An “Islamic Bomb” and the Politics of Scientific Dissent: Pakistan’s Feminist and Peace Disquietudes amidst an Unending Cold War

by Vanja Hamzić, Professor of Law, History, and Anthropology, SOAS University of London [1]

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This piece by Vanja Hamzić is a part of the WPS Special Series on "Disarming Toxic Empire." All contributions to this Special Series were originally delivered as talks at the Rapoport Center's Disarming Toxic Empire conference in Spring 2024. A commentary responding to this paper was written by WPS editor Jackie Cheng. That commentary and a response by Professor Hamzić can be found here.

Through “Disarming Toxic Empire,” the Rapoport Center and its partners and co-sponsors fostered an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international approach to nuclear weapons, waste, extraction, and energy. Conference participants—scholars, artists, advocates, and activists—considered and contested the unjust, imperial histories and geographies of nuclear testing, production, storage, and weaponry through channels of intergenerational memory and action. Through this Special Series of the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series, participants in the conference were invited to publish their remarks or papers based on their remarks, with short responses by graduate students part of the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series editorial committee. These exceptional pieces capture the critical insight and clarity that were a common feature of contributions to the conference. Considering sites ranging from the Navajo Nation and the Pacific Islands to Japan, North Africa, and Ghana, their exciting interventions showcase the breadth and depth of work considering “toxic empire” that is taking place at the University of Texas at Austin and around the world. To watch the conference presentations, visit the “Disarming Toxic Empire” playlist on YouTube.

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Grown out of an enduring desperation and anger with Cold War Realpolitik, besetting much of the country’s post-independence existence and prospects, Pakistan’s peace movement has long fought an uphill battle with what Mian described as “nuclear nationalism” (Mian 2009): a feverish, zero-sum vision of the state locked in something akin to a frozen peace with its immediate neighbors—especially the nuclear-capable India. According to this vision, if such a peace were to last, it was only thanks to Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent, given that any open conflict between the two nuclear powers of the Indian Subcontinent would come with a chilling prospect of nuclear winter. In response, Pakistan’s peace movement—involving, right from its beginnings, diverse feminist voices and collectives—has sought to expose an inherent danger and patriarchal bias of this vision. But what has enabled Pakistan to achieve nuclear weapon capabilities and become, in Mian’s parlance, a “murderous state?” And how did its grassroots movements for peace and gender justice coalesce to produce a counternarrative to nuclear nationalism?

In response to these queries, the pages that follow sketch out a series of brief, situated analytical directions in what might be called a feminist and queer recollection of Pakistan’s complex history of its own nuclear program (Das 2010; Khattak 1999; Feigenbaum 2015; Otto 2020). What one encounters at the surface, when memories are rejogged and old stories retold, is a sense of disquietude about opportunities lost, movements stunted in their growth, and antinuclear voices dissonant, disjoint, and fading in their lonesome tenor. Perhaps this is not unusual for intergenerational peace and justice movements everywhere, but Pakistan’s unique standing in, and dealings with, the wider Muslim world give it a distinct flare—and it is this complex, extraordinary sense of multiple displacement, Orientalism, and systemic erasures that this essay revisits, in hope that some disgruntled silences can one day give way to more capacious processes of re/memorialization. To do so, I briefly explain how Pakistan became the only Muslim-majority nuclear-weapon state, and how this came to be framed as first the prospect and then the rather underwhelming reality of an “Islamic bomb”—a preposterous construct ostensibly symbolizing Muslim worldwide “nuclear solidarity” (Hoodbhoy 1993: 42), though it was actually borne out of opportunistic politicking with varied, largely unintended, repercussions (Shaikh 2002: 40; Yasmeen 2008). Then, the essay considers what I call the politics of scientific dissent, with Pakistani scientists taking several, mutually irreconcilable, directions in their dealings with nuclear nationalism and daily Realpolitik. This should provide a useful background to the complex terrain of feminist and peace movements’ disquietudes, which, as I next argue, should be examined against what certainly feels like a protracted, unending regional Cold War in all but name. In the end, I offer some thoughts on what makes such a war possible, by asking what gets cooled or frozen in South Asia’s cisheteropatriarchal nationalist nuclear politics.          

