Eat Grass, Build a Bomb: The Story Pakistan Doesn’t Tell on May 28

Every year on the 28th of May, Pakistan throws itself a party.

It’s called Youm-e-Takbeer – the “Day of Greatness” and it marks the morning in 1998 when the country detonated a handful of nuclear devices inside a mountain in Balochistan. There are flags. There are patriotic songs. There’s a public holiday. And honestly, from inside Pakistan, the emotion behind it makes complete sense. A nation that once felt it could be wiped off the map reached for the ultimate insurance policy, and it got it.

But here’s the thing nobody mentions when the sweets are being handed out.

Pakistan’s bomb is really two stories wearing the same uniform. The first is the one you’ll hear on May 28 – a tale of survival, sacrifice and national pride. The second one almost never gets told because it’s a lot less flattering. That same program, the one being celebrated, became the launchpad for the most prolific nuclear smuggling operation in the history of the planet. Not a government leak. A business. One that sold the building blocks of an atomic bomb to Iran, to Libya, and to North Korea.

You can’t honestly tell one half of that story without the other. So let’s tell both.

It started with a war, not a test

Most people assume Pakistan’s nuclear program kicked off as a reaction to India’s 1974 nuclear test. That’s the tidy version, and it’s wrong or at least incomplete.

The real trigger was older and a lot more raw. December 1971. War with India ended in catastrophe for Pakistan. The country was physically torn in half: its eastern wing broke away to become Bangladesh, and somewhere around 93,000 Pakistani soldiers were taken prisoner. In the space of about two weeks, Pakistan lost more than half its population and a war it had genuinely expected to survive intact. If you want to understand everything that came after, you have to sit with that humiliation for a second. For the men running Pakistan, the lesson wasn’t subtle. Conventional armies had failed. Alliances hadn’t saved them. They wanted something that could never be taken away from them again.

Their leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had actually been chewing on this idea for years. Back in 1965 nearly a decade before India tested anything he’d told a British journalist that if India ever built a bomb, Pakistanis would “eat grass” but get one of their own. That line became the unofficial slogan of the whole project.

(For what it’s worth, Pakistanis did not, in the end, eat grass. The metaphor turned out to be far more durable than it was accurate which is more or less the fate of every political slogan ever spoken.)

In January 1972, barely a month after the surrender, Bhutto gathered Pakistan’s top scientists at a house in Multan and told them to build him a bomb. He gave them three years. He promised to spare no expense. The three-year deadline was pure fantasy – the real timeline would stretch to a quarter of a century but the decision made in that room never wavered. Not through a single change of government, military or civilian, for the next 26 years.

That’s the part worth holding on to. Pakistan’s bomb was never really a science project. It was the answer to a near-death experience. Which is exactly why nobody who came later ever seriously considered stopping.

Enter the metallurgist

Every story like this has a central character, and this one is named Abdul Qadeer Khan. The world would come to know him as A.Q. Khan.

Here’s irony number one, and there are several. The man who would build Pakistan’s bomb to deter India was himself born in India in Bhopal, in 1936. His family migrated to Pakistan in the early 1950s. The architect of the weapon pointed at India came from India.

And irony number two: Khan wasn’t a bomb designer. He was a metallurgist – a man trained, essentially to understand metal. That sounds like a footnote but it’s the whole game. Because the heart of this entire story is a machine that is, fundamentally, a metals problem.

It’s called a gas centrifuge. To enrich uranium you spin a cylinder at staggering speeds. Spin it fast enough without it shredding itself apart, and you’ve got one of the most strategically valuable machines on Earth. Building one that doesn’t fly apart is, you guessed it, a metallurgy problem. And metallurgy was exactly what Khan knew.

In 1972 he took a job in the Netherlands, working for a subcontractor to URENCO, a uranium-enrichment consortium jointly owned by Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands. URENCO’s centrifuge designs were among the most closely guarded industrial secrets in Europe.

But they were not guarded closely enough.

Khan got access to the classified blueprints. After India’s 1974 test, he wrote to Bhutto offering his services. And in late 1975 he left the Netherlands taking the centrifuge designs with him.

But here’s the part that actually mattered most, and it’s the part people skip. Khan didn’t just walk out with the drawings. He walked out with the supplier list – the names of the European companies that manufactured every single component.

