The Mirage of Scientific Greatness: A Personal Reflection on Pakistan’s Nuclear Claims

As someone with a deep appreciation for scientific reasoning and the demanding precision it entails, I have often found myself troubled by the many contradictions surrounding Pakistan’s nuclear program. At first glance, the country presents itself as one of the few nations to have successfully joined the exclusive nuclear club - a claim often worn as a badge of national pride. But upon closer inspection, the intellectual and infrastructural basis for such an achievement appears, at best, questionable and, at worst, alarmingly hollow.

I’ve long been aware of the basic prerequisites for a nuclear weapons program: a strong industrial base, sustained investment in scientific education and research, a capable and critically minded scientific community, and a tightly coordinated supply chain to support enrichment and weaponization. Pakistan, as I see it, was lacking in nearly all of these areas - especially during the period in which it supposedly built its nuclear capability. Unlike China, which had the benefit of early Soviet assistance and a growing industrial base even in the 1950s, Pakistan was and remains a nation struggling with fundamental scientific infrastructure and widespread energy insecurity.

This contradiction between claimed capability and visible reality becomes even more disturbing when one observes the conduct and beliefs of Pakistan’s own scientific elite. Take, for instance, the infamous “water car” fiasco. Agha Waqar, a charlatan who claimed to have invented a car that runs on water, was not laughed out of the room as he should have been. Instead, he was celebrated, televised, and supported - shockingly -by some of the country’s top nuclear scientists. Among them was Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, a senior figure in Pakistan’s missile and nuclear testing efforts. For someone of his stature to endorse such blatant pseudoscience was more than disappointing; it was deeply alarming. And he was not alone.

Equally disturbing was the case of Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a prominent engineer in Pakistan’s nuclear establishment, who seriously proposed that jinns - the supernatural beings of Islamic folklore - could be tapped as an energy source. This wasn’t a private belief. It was shared in public, discussed in interviews, and even made its way into policy circles. That a man of such influence in nuclear matters could promote such fantastical ideas, unchallenged by his peers, speaks volumes about the intellectual climate within which Pakistan’s nuclear program was supposedly developed.

How can one reconcile these episodes with the claim that Pakistan built a sophisticated nuclear weapon - particularly one based on highly enriched uranium (HEU), a path that even the Manhattan Project ultimately considered less practical for deployment? The claim becomes even more audacious when one considers that uranium enrichment is one of the most technically demanding feats in modern engineering. It requires centrifuge cascades operating with extreme precision, materials science expertise, and a depth of technical know-how that seems incongruent with the broader state of science and education in the country at the time.

Adding to my skepticism is the reality of Pakistan’s ongoing energy crisis. If the country could really master reactor technology to produce plutonium for weapons, why can’t it produce enough nuclear energy to meet its civilian needs? Most of its nuclear power plants today are Chinese-built, and none are indigenously developed. The notion that a nation could leapfrog the entire civilian nuclear learning curve and go straight to military-grade capabilities without any meaningful civilian parallel is, frankly, implausible.

All of these observations lead me to believe that Pakistan’s nuclear program is far less indigenous than it claims. While AQ Khan is publicly hailed as the father of the bomb, his own background as a metallurgist - not a nuclear physicist - casts doubt on the scientific validity of the claim. His later support of the water car scam further tarnishes his credibility. More likely, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, if real and operational, owes much to covert assistance, particularly from China, perhaps even including a ready-made device handed over for testing in 1998.

In the end, I see Pakistan’s nuclear program less as a triumph of scientific achievement and more as a geopolitical chess move, orchestrated in secrecy and maintained through myth-making and nationalist pride. It is a sobering reminder that strategic capability does not necessarily equate to scientific advancement, and that in the absence of a culture of critical inquiry and rational thought, even the most prestigious technological claims must be met with deep and cautious scrutiny.