Vignettes from a History of Pakistan’s Bomb: Reality Masquerading as Fiction

Pakistan’s now conventional history of the atomic bomb reads not unlike a popular Cold War novel. Larger-than-life characters, spy and proliferation networks of ambiguous allegiances, and thrilling duels behind enemy lines all abound, set against some stunning feats of modern technology and architecture. Recounted as it is in the Subcontinental academic and popular press alike, it has acquired a nearly mythopoetic veneer, which presents both opportunities and challenges to its diverse audiences. To those seeking to unravel the nationalist drive that structures much of Pakistani politics, its tightly interwoven factual and fictitious elements serve as an obstacle in understanding the power relations behind the neat public-facing storyboard. And to those partaking in such politics, the mainstream history of the bomb has become a form of useful political mirage, a novelesque account of the nation’s outsized resilience and ability to achieve the near-impossible, which masks deeper, persistent inequalities befalling Pakistani society. Here are a few highlights.

There are not-so-secretive secret meetings, such as that of January 20^th, 1972, in Multan, where Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, just one month after assuming the Pakistani presidency, gathered Pakistani scientists, with local politicians and selected members of his press corps in attendance, and asked, bluntly, as had been his intent for quite some time: “How long will it take you to make a nuclear bomb?” In response, apparently, young scientists were trying to “outbid each other as though at an auction,” and Bhutto gave them the deadline: “I want the bomb in three years” (Abbas 2018: 62). The meeting set in motion a series of events that would eventually lead to the country pursuing two routes toward nuclear weapon capabilities—a plutonium bomb and a uranium bomb (Kapur 1987: 139).  

There are epic archrivalries inviting inevitable popular comparisons, such as that between the two Khans, that is, Dr Munir Ahmed Khan, a talented nuclear reactor physicist, whom Bhutto placed at the helm of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and the flamboyant Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. The latter was a metallurgic engineer whose clandestine operations and—perhaps contradictorily—his love for the media spotlight earned him the status of a national hero. He headed a separate research and uranium-enrichment facility in Kahuta, soon renamed in his honor as the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL). Munir Ahmed Khan was nicknamed “Reactor Khan” and popularly described as speaking in code and in whispers, while A. Q. Khan, as he was known, was extolled as “the Muslim Oppenheimer” and “a cross between Dr Strangelove and an Islamic James Bond” (Abbas 2018: 63, 155; Sreedhar 1987: 92). Though long extolled as the “father of Islamic bomb” (Nayar 1987), A. Q. Khan was eventually forced to apologize and leave the public spotlight for exporting nuclear technology and materials to other countries—apparently including Libya, Iran, and North Korea—for personal financial gain (Chakma 2009: 107–21; Durrani 2009: 95–6).

There is risqué storytelling laced with sexist innuendo, a hallmark of the era not unlike the James Bond franchise. The prominent journalist Shahid-ur-Rehman’s tell-all is an apt representative of this genre, in which he recounts, for example, how the theoretical physicist Abdus Salam asked a blushing PAEC scientist to design a nuclear device that resembled “explosive breasts” of a woman, or how Pakistan leadership’s reluctance to accept American aid was like “a ravishing beauty” who first hesitates to provide “her services” but is inevitably persuaded when offered a much larger sum (Rehman 1999: 40, 128–9). It is a reflection of an overwhelmingly patriarchal “atomic esthetics” and politics (Taha 2022), evident throughout the Cold War lifeworlds.    

There is appreciation for modernist architecture exuding a distinct South Asian Muslim flair, as with the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) in Nilore, designed by the American architect Edward Durell Stone and described as potentially the most architecturally exquisite mid-twentieth-century physics complex in the world: “With its decorative dome concealing the reactor shield, soaring exhaust stack in place of a minaret, and formal gardens, fountains, and reflecting pools, it seemed to herald the scientific future in much the same way as the original Taj Mahal exemplified the artistic and scientific renaissance of its day” (Leslie 2015: 40). That this scientific facility—which trained many of the scientists and engineers who would transform Pakistan into a nuclear state—needed to rise to an esthetic rival of the wonders of both modernist and Mughal architecture is a peculiar feature of Pakistani nuclear nationalism, not least because PINSTECH was housed in a purpose-built townsite that had initially been closed to the public. It shows that such projects had multiple uses—one of which being not so much to assuage the commonfolk as to forge and maintain elite military and political alliances.  

