Pakistan rejected a US newspaper report that China provided it with weapons grade uranium for two bombs in 1982. A spokesman for Pakistan’s foreign ministry rejected the allegations in a Washington Post article as “baseless.”
In written accounts cited by the newspaper, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, said China also supplied a blueprint for a simple bomb that significantly speeded Pakistan’s nuclear weapon programme. The Post said the deliberate act of proliferation was the culmination of a secret nuclear deal struck in 1976 by Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Pakistan and China had “comprehensive and all-dimensional” cooperation, which includes civilian nuclear cooperation for peaceful purposes, the spokesman said.