Our renowned nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, while writing in the recent issue of the Newsweek magazine, has argued that “Bangladesh would not have won independence in 1971 if Pakistan had nuclear weapons.”
It appears that Dr Qadeer Khan is unnecessarily suffering from disillusionment and seems to treat Pakistan’s atomic bomb as a solution for each and every major political crisis. If the Atomic bombs were capable to stop a country from dismemberment, why super power Soviet Union (now Russia) broken up despite having hundreds of atomic bombs?
Further, it would not have been easy to use the bomb against an opponent country when that other country also has the similar type of bombs.
Dr Qadeer is forgetting that East Pakistan’s (now Bangladesh) was in political turmoil which originally started on Feb 21, 1952 when Pakistan refused to recognise the language of 56 percent of total population ie, Bengali as one of the national languages of Pakistan. This initiated the movement for independence as Shaikh Mujibur Rahaman after the creation of Bangladesh admitted in public that they were trying to get independence since 1952.
Again during the general elections held on December 07, 1970, the mandate of the majority people of East Pakistan was not accepted and power was not transferred to them by the ex-army dictator General Yahya Khan. Therefore, high level resistance movement launched in East Pakistan and it would have not been possible for any bomb to stop this. I suggest Dr Abdul Qadeer to correct himself and not try to find solutions of every major political problem in this bomb.
MOHAMMAD KHAN SIAL
Karachi