Think about why that’s the dangerous bit. Anyone can photocopy a blueprint. A blueprint by itself builds nothing. What Khan carried out of Europe was the address book — the directory of firms that, with weak export controls and the right paperwork, would happily sell the parts to almost anybody. Hold that thought. It’s the engine of the entire second half of this article.

A Dutch court later convicted Khan in absentia for the theft. The conviction was eventually overturned on a technicality which is the kind of outcome that tends to encourage a man rather than chasten him.

Two roads to the bomb (and a Chinese shortcut)

Back home, Khan got his own enrichment complex at Kahuta, near Islamabad, eventually named with admirable confidence – the Khan Research Laboratories.

Now here’s something the popular telling flattens out completely. Pakistan didn’t pursue one path to a weapon. It pursued two, at the same time, and the rivalry between them shaped everything.

There was a plutonium route, run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission under a man named Munir Ahmad Khan — no relation. And there was A.Q. Khan’s uranium route at Kahuta. The two organisations weren’t colleagues; they were competitors, and the bad blood between them was real.

That’s why the cherished title “father of the Pakistani bomb” is honestly up for debate. Khan’s labs produced the enriched uranium, sure. But Munir Ahmad Khan’s organisation did much of the actual weapon design work and ran the 1998 tests. National legend wants one hero. The historical record is a lot more crowded and a lot less convenient.

And then there’s the contribution almost everyone overlooks: China.

Beijing viewed a strong Pakistan as a handy counterweight to India. According to multiple arms-control analyses, China provided not just extensive training but the design of a simple, rugged nuclear weapon. Pakistan’s first weapon design is widely believed to be a derivative of that Chinese blueprint.

Read that again, because it matters later. Pakistan didn’t invent its first bomb from first principles. It was handed a working design. File that away — it comes back, and when it does, it brings consequences.

By the mid-1980s, Kahuta was producing weapons-grade uranium. By the late 1980s, Pakistan was in every practical sense — a nuclear-armed state. It had a bomb. It just hadn’t lit the fuse.

May 1998: the mountain turns white

For roughly a decade, Pakistan sat on a bomb it had never shown anyone. Then India forced its hand.

On the 11th and 13th of May 1998, India conducted its Pokhran-II nuclear tests. The pressure on Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, became impossible to resist — domestically, staying silent now would have looked like surrender. The United States dangled an aid package to talk him out of it. It wasn’t enough.

On 28 May 1998, at around 3:15 in the afternoon, Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices simultaneously inside the Ras Koh Hills of Balochistan. Eyewitness accounts describe the mountain visibly shuddering, its rock face draining to a chalky white under the shock. Two days later, a sixth device went off in the nearby Kharan desert.

The announced yields are still disputed – Pakistan claimed figures that independent seismic readings have never fully backed up but the politics weren’t disputed at all. Pakistan had become the seventh country to openly test a nuclear weapon, and the first in the Muslim world.

At home: jubilation, and a brand-new national holiday. But here’s a footnote the celebrations never seem to include. The people of Chagai among the poorest in all of Pakistan got the blasts. The roads, schools and clinics they were promised in return mostly never showed up. The honour of hosting history, it turns out, isn’t always shared with the people who actually host it.

The “Nuclear Wal-Mart”

Now we get to the half of the story that the Day of Greatness does not commemorate.

A national nuclear weapons program is supposed to be one of the most closely held secrets a state possesses. A.Q. Khan turned his into a business and I want to be clear that “business” isn’t me being snide. In 2007, the United States Congress held a hearing on this whole affair. The official title they chose was: “A.Q. Khan’s Nuclear Wal-Mart.” When a national legislature reaches for a discount-retail metaphor to describe a man’s nuclear dealings, the situation has genuinely gotten away from everybody.

Here’s how the operation worked. Years earlier, while procuring components for Pakistan’s own program, Khan had quietly ordered far more than Pakistan actually needed and kept all those European supplier relationships warm. So he already had the drawings. He had the contacts. He had the untouchable prestige of a national hero. And after he was eased out of his official job around 2001, he also had plenty of free time.

