Whether Pakistan had become an Atomic power before August 17, 1988 during the lives of Gen. Zia Ul Haq and the then ISI chief Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rahman is a crucial question that has long been debated in the international and national media. CIA’s secret documents related to this question, recently declassified, indicate that Pakistan had acquired nuclear capability between 1986 and 1987.

In response to a request by the George Washington University’s National Security Archive project, on December 18, 2012 CIA released a classified document “The Jonathan Jay Pollard Espionage Case: A Damage Assessment”. It has been reproduced by the press in the wake of recent Iran-Israel and Pakistan - India wars. The document contains previously classified information about Jonathan Jay Pollard’s activities as an Israeli mole in the US intelligence system. One of the major tasks of Jonathan Pollard was to collect information about Pakistan’s nuclear programme and plutonium reprocessing facility near Islamabad.

There are ten references to Pakistan and its nuclear facilities in the document. It shows that by the 1980s the Americans knew that Pakistan had a fairly advanced nuclear programme but Islamabad’s support for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan prevented them from taking any serious action. In July 1982, the Reagan administration sent former CIA deputy director General Vernon Walters to meet Gen. Zia with US intelligence reports about “an upswing of clandestine Pakistani efforts” to produce nuclear weapons.

Confronted with the evidence, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq restated earlier promises not to develop a nuclear weapon and made........

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