And, of course, there is the occasional cameo of Henry Kissinger. In August 1976, for example, Kissinger arrived in Islamabad to persuade Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to drop the purchase of a nuclear reprocessing plant from France (Abbas 2018: 302). “‘I was in the hall at the time Henry Kissinger came in and said, ‘We will make a horrible example of you,’” recalls Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali and future Prime Minister. “And my father said, ‘That is no way to talk to the head of an elected government in a country’” (Rehman 1999: 101). Perhaps because of such uncouth bullishness, Bhutto signed a reprocessing plant agreement with France that very day.

            Finally, there are ethically ambiguous twists and turns throughout. The history of the bomb in Pakistan complicates the usual way the distinction between its democratically elected governments and military dictatorships is painted, with allegiances that are murky and changing precisely because of the symbolic power of such a weapon. Pakistan’s quest for the bomb began in earnest under Bhutto, a democratically elected, ostensibly Muslim socialist leader, famed for his progressive agenda. It continued, after his demise, under the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, with both the PAEC and KRL succeeding in “developing a deliverable nuclear weapon independently of each other at roughly the same time;” that is, in March 1983 and December 1984, respectively (Abbas 2018: 74). And it finally reached a public “demonstration” of this pursuit under another civilian leader, Nawaz Sharif, when—in the wake of the Indian nuclear tests earlier that month—six nuclear devices were set off under the Ras-Koh hills in the Chagai District of Balochistan on May 28^th and 30^th, 1998. While the style of government and its domestic outcomes varied considerably between different Pakistani political and military elites, they all supported Pakistan’s road to nuclearization and engaged in multiple aspects of nuclear statecraft. And, especially after Bhutto, the army’s role in these dangerous machinations remained central throughout.  

Overall, my contention is that the vignettes such as these of Pakistan’s checkered nuclear history reveal a complex and varied set of effects of nuclear nationalism. On the one hand, the near-fictional audacity of scientists and politicians popularly depicted as the country’s Cold War heroes has protected these actors, and the institutions they oversaw, from any serious accountability for the actions that at times clearly favored self-interest over any collective concerns, let alone the considerations of the country’s peaceful future. Because these men and their “nukespeak” (Biswas 2014: 122) were seen not only as saviors of the nation but as protectors of the nation’s Cold War “masculinity,” it was possible for a Pakistani general and Chief of Army Staff to argue, as recounted by Zia Mian, “that giving up Pakistan’s nuclear capability would amount to ‘nuclear castration’” (Mian 2011: 353). This, of course, reflected similar attitudes on the other side of the regional nuclear arms race. As the peace activist and writer Arundhati Roy recalls, an Indian politician celebrated India’s own nuclear tests with the following bravado: “‘We have proved we are not eunuchs any more’” (Roy 1999: 136). On the other hand, much of Subcontinental nuclear nationalism rested on a shaky ground. While it achieved the purpose of keeping military elites in power, it brought little political and virtually no economic stability in the long run.

The Making of an “Islamic Bomb”

Scientists, feminists, and peace activists alike found Pakistan’s complex nuclear political terrain exceptionally difficult to navigate, not least because a great deal of Pakistan’s “atomic public”—to use Itty Abraham’s helpful term-of-art—“came to love the bomb” (Abraham 2009: 4), especially given its alleged “Islamic character.” Years before any public “demonstration” of the bomb, or even its clandestine designs, the foreign and domestic press and the analysts of a wide range of political persuasions warned that Pakistan was building “an Islamic bomb” (Hoodbhoy 1993). In an oft-quoted passage, Bhutto himself lamented that the “Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this capability” and that “[o]nly the Islamic civilization was without it,” adding conspicuously, “but that position was about to change” (Kak 1979: 52; Bhutto [1979]: 166). But the project, as far as Bhutto was concerned, was spun as an “Islamic bomb” primarily so as to “motivate scientists and generate requisite funds from wealthy Muslim states” (Abbas 2018: 79).

