punished. The the Bush Sr. administration shielded the nuclear test conducted on May 26, 1990 for Pakistan by China on its test site and obfuscated the development by sending the Robert Gates mission to defuse nonexistent Indo-Pak nuclear tension. (This is disclosed in a recent book, “Nuclear Express”, by Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman.) The Clinton administration maintained for six years that they were unable to make a finding on the Chinese supply of nuclear-capable missiles to Pakistan even after the Pakistanis admitted the receipt of the missiles. The US white-washed Chinese proliferation to Pakistan through supply of 5000 ring-magnets for their centrifuges, accepting the totally implausible story that the supplies were made without the knowledge of Chinese central authorities.

Therefore President Bush’s acceptance of Khan being a lone operator followed 25 years of US permissiveness about proliferation.

However this time Pakistanis, for reasons we are unable to guess as of now, appear to have decided to subject the US to ridicule and openly defy them. How will this administration manage to reassure America and the world when the the US establishment bought the story of Khan being a lone rogue proliferator and now the world is being told that is totally unsubstantiated? There is widespread agreement among American analysts that, if at all a weapon of mass destruction were to be used against the US, it would originate from Pakistan. If Khan is not the lone proliferator then it would mean proliferation has wide and high-level support in the Pakistani establishment. In such circumstances even if the network has been dismantled, why can it not be revived? It will be useful to discuss these issues with Holbrooke as

... contd.