What he built was a genuinely globalised enterprise. Dubai served as the shipping hub. A factory in Malaysia machined centrifuge parts. Workshops in Turkey assembled components. European middlemen fed in the precision pieces. The whole thing ran on dozens of single-use shell companies and forged “end-user certificates” that disguised where the equipment was really going.

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog at the time, Mohamed ElBaradei, summed up why this was a genuinely new kind of nightmare: it was the first time in history that a private network not a government controlled every single element needed to build a bomb. The state’s monopoly on the most dangerous knowledge on Earth had quietly ended.

And then the network found customers. Three of them are firmly established by international investigations.

Iran

Around 1987, the Khan network handed Iran a starter kit — designs and components for first-generation centrifuges. The fingerprint was almost literal. When inspectors later detected traces of enriched uranium in Iran, the centrifuges turned out to be unmistakably of Pakistani lineage – the very same stolen European design Khan had carried out of the Netherlands.

Iran’s entire enrichment program – the thing the world has spent more than two decades, multiple rounds of sanctions and at least one shooting conflict trying to contain grew out of that single seed.

North Korea

In the 1990s, a cash-strapped Pakistan wanted ballistic missiles to deliver its warheads. North Korea had them. So the two arranged a barter: North Korean missiles in exchange for Pakistani uranium-enrichment technology. Pakistan’s Ghauri missile is, in fact, a North Korean Nodong derivative.

Khan reportedly visited North Korea around 13 times. And some of the equipment is reported to have moved on Pakistani military aircraft, on flight plans cleared by Pakistani air controllers. Keep that detail in your back pocket it sits very, very awkwardly next to the official story we’re about to get to.

Libya

Libya was the biggest sale, and the one that ended everything. Muammar Gaddafi didn’t want a starter kit – he wanted the whole store. The network sold Libya a near “turn-key” capability: components for a large centrifuge plant, around two tons of uranium feedstock, and the crown jewel – an actual nuclear weapon design.

And that design? It’s widely assessed to be the very same China-origin blueprint that Pakistan itself had been handed decades earlier. The gift, passed along. When Libya later surrendered the documents to investigators, the bomb plans reportedly arrived wrapped in shopping bags from an Islamabad tailor.

A complete nuclear weapon design, delivered in dry-cleaning bags. It’s a sentence that would be funny if every individual word in it weren’t so genuinely alarming.

One last detail that captures the sheer nerve of this operation: in 1999, the Pakistani government published an official advertisement listing nuclear-related equipment available for export. Whatever else you want to say about this network — subtlety was never its strong suit.

Caught: the ship that blew the whole thing open

A network built on this much paperwork and this many couriers does not stay hidden forever.

On 4 October 2003, a German-flagged cargo ship called the BBC China, en route to Libya, was diverted into an Italian port. In its hold were containers labelled “used machine parts.”

They were not used machine parts. They were centrifuge components enough for roughly a thousand machines manufactured in Malaysia, shipped via Dubai, bound for Gaddafi’s secret enrichment plant.

Caught with the receipts, Gaddafi cut a deal. Libya gave up its entire weapons program and handed the centrifuges, the documents and the weapon design to investigators. That cooperation produced a near-complete map of the network and the map led straight back to Pakistan.

On 4 February 2004, A.Q. Khan appeared on Pakistani national television and read out a confession. He took sole, personal responsibility. He called it an “error of judgment.” He offered his “deepest regrets.”

The very next day, President Pervez Musharraf pardoned him and publicly called him a national hero. (Typical Pakistani Things)

The journey from national disgrace to national hero took, in this telling, roughly 24 hours. Which has to stand as some kind of record for the genre.

What followed is just as revealing as the confession itself. Not one member of the network was ever criminally prosecuted in Pakistan. Khan was placed under house arrest officially “for his own protection” and released in 2009. In 2008 he publicly recanted, claiming the confession had been forced on him. Pakistan never allowed international investigators to question him directly. He died in 2021, still regarded by much of the Pakistani public as a hero.

The question Pakistan has never answered

This is the part of the story where intellectual honesty really earns its keep. So let’s be careful here.

The official Pakistani position is simple: A.Q. Khan was a rogue operator. The state didn’t know. The army didn’t know. This was the freelance criminality of one brilliant, greedy man.