If Libya under Muʿammar al-Qaddhāfī, Bhutto’s political ally and confidant, was to acquire the bomb through Pakistan’s assistance, as it was apparently originally conceived, that bomb would have been perhaps as “Islamic” as Pakistan’s, in that Islam and the vision of pan-Muslim unity were important tools in these leaders’ political toolbox, albeit hardly something far more significant than that (Pasha 2005: 66–9, 101–3). And, for all his conservative posturing and projects aimed at the “Islamization” of law, education, and public policy, the military dictator Zia-ul-Haq refrained from publicly boasting about the country’s still-clandestine nuclear weapon capabilities, not least because of his deep ties with the United States.

However, the discourse on an “Islamic bomb” was soon appropriated by a wide range of conservative religious parties in Pakistan, exploding into numerous acts of public commemoration and defiance in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear tests (Hoodbhoy 2013d). These acts left a spate of curious artefacts behind, including gaudy, colorful models of Pakistan’s nuclear missiles and the Chagai mountains adorning public crossroads and squares for years to come (Dadi 2009). Ona such a makeshift missile, erected in Karachi by the Pasban—a youth wing of the Jamaʿat-i Islami, an influential rightwing religious movement, at the time—was labeled “Pasban Islamic Atom Bomb,” featuring Pakistan’s and a range of other Muslim-majority countries’ flags. “Now that Pakistan has attained nuclear capability,” enthused the Pakistani weekly magazine Akhbar-i Jahan, reporting on Pasban’s “monument,” “we have finally become able to blacken the enemy’s face by mounting the atomic bomb on the Ghauri missile, the nation’s fervor has again reached a climax” (Dadi 2009: 189–90). The tests were also enshrined in the annual calendar of official celebrations, with each May 28^th becoming an occasion to remember Youm-e-takbīr, or the Day of Greatness.

Elsewhere in the Muslim world, an “Islamic bomb” was not a straightforward matter. Though major funding for Pakistan’s nuclear program came from Libya and Saudi Arabia (Hoodbhoy 2013d: 162), and even if “Bhutto intended to share with Arab countries Pakistan’s nuclear capability” (Kak 1979: 52), complex rivalries between various Muslim-majority states prevented the formation of any long-lasting alliances (Yasmeen 2008). Thus, although, a few days after the 1998 tests, Iran’s minister of foreign affairs visited Pakistan to show his country’s support, while Saudi Arabia sent public congratulations, apparently the Saudi King “had repeatedly urged the U.S. to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and ‘cut off the head of the snake’ by launching military strikes” (Hoodbhoy 2013c: 136; Hoodbhoy 2013d: 160). It was, therefore, in neither of these countries’ interest for Pakistan to share its “Islamic bomb” technology and materials with their rival Muslim-majority state—or, indeed, for Pakistan to claim any supremacy in wider international and inter-Muslim affairs.

Besides, prominent clerics such as Iran’s Ayatollah ʿAlī Khāmeneʾī and Egypt’s Grand Mufti ʿAlī Ǧumʿa, have issued fatāwā, or Islamic legal opinions, against weapons of mass destruction (Porter 2014; Radsch and Awad 2009). Despite his country’s covert activities toward achieving nuclear weapon capabilities, Khāmeneʾī “emphatically characterized both the use and production of nuclear weapons as crimes against humanity and Islam” (Yousuf and Hussain 2022: 85). Meanwhile, Ǧumʿa emphasized the use, rather than the attainment, of weapons of mass destruction as prohibited under Islamic law. “There is a difference between acquiring these weapons to deter potential aggressors and between initiating their use,” clarified Ǧumʿa. As for the latter, “[s]uch a foolish act will bring about catastrophes not only upon Muslims but upon the entire world because the countries under attack may retaliate either in kind or in a more brutal manner.” Of utmost importance here is the Islamic legal maxim that preventing harm takes precedence over gaining benefit (darʾ al-mafāsid awlā min jalb al-maṣāliḥ), Ǧumʿa concluded, while denouncing as invalid any analogical legal reasoning (qiyās) that equates the means and tactics of classical Muslim warfare with the use of contemporary nuclear weapons (Mowatt-Larssen 2011: 75–9; Muhsin et al. 2019; Hamzić 2024).

