Pakistan’s nuclear Taj Mahal

No one did more to make PINSTECH a reality than Salam, Pakistan’s most renowned physicist and a tireless promoter of science as a key to the country’s future. Salam may be better known today as the founding director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) that now bears his name in Trieste, Italy. But he was equally prominent in establishing PINSTECH, an institution he considered another kind of model for science and technology in the developing world. As chief scientific adviser to Pakistan’s presidents from 1960 to 1974, he had the necessary connections in his native country and abroad to turn PINSTECH into far more than just another Atoms for Peace reactor.

A mathematical prodigy, Salam broke academic records as an undergraduate in his native Punjab, earned first-class honors in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and completed his PhD in theoretical physics there in 1952 at the age of 25. He taught briefly in recently independent Pakistan but, discouraged by his scientific isolation, returned to the UK to take up faculty positions, first at Cambridge and later at Imperial College London.² 

Although he was a scientific expatriate, Salam never lost sight of his early ambition to make Pakistan a fully contributing member of the world scientific community. While headquartered at Imperial College, where he led an important group in theoretical physics, and later as director of the ICTP, Salam found time to give significant attention and energy to PINSTECH. His efforts included lobbying for support in the US and Pakistan and recruiting and training several of the institute’s future leaders. Preferring to work behind the scenes in collaboration with his handpicked lieutenants, Salam left his mark on PINSTECH, and his legacy there endured long after he had become a religious and intellectual exile from his homeland.

In 1960, at the request of dictator Ayub Khan, who had seized power in 1958 in a military coup d’état, Salam accepted the role of science adviser and member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). On Salam’s advice, Khan chose I. H. Usmani to head the agency. Usmani, who had joined the Pakistan civil service after earning a PhD in physics from Imperial College, knew Salam from their time in the UK. Together, they quietly launched a determined effort to propel Pakistan into the nuclear age. They initially put training and scientific manpower ahead of reactors, as much for financial as for strategic reasons. In the 1950s Pakistan had sent some 30 of its best physics graduates to PhD physics programs in the US and the UK. From Salam’s and Usmani’s points of view, however, too many of them had opted for high-energy or solid-state physics and had subsequently taken up positions abroad.

Such was not the case for the 15 Pakistanis sent to Argonne National Laboratory’s short course in nuclear engineering, a one-year training program for international students that was established in 1954 with stipends provided by the US Agency for International Development. Argonne, in cooperation with fledgling nuclear engineering programs at North Carolina State University, the Pennsylvania State University, MIT, and other universities, provided rigorous, hands-on training for the scientists and engineers who would run Atoms for Peace reactors. Among those who graduated from the course was Munir Ahmad Khan, destined to be a powerful advocate of nuclear weapons who would replace Usmani as PAEC chairman in a “guns versus butter” struggle over Pakistan’s nuclear future.

To create a qualified cadre of nuclear scientists and engineers, Salam and Usmani enlisted the best Pakistani university graduates they could find into a program that would train them abroad and give them strong financial and patriotic incentives to return home. By 1961 PAEC had placed 70 Pakistanis in training at US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) laboratories and an equal number in places like the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Britain’s main center for reactor R&D, and Chalk River Laboratories, its Canadian counterpart. In an attempt to jump-start reactor development, Usmani and Salam revived a moribund agreement between Pakistan and the US that had been signed in the mid 1950s under the auspices of Atoms for Peace. As a result, the two men received a promise of $350 000 to support the construction of a 5-MW swimming-pool-type research reactor. The US also agreed to provide the enriched uranium fuel elements for the reactor, with the explicit understanding that all fissionable material would be kept under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards and subject to inspection. Pakistan would fund the rest of the estimated $3.5 million project itself, and the US would pay its share only after the reactor went critical.

To garner support for the project, Salam traveled to the US in 1961 to meet with AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg and lay out his vision for Pakistan’s scientific and technological future. Characteristically bold, Salam said he considered the 5-MW research reactor a mere start. He strongly urged Seaborg to provide Pakistan with capital funding for a full-sized power reactor. Further, Salam proposed that in the meantime, the US provide direct assistance in getting the research reactor on line and establish a close working relationship between Pakistan’s new nuclear laboratory and one of the AEC laboratories. Direct laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation caught Seaborg’s attention as the best strategy for assisting a developing country. PAEC subsequently arranged an advanced training program for 10 Pakistanis at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, though security issues severely restricted their access within the site.

