Nehru briefs the Provincial Premiers about internal and external developments. Nehru highlights the situation in China and states that the communists could soon take power in the whole of China. He speculates how this will affect other regions.

From early 1979 onwards, media coverage of the "Islamic bomb" became ever more prominent. In Mid-June 1980, the BBC's prestigious Panorama investigative strand aired "Project 706: The Islamic Bomb," that seemingly underscored alleged Pakistani-Libyan connections, uranium supplied by Niger, the complicity of British, German, Italian, and Swiss industry, and the threat of pan-Islamic nuclear proliferation. Reporter Philip Tibenham opened by alarmingly informing viewers that: "This convoy grinding across the empty Sahara is carrying what could be the raw material for the world’s first nuclear war …. It’s been mined in the Islamic state of Niger. It’ll be flown on to Islamic Libya; then on to Islamic Pakistan. Tonight, Panorama reports exclusively on payments of millions of pounds by Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi to finance Pakistan’s efforts to build the ‘Islamic bomb’."

Only a few weeks after Pervez’s arrest, Under Secretary of State Armacost traveled to Pakistan for wide ranging discussions with General Zia, but with a special focus on nuclear procurement and the uranium enrichment program.

Only a few weeks after Pervez’s arrest, Under Secretary of State Armacost traveled to Pakistan for wide ranging discussions with General Zia, but with a special focus on nuclear procurement and the uranium enrichment program.

Armacost reported to Secretary Shultz, “I emphasized the need for immediate practical steps to demonstrate to an aroused Congress and a skeptical administration that no further illegal procurement activities would take place and that we had verifiable assurances there would be no further enrichment of weapons-grade uranium.”

With Pakistan already violating the “red line” on uranium enrichment, Adelman believed that without a display of resolve “presidential credibility” would be further damaged; that required cutting off aid under the Solarz amendment.

The year after Congress passed the Solarz amendment in August 1985, Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-CA) traveled to Pakistan, a country that would become a major test case for the amendment which cut off U.S. foreign aid to recipients. Solarz confronted General Zia and other top officials with his perception, based on U.S. intelligence, that Pakistan’s Kahuta plant was enriching weapons-grade enriched uranium. The Pakistanis strenuously denied the charge.

In response to the State Department's request, the Foreign Office found that the equipment had not been delivered and German firms had been informed that an export license needed to be granted.

As these telegrams demonstrate, by the fall of 1986, if not earlier, the U.S. government believed that a Pakistani firm, Multinational Inc., was a “procurement agent” for A.Q. Khan’s secret network. In this case, Pakistani agents operating in West Germany were trying to secure aluminum tubes that could be used for the Khan Laboratory’s gas centrifuge program.

For years, U.S. intelligence agencies did not take seriously Muammar Gaddafi’s efforts to develop a Libyan nuclear capability and this report provides early evidence of the perspective that the Libyan program “did not know what it was doing.” According to the CIA, the program’s “serious deficiencies,” including “poor leadership” and lack of both “coherent planning” and trained personnel made it “highly unlikely the Libyans will achieve a nuclear weapons capability within the next 10 years.” The Libyan effort was in such a “rudimentary stage” that they were trying to acquire any technology that would be relevant to producing plutonium or enriched uranium.