In Pakistan, however, conservative clerics insisted that the bomb was a matter of national security and Muslim pride. When, in early 2004, it was revealed that A. Q. Khan had sold, through his clandestine international proliferation network, nuclear technology and materials to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, public protests and strikes erupted in his support. An ultraconservative preacher retorted: “He shared the technology for the supremacy of Islam, and he acted on [God’s] command” (Abbas 2018: 74). Two years prior to Pakistan’s 1998 tests, A. Q. Khan himself declared the nuclear weapon know-how a matter of Muslim survival and necessity worldwide. “Our resources are being robbed by the advanced nations,” he warned, “our governments are virtually becoming hostage to international agencies and from Afghanistan to Bosnia and from the Middle East to Somalia our lands are being converted into lucrative markets of the Western manufactured arms” (Abbas 2018: 160). Thus, what started as a political act, expedient inasmuch as it garnered financial support from well-to-do Muslim states, eventually escalated into a paradigm of Pakistan’s good standing in the wider Muslim world, which in turn helped buttress domestic religio-political movements such as the Jamaʿat-i Islami for decades to come.   

The Horizons of Scientific Dissent

Pakistani scientists participated in, ignored, or outright opposed Pakistan’s journey toward and the life after the public “demonstration” of its nuclear weapon capabilities. Though widely divergent in nature, I contend that these were all forms of the peculiar politics of scientific dissent. A few, like A. Q. Khan, sought to further various would-be pan-Muslim causes. Two even journeyed several times into Afghanistan, in 2000, for meetings with the Ṭālibān (Abbas 2018: 174). The majority preferred a form of silent dissent, concerning themselves primarily with matters of scientific research and education, or were persuaded by the dominant form of nuclear nationalism.

But a group of dedicated peace activists has also emerged from the Pakistani scientific community, foremost of whom were the nuclear physicists Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, Abdul Hameed Nayyar, and Zia Mian. The trio has published, together and separately, a great deal of books and articles, in which they cogently argue against Pakistan’s brand of nuclear nationalism and advocate for a range of peaceful, economically sensible steps toward disarmament and abolition (e.g., Mian 1995; Mian et al. 2019; Hoodbhoy and Mian 2016a; Hoodbhoy and Mian 2016b; Nayyar and Mian 2015; Hoodbhoy 2013a). As self-avowed “scientists who reject nuclear patriotism” (Hoodbhoy 2013b: xxii), they have often been the target of state and non-state actors who see Pakistan’s security permanently tied to its nuclear weapon capabilities. Hoodbhoy, Nayyar, and Mian’s analysis—delivered in clear, facts-centered prose—defies disciplinary boundaries and aims at debunking various commonly cherished myths about Pakistan’s nuclear nationalists. Memorable is, for example, Pervez Hoodbhoy’s recollection of a meeting with a Pakistani general, unmoved by the lethality of nuclear war. “You can die crossing the street,” wryly observed the general, “or you could die in a nuclear war. You’ve got to die someday anyway” (Hoodbhoy 2013b: xxxi).  

            The lethality, environmental hazards, and huge state expenditures related to developing and maintaining nuclear weapons were often at the forefront of this strand of scientific dissent. Hoodbhoy has argued, for example, for “an economy for peace rather than war,” demonstrating the impossibility of economic justice with the nuclear-armed military keeping a near-feudal sway over Pakistan’s resources and land (Hoodbhoy 2013c: 147–9). Mian has warned that the maintenance of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal “exacts a terrible toll on people’s health and on the environment,” including the dangers of the highly polluting domestic mining and processing of uranium along with the extracting of plutonium produced by a reactor from the spent uranium fuel, which “accounts for 85 per cent of the radioactivity released in the nuclear weapons production process.” His conclusion: “[i]t is only by renouncing nuclear weapons that damage can be stopped” (Mian 2011: 357–8).   