Pakistan ultimately got only the small research reactor with AEC help, but Salam and Usmani had big plans for it as the heart of PINSTECH. In 1959 the government had chosen to build its new capital Islamabad—a modern, planned city along the lines of Brazil’s capital, Brasília—in the northeastern corner of the country. Recognizing the importance of political visibility, Salam and Usmani decided that rather than expand the small atomic energy center in Lahore, they would relocate PAEC’s main laboratories to Islamabad. They personally selected the site: 400 acres near Nilore. About 15 miles southeast of the capital city, the location would be sufficiently isolated for safety and provide spectacular views of the mountains rising behind it.

The US firm AMF Atomics, in addition to designing the PINSTECH reactor, prepared the master plan for the institute. Dismayed by its lack of architectural imagination, Salam and Usmani rejected the plan and went looking for an architect who could design a building that would inspire scientists. As broadly humanistic scholars with a deep appreciation for Islamic culture, Salam and Usmani sought someone well versed in the high modernist idiom appropriate for the nuclear age but with a sense of Pakistan’s unique heritage.

Among architects of international stature, only Edward Durell Stone fit the bill. He had impeccable modernist credentials, and his recently completed US Embassy in New Delhi, India, had demonstrated a sensitivity to the unique forms, structure, and even workmanship of traditional Mogul design. Dedicated in 1959, Stone’s New Delhi embassy received rave reviews from both critics and the public. Set atop a podium, with gilded columns and marble cladding, the building charmed even prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with its “dream-like, haunting beauty.”³ 

For what Stone dubbed the “future MIT of Pakistan,” Salam and Usmani sought a similar aesthetic, though on an even grander scale—a highly functional building that had room for 1000 scientists and engineers, support staff, and administrators and that would embody Pakistan’s national aspirations. Stone had recently completed plans for India’s new radiological laboratories in Bombay (now Mumbai), having worked closely with physicist Homi Bhabha, Salam’s Indian counterpart and rival. Bhabha had served as president of the United Nations 1955 conference “The Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy,” for which Salam acted as scientific secretary. Ironically, both men later became strong advocates of nuclear weapons programs in their countries. Bhabha, often called the father of India’s nuclear program, founded and directed the Atomic Research Centre now named for him, which provided PINSTECH with an obvious model of how to organize nuclear research. Who better to trump India’s latest nuclear laboratory than Stone himself. Salam and Usmani did not even consider other architects, and Stone did not have to be asked twice.

As the opening sketch on pages 40–41 shows, Stone put the reactor itself at the center of his design—literally and symbolically. The reactor’s swimming pool and shielding had to meet AEC standards, of course, as did the hot cells, gamma and x-ray rooms, and other special facilities. Yet even after accommodating a 10-ton gantry crane to move the reactor core to different experimental windows, Stone found plenty of room for architectural improvisation. Instead of exposed concrete, he finished the thin-shell dome with waterproof stucco in an ornamental arrangement of slender rounded arches capped by concentric rings of circles. He then elaborated the arches and circles with embedded gold mosaic tiles (see figure 2). In the moat around the base of the reactor dome, Stone arranged fountains and spotlights, to eye-catching effect. The slender tower rising 250 feet, about twice the height of the dome, doubled as a water storage tank and exhaust stack for the reactor. Resembling a minaret standing aside the mosque-like dome, the tower showcased polished convex walls with a repeating pattern of concrete blocks. At the top, the walls flared upward, a perfect complement to the circular motifs of the dome.

As he had done for the New Delhi embassy, Stone elevated the entire complex on an enormous rectangular podium, 1400 feet long by 600 feet wide, with the reactor dome on the long axis and the soaring tower beside it. In the forecourt, facing west, he placed a large round pool and fountain and included a grand stairway leading up to the podium level. For an avowedly Muslim institute, having an unobstructed view toward Mecca at prayer time was imperative.

Just beyond the entrance, a long, narrow water channel with a central row of fountains flowed toward the reactor, with paved pathways, gardens, and benches on either side. The fountains doubled as cooling jets for the air-conditioning system. Stone strung out the laboratories—three stories tall, including the basement—along a grand quadrangle. Each research group—theoretical physics, nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, and radiobiology—had its own building, connected to the adjoining ones by open breezeways.

Sensing the historical importance of the building, Stone included plans for a museum on the second floor adjoining the dome, with terrazzo floors, a brass chandelier, a visitors’ view port into the reactor, and a tea counter in Burma teak with a marble top. Stone had utter confidence in his design, which, as he wrote in a letter to Usmani, he intended “to make so thorough and beautiful that it will be irresistible.”

Structurally, Stone supported the buildings with a forest of reinforced concrete columns that flared at the top into delicate tree-like forms. Arranged in parallel rows, the columns, as seen in figure 3, permitted the roof slab to be extended on each side of the laboratory buildings to provide shade from the intense sun. Straight on, those columns framed graceful arches. Stone’s incorporation of a hidden double roof between the roof and ceiling allowed for natural air circulation and cooling and for another floor of laboratories to be added in the future at minimum cost. Above the auditorium and the library, and above the breezeways between laboratories, large transparent domes broke the monotony of the concrete canopy and illuminated the courts between the buildings.