Very few independent experts find that account fully believable, and the reasons are worth laying out plainly:

Pakistan’s nuclear complex is one of the most heavily guarded, military-controlled environments on the planet. The Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy has argued bluntly that moving this technology without the security apparatus noticing is, on its face, implausible.

Sensitive equipment reportedly moved on military aircraft, on flight plans cleared by Pakistani controllers — not the kind of thing a lone scientist arranges from his study.

Khan himself, at various points, pointed at senior army figures.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto called him a “scapegoat.” ElBaradei called him merely the “tip of the iceberg.”

But honesty has to cut both ways. The most rigorous technical investigation of the network — by David Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security — reached a careful conclusion: the network almost certainly was not being directed by the Pakistani state as deliberate policy. It was, in essence, a criminal operation. And that, the institute noted, is in some ways more frightening, not less — because a criminal network answers to no chain of command and no deterrent.

So here’s the accurate version, the one that doesn’t need exaggerating. There’s a real and meaningful difference between “the state ordered this” and “the state created the conditions, looked the other way, and shared in the benefits.” The evidence sits much closer to the second. And Pakistan has never permitted the kind of independent investigation that could move it definitively to the first — or clear its name.

One more point, to keep the picture honest. Pakistan wasn’t only a seller of proliferation. It was first a buyer of it. China handed Pakistan a weapon design. Lax export controls across Europe and Japan let Khan build his program straight off the open market. Proliferation is a chain, not a single villain and that doesn’t excuse Pakistan one bit. But it does make the accurate charge a specific one: Pakistan, and the network it produced and then sheltered, is the link where the chain stopped being a line and became a branching tree.

The ledger today

So, more than a quarter-century after that mountain turned white, where does the account actually stand?

Pakistan’s own arsenal is estimated by independent analysts at the Federation of American Scientists at roughly 170 nuclear warheads as of 2025 and slowly growing, with the fissile-material capacity to grow faster if it chooses. It’s held under tight military control. Pakistan has not signed the major treaties that would limit it, and it has fielded short-range “tactical” nuclear weapons that worry analysts precisely because battlefield-range nukes lower the threshold at which a crisis could turn nuclear.

And the three known customers? They ended up in three very different places:

Libya — the clean success. Caught early, surrendered whole, dismantled. The one branch of the network that was genuinely rolled back.

Iran — never stopped. The centrifuges multiplied, the program advanced, and it has consumed two decades of diplomacy, sanctions, sabotage and the constant risk of war.

North Korea — now a nuclear-armed state. The uranium-enrichment route Pakistan helped seed is the very path that’s hardest for the outside world to find, freeze or destroy.

ElBaradei’s verdict has aged into plain fact. The A.Q. Khan network proved to the world that the most dangerous knowledge on Earth could slip out of the hands of states altogether. That demonstration cannot be un-demonstrated. The centrifuge designs are loose. The business model has been published, prosecuted and studied. The genie isn’t just out of the bottle it’s been photographed, catalogued, and added to the syllabus.

For Pakistan, Youm-e-Takbeer is often framed as a story of survival a nation under existential threat reaching for nuclear deterrence. But that narrative begins to unravel when examined against the broader historical record.

India, despite its size and power has not pursued expansionist wars or aggressive territorial campaigns against its neighbors. Its military actions have largely been reactive, not preemptive. In contrast, Pakistan’s history is marked by repeated military confrontations initiated across borders from 1947 to Kargil alongside a sustained strategy of proxy warfare. The idea that Pakistan was cornered into developing nuclear weapons purely out of fear of India simplifies a far more complex and uncomfortable truth. The program was not just about deterrence- it was also about parity, prestige, and power projection.

And then comes the second half of the story – the part rarely acknowledged. The same nuclear program that Pakistan celebrates became the source of one of the most dangerous proliferation networks in modern history. Sensitive nuclear technology did not remain confined within national borders. It spread to Iran, to North Korea, and beyond fundamentally altering global security.

This was not the act of a state merely seeking survival. It reflected ambition, strategic calculation, and a willingness to operate outside international norms.

That is why the 28th of May deserves more than a one-sided narrative. Recognizing complexity does not diminish history – it strengthens it. A day called the Day of Greatness should be able to withstand a complete and honest account, including the parts that challenge the official story.