            While the abolitionist stance is yet to be publicly acknowledged as a viable option by the wider Pakistani scientific community, it has been the main drive of Pakistan’s peace and feminist movements. Nayyar, for example, has acknowledged the importance of both scientists and activists speaking out in unison on the necessity of denuclearization. “The peace movement has always warned of the many dangers of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,” he argues. But these warnings were not taken seriously by “those in power in Pakistan [who] do not yet understand the full seriousness of the harm the nuclear programme has done to us,” which is why both the scientists and the “peace movement [have] a long way to go” (Durrani 2009: 108). As for the former, the mutual irreconcilability of the nationalist, silent, and pro-peace politics of scientific dissent has made its long-term impact on the national nuclear policy all but limited. In such an environment, as Mian has argued, the strategy of warning people of the many dangers of a life with nuclear weapons in their midst can backfire, since it may lead to an immobilizing sense of hopelessness and fear, rather than to concerted action. Nor does it suffice to imagine and build a future that emulates “the states, economies, societies, and knowledge systems of the ‘developed’ world.” Rather, as Mian concludes, new dreams altogether are required (Mian 2009: 37).

Feminist and Peace Disquietudes

The wider Pakistani feminist and peace movements share in the sobering accounts of Pakistan’s abolitionist scientists. Activists recalled, on multiple occasions, how lonely and helpless they had felt at times when the deathly Realpolitik of Pakistani-Indian relations threatened to throttle any form of dialogue or dissent (Sarwar 2007). Their near-erasure from the popular histories of social movements in Pakistan had had a similar effect. Feminist histories in particular, centered as they are on the role of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) as a loose umbrella collective for women’s rights since the early 1980s, often refrain from recounting its early solidarity and peace action for the fear of depicting it as “too broad” and, in some cases, as “too political” (Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987; Saigol 2013). Yet, in its early years, WAF “raised a voice not only for women’s rights but also against military dictatorship and for the demand for the restoration of democracy” (Haroon 1995: 183). Operating as a non-hierarchical platform, it refused to accept any external funding or open a permanent office. Instead, it engaged in direct action against the oppressive state, which saw its members “arrested and threatened” as well as “baton-charged and tear-gassed by the police” (Haroon 1995: 183; Hamzić 2019). Left-leaning women’s collectives operated both within and without it, such as Lahore-based Tehrik-e-Khawateen, which tried “pulling WAF further to the left” (Rouse 1988: 13) or the Applied Social Research Resource Center, “one of the vocal socialist feminist” fora (Rashid 2006: 178). Also of note is a Marxist collective known as the Democratic Women’s Organization (DWO), which “raised issues of equal wages for equal work, of transport services and basic facilities for workers, and issues of non-militarization and peace” (Haroon 1995: 180). The DWO and other similar groups are, however, rarely described as feminist, or indeed as pacifist.

            It is, however, now commonly understood that the peace movement, including its various feminist strands, gained considerable urgency and broadened its base in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear tests and the 1999 Kargil conflict, the latter first to involve now openly nuclear Pakistan and India at the opposing sides. Out of many cross-border peace actions that ensued, memorable is the episode of the first peace bus, in March 2000, which one keen observer described as follows: “A ‘women’s peace bus,’ involving several women’s groups, came to Pakistan, spearheaded by the veteran Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande. Pakistani women, led by Asma Jahangir, greeted the bus-load of Indian women on their arrival in Lahore with flower garlands, music, and glass bangles” (Sarwar 2007: 47). As for the bangles, Asma Jahangir, Pakistan’s foremost human rights activist, later observed: “We exchanged bangles, which are traditionally used as symbols of weakness, and subverted the negative connotation to positive one by using them as symbols of peace” (Sarwar 2007: 47). Jahangir believed that the urgency of the moment had encouraged the widespread feminist peace action, which in turn “successfully brought about a thaw” in India-Pakistan relations (Fiaz 2007: 89). Yet, these moments of apparent triumph and togetherness are rarely remembered, more rarely still critically appraised and contextualized.