In keeping with Salam’s and Usmani’s wishes that the construction be first class, Stone specified Burma teak for all exposed woodwork, brass hardware, marble floors and walls in the lobbies, and marble treads and risers for the staircases. The lobby had starburst chandeliers and woven tapestries on the walls. Even the canteen, far more plush than the name might imply, had enormous hanging brass planters illuminated from below by spotlights. Though more spartan than the public areas, the laboratories and offices did have air conditioning, a rare amenity at the time.

According to one of his confidants, Usmani paid “full attention to every detail in construction and furnishing of the facility.”⁴ Stone visited Pakistan several times to study the site and to listen to Usmani’s concerns. In turn, Usmani paid several calls to Stone’s studio in New York City and offered practical and aesthetic suggestions. In November 1961 Stone personally presented the model of the complex to president Ayub Khan, Usmani, and other assembled dignitaries (see figure 4). That year Usmani even put a photograph of the final model on a one-of-a-kind holiday card offering “Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes, Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.” Four years later, on 22 December 1965, the reactor went critical; Salam himself was there to witness it. Six months after that, the reactor achieved its full 5-MW potential. Acknowledging the achievement, AEC chairman Seaborg delivered the promised check for $350 000 during an official visit to Pakistan. In the end, PINSTECH cost $6.6 million to construct, nearly double its projected budget.

In 1969 PINSTECH launched a reactor school whose Pakistani faculty boasted an impressive range of international credentials. Students were selected and sent to PINSTECH for 16 months of training before taking up their future assignments in PAEC. Though strong in textbook learning, the recruits had relatively little opportunity to gain the laboratory and engineering experience so vital to successful reactor design and operation.

To remedy that weakness, PINSTECH used financial support from the IAEA to arrange a sabbatical for Malcolm Scott, from the University of Birmingham’s highly regarded MSc course in the physics and technology of nuclear reactors. Scott went to PINSTECH in the fall of l970 and spent a year setting up a laboratory teaching program and advising his Pakistani colleagues on curriculum revision. (Figure 5 shows the complex at the time.) Instead of endless lectures, Scott stressed, the students should have time to actually work with the reactor and its instruments and to collaborate with other research groups at PINSTECH.

Scott made it clear that academic standards must be set sufficiently high that the PINSTECH reactor school would not be seen as a second-rate place that attracts only students who can’t gain admission to universities in developed countries. Scott systematically surveyed the Pakistani students whom PAEC had sent abroad for advanced degrees. His conclusion, as conveyed in a report to the IAEA, was that too many of them continued to choose “subjects which can be considered ‘fashionable’ on a world scale but have only marginal relevance to a nuclear power programme and, moreover, have little relevance to the scientific needs of the country as a whole.” What sense did it make to send Pakistan’s best and brightest abroad for degrees in high-energy physics when Pakistan had no positions for them back home and when PAEC, which had sponsored their educations, desperately needed people who could design nuclear reactors, not particle accelerators? Moreover, in addition to physicists and engineers with appropriate advanced training, PINSTECH had to recruit, train, and retain an army of skilled technicians knowledgeable about the particular requirements of power reactors. PINSTECH, for instance, trained the nuclear engineers who would staff the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant, a pressurized heavy-water reactor supplied by Canada.

The brief but costly Indo–Pakistani War of 1971, coupled with India’s surprise nuclear test in 1974, gave PINSTECH new missions in an escalating arms race. Amidst the turmoil and recrimination following a devastating military defeat and the loss of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took power as president. Bhutto, long an unapologetic advocate of a Pakistan bomb, had publicly stated that if India built a bomb, Pakistan would have to follow suit at any cost. One month into office, Bhutto called together Salam and Pakistan’s other leading nuclear scientists to advise him on establishing a top-secret atomic weapons program. At that meeting, Bhutto replaced Usmani, whom he considered a “conscientious objector” on nuclear weapons, with the hawkish Munir Khan.

