Scary warning from Benazir Bhutto – Politico

Then, she added, quietly: “I think we must ask ourselves: with a population of more than a billion people and high poverty rates in the middle of the wealth islands, what do we do to get out of this mess for the future?”

She also talked about the man who would become the most controversial figure in Pakistan nuclear history: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the family nuclear physicist known as the father of the Pakistan atomic weapons program.

“When I knew him, he was a modest man. The huge ego started in 1980. I met him for the first time when he came to see me with Mnir,” she recalls, referring to Murnir Ahmed Khan, then president of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. “They seemed to be civil servants, ready to carry out government orders. The Prime Minister called them, they came. ”

Her tone was neither respectful nor condemning – simply descriptive, as if she treating a trajectory that she could have observed closely. The myth of Khan as a national Savior, she heard later, fueled as much by politics and insecurity as by any singular scientific achievement.

It was not a press conference. It was a conversation in exile – unattended, revealing and now historically precious. At a time when nuclear saber is back in fashion and disarmament looks like a delayed dream, Bhutto’s words strike like an alarm.

She had traveled the corridors of power and knew what it meant to exercise terrible responsibility. However, she also instinctively understood the absurdity of mutual destruction.

“Nor India can use the nuclear bomb, and Pakistan. Whatever the country that launches this nucle,” she said, “knows that there is not enough time or space-and will recover it (rejected).”

More than 20 years later, this logic remains healthy.