            There is, then, an abiding necessity to study Pakistan’s feminist peace action in greater detail. For instance, some of the possible fissures in those turbulent post-Kargil times might suggest the reason behind at least some abiding disquietude. A Pakistani account of the events surrounding the first peace bus depicts a complex reality of the Indian-Pakistani feminist exchange. On the one hand, it speaks of the courage of the delegates from both countries and of repeated visits and cross-border collaboration, recalling, for example, Arundhati Roy’s defiant declaration in Karachi, two years after the first bus had reached Pakistan: “If I had prior knowledge that India was preparing to send a nuclear missile towards Pakistan, I would be here to receive it.” On the other hand, the same account demonstrates the differences in opinion and preferred tactics between the Pakistani and Indian delegates: “the women’s bus delegates disappointed many Pakistanis with their insistence that India should disarm only after the US and China take the lead; Pakistanis were calling for a unilateral disbanding of nuclear weapons—a stand criticized by many as unrealistic and therefore unlikely to be realized” (Sarwar 2007: 59). Some of these unresolved tensions—along with the cessation of further nuclear weapon “demonstrations” on either side of the border (perhaps giving out an impression that a nuclear war between the two countries was no longer imminent) and the sustained outsized role of the military in Pakistan’s perennially unstable daily politics—may have prolonged the domestic feminist peace disquietudes. The ensuing détente, after all, between the two Subcontinental nuclear powers resembled a frozen peace at best—a state of affairs uncannily resembling Cold War reasoning and relations.  

Conclusion: Frozen Peace as a Continued Regional Cold War

I have argued elsewhere (Hamzić 2020) that, owing to the complexity of many regional relations, not least that between India and Pakistan, the Cold War in South Asia may have entered a new phase after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th, 1989, but it certainly did not end. After all, multiple constellations of predominantly “cold” yet constant warfare characterized the global Cold War, too. I have also suggested that, due to its ominous Cold War legacy, Pakistan often relives its own Orwellian future past—a constant loop of events and circumstances in which Cold War-like elites prolong indefinitely a “peace that is no peace” for the sake of their own survival (Hamzić 2020: 465–6). Similarly, authors across South Asia have observed that the protracted, seemingly indefinite, India-Pakistan conflict has been, in the words of Saira Khan, “frozen at the […] phase [of] escalation” (Khan 2009: 128). What made this high-tense stagnation possible is precisely the emergence and “declaration” of these states as nuclear, and with it, as staunchly nuclear nationalist.

            This study has presented a series of vignettes that reveal a troublesome history of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, replete with militaristic bravado, sexism, and less-than-altruistic calculations. These included the political discourse of an “Islamic bomb,” a tactic gone awry only to bolden the country’s religious right wing and give fuel to Pakistan’s Orientalist critics abroad. In the wider Muslim world—whose prominent spiritual leaders declared the use and, in some cases, the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction as squarely impermissible—Pakistan’s “going nuclear” produced complex responses, which exacerbated inter-state rivalries. In Pakistan, however, the public “demonstration” of the country’s nuclear weapon capabilities only strengthened the course of an already rampant nuclear nationalism. Some of its prominent nuclear experts voiced their scientific dissent—albeit to a varied and limited effect. And its peace and feminist movements reacted courageously, though with a deep sense of disquietude amidst the resulting frozen peace.

Such a peace is not of their making, nor can it assuage their yearning for the true absence of war, which seems incongruent with the continued presence of nuclear weapons in the region. New dreams might be necessary, as these movements ponder their future, along with more probing studies of their past. Perhaps one way to go about it would be to ask what else gets cooled or slowed in its tracks by a frozen peace and its never-too-distant prospect of nuclear winter. In the meantime, it is the prerogative of critical, decolonial, pacifist, feminist, and queer scholarship to expose this stilted, regional Cold War for what it is—a technology of undemocratic and extractive cisheteropatriarchal governance, whose toxic residue will be felt years after it is finally consigned to the annals of history. 

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[1] Professor of Law, History, and Anthropology, SOAS University of London (vh1@soas.ac.uk). This paper is based on the presentation I gave on March 22^nd, 2024, at the Disarming Toxic Empire Conference at the University of Texas at Austin. I am deeply grateful to the organisers of this extraordinary conference—especially Karen Engle, Neville Hoad, and Cooper Christiancy—for their hospitality, critical conversations, and encouragement. Many thanks, also, to Safet HadžiMuhamedović for his incisive comments and support. All errors are mine.