Salam, though still the director of the ICTP, organized the theoretical-physics group that performed the sophisticated calculations for the bomb, and he personally asked his former student and protégé Riazuddin to head it. Riazuddin, then teaching at the University of Islamabad (now Quaid-i-Azam University), took several trips to the US, where he collected unclassified documents on nuclear weapons design. He also recruited selected colleagues to join the theory collaboration, though he did not succeed with his twin brother, Fayyazuddin, a brilliant physicist in his own right. Salam left the details to others, though he did open the ICTP library to Riazuddin’s group and kept in close touch with its members.⁵ Riazuddin, describing his research team, later acknowledged, “We were the designers of the bomb, like the tailor who tells you how much of the material is required to stitch a suit. We had to identify the fissile material, whether to use plutonium or the enriched uranium, which method of detonation, which explosive, what type of tempers and lenses to use, how material will be compressed, how shock waves will be created, what would be the yield.”⁶ 

For a new generation of Pakistani scientists, war with India had tipped the balance in favor of nuclear weapons. By the 1970s PINSTECH had 350 nuclear scientists in training—100 in the reactor school and the rest in divisions, such as nuclear chemistry, that had been relocated to PINSTECH from other parts of the country. Together, faculty and students were developing a critical mass of expertise in nuclear science and technology. A group of young radicals at PINSTECH organized themselves as the Association of Nuclear Engineers for a Nuclear Pakistan, leaving no doubt as to their intention or determination.

It would have been difficult to repurpose PINSTECH as a weapons laboratory, as it was not designed to be a classified facility. Moreover, its tiny research reactor could never be a source of weapons-grade material. Still, as the main research and design center for the PAEC nuclear fuel cycle, PINSTECH trained and inspired a “cadre of weaponeers” who would go on to staff nuclear facilities across the country. With assistance from Belgian and French companies, it also built a pilot plant for reprocessing spent reactor fuel into plutonium. The so-called New Labs, placed at a discreet distance from the main complex, could produce only enough plutonium for two or three bombs a year, but it served as the prototype for a full-scale reprocessing plant later built in collaboration with China. Indeed, to accommodate the many visiting Chinese technical experts—and to keep them hidden from public view—PINSTECH built them their own guesthouse on the campus.

So although PINSTECH was formally an unclassified facility, it was also part of a growing network of weapons laboratories and factories. Something of an open secret, it was often referred to by local cab drivers as the Nilore bomb factory. By the 1990s what had begun as a showcase for the peaceful atom and basic science had become an applied research complex with a total staff of 2000. Surprising former advisers like Scott, Pakistan found the intellectual and financial resources—whether homegrown, from foreign technical and financial assistance, or from espionage—to support programs for both uranium and plutonium weapons and, simultaneously, to build up the heavy industrial infrastructure necessary for success. In 1998, just weeks after India’s second nuclear test, Pakistan detonated a half dozen nuclear devices of its own in the Chagai Hills.

The repurposing of PINSTECH had its price. After Israel bombed and heavily damaged Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, PINSTECH, fearing a similar attack from India, hid its once-gleaming concrete buildings under layers of olive drab. Even some of Pakistan’s generals considered that a crime of vandalism. “In the whole of Pakistan there is no better piece of architecture created in the last sixty years,” said one. “Now … we have camouflaged it, we have painted it, colored it, put bars around it, we have machine guns spread all over the place. You can’t reach it, you can’t see it, you can’t identify it.”⁷ Whereas PAEC had once proudly published its annual list of scientists and engineers, the names suddenly became classified—as did even the number of names on the list. PINSTECH’s new mission also carried a high opportunity cost. Salam always considered the greatest weakness of Pakistani physics to be its isolation from the international community.⁸ Pakistan’s nuclear weapons laboratories siphoned off and sequestered some of the best physics talent. For a poor country, building a “nuclear complex that dwarfs all other areas of science and technology,” as Pakistani–American nuclear scientist Zia Mian explains, could only be done by neglecting “many of the basic political, social, and economic needs of its citizens.”¹ 

For all its contradictory goals and dashed visions of nuclear peace, PINSTECH may yet be considered a monument to Salam in his homeland. Branded an apostate because of his adherence to the Ahmadi sect of Islam, Salam spent his last years at the ICTP and rarely visited Pakistan. Even after his death in 1996, the persecution of the Ahmadis in Pakistan stalked Salam. At his grave in his native Punjab, Salam’s tombstone identified him as the “First Muslim Nobel Laureate.” In an excess of zealotry, a court ordered the word “Muslim” chiseled away.

Salam long sought to end Pakistan’s isolation from the rest of the scientific world. PINSTECH could have been an important step forward, had it not embodied the paradox of Cold War physics, inspired by the promise of atoms for peace but driven by political circumstances to pursue atoms for war. Neither willing nor able to resist the grim attractions of nuclear weapons, PINSTECH, as one prominent Pakistani physicist complains, “steadily became an organizational behemoth that is scientifically unimaginative, academically mediocre, and stridently religious.” Salam would no doubt have wished his legacy to be otherwise.

Correction: Updated 3 February 2015. The Osirak reactor is located in Iraq.

Stuart Leslie is a professor in the department of history of science and technology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.