[sacw] BOMBS, MISSILES, AND PAKISTANI SCIENCE

[Harsh Kapoor]

April 6, 1999
FYI
South Asians Against Nukes
====================================
BOMBS, MISSILES, AND PAKISTANI SCIENCE

by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Professor of nuclear and high-energy physics
at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad
(This article has been submitted to an Islamabad newspaper
for publication before May 28)

Ten days of officially sponsored celebrations, leading up to
the nuclear tests of May 28, are scheduled to culminate with
the award of prizes and honours by prime-minister Nawaz
Sharif to the leading members of Pakistan's nuclear
establishment. In preparation of this grand finale Pakistan
Television is continuously exhorting its viewers to
celebrate Pakistan's power for wreaking apocalyptic
destruction. The Chaghi tests, together with the more recent
Ghauri-II and Shaheen-I missile launches, have been deemed
heroic symbols of high scientific achievement.

Making bombs and missiles has indeed demonstrated a high
level of engineering and management skills, and the
individuals to be decorated are undoubtedly competent,
resourceful, and dedicated to the task they were assigned.
But these programs have little to do with cutting-edge
science, original scientific research, high-technology, or
the country's general scientific progress. Testing even a
hundred bombs or missiles cannot change this reality by the
tiniest bit.

The truth about science in Pakistan flatly contradicts all
claims of scientific progress. But it is pointless to answer
hyperbole with more hyperbole. Therefore I shall first
define suitable criteria for gauging scientific achievement.

One key criterion of progress is to see what new scientific
discoveries, analyses, inventions, or processes a country's
scientists have produced. Since modern science is about the
discovery and invention of new knowledge in highly specific
areas, all scientists need to establish their professional
credentials by publishing their work in internationally
refereed journals or file patents.

Pakistan's international status can be determined from
publications of the Institute for Scientific Information
that regularly tabulates the scientific output of each
country. Professor Atta-ur-Rahman, Pakistan's leading
chemist, quotes the following facts published by the
Institute. In the period 1990-1994, Pakistani physicists,
chemists, and mathematicians produced a pitiful 0.11
percent, 0.13 percent, and 0.05 percent respectively of the
world's research publications. Pakistan's total share of
world research output in 1994 was just 0.08 percent.

These painfully small numbers are even more painful if one
also looks at the usefulness of these papers, also measured
by the Institute. The average number of citations per paper
was around 0.3, which is barely above zero. In other words,
an overwhelming majority of papers by Pakistani scientists
had zero impact on their field. Atta-ur-Rahman also points
out that between 1947 and 1986 the total number of Ph.D's
produced in the sciences by all Pakistani universities and
research institutes was 128. In comparison, India produces
over 150 science and engineering Ph.Ds in one single year.

With fewer than 40 active research physicists in the
country, about 100 active chemists, and far fewer
mathematicians, Pakistan is starved of scientists. Even in
nuclear physics, contrary to what may be suggested by
Pakistan's successful nuclear weapons program, there are
just a handful of nuclear physicists. Ill-informed
journalism is responsible for certain popular
misconceptions. For example, Dr. A.Q.Khan, the pre-eminent
architect of Pakistan's nuclear program, is often called a
nuclear physicist when, in fact, his degrees and
professional accomplishments belong to the field of
metallurgy, which is an engineering discipline rather than
physics. When Dr. Khan visited the physics department of
Quaid-e-Azam University about two months ago, he endeared
himself even more to his admirers by wistfully saying he
wished he could come someday to this university to study
physics.

The small size and poor quality of Pakistani science owes
squarely to the miserable state of Pakistani universities,
which rate among the poorest in the world. There are few
qualified and motivated faculty, student quality is low,
rote learning is normal, academic fraud is widespread, and
student violence common. Pakistan does not satisfy the first
criterion.

The second criterion for scientific achievement is the
degree to which science enters into a nation's economy.
Again, the facts are stark. Pakistan's exports are
principally textiles, cotton, leather, footballs, fish,
fruits, and so on. The value-added component of Pakistani
manufacturing somewhat exceeds that of Bangladesh and Sudan,
but is far below that of India, Turkey, and Indonesia. Apart
from relatively minor exports of computer software and light
armaments, science and technology are irrelevant in the
process of production.

Thirdly, and lastly, a nation's scientific level is
estimated by the quality of science taught in its
educational institutions, and the extent to which scientific
thinking is part of the general public consciousness. It is
not necessary to say very much in this regard.. Even our
leaders admit that the country's schools, colleges, and
universities are in shambles. An internationally
administered test in 1983 established that 6th grade
Japanese students performed better in physics and
mathematics than 11th grade Pakistani students. And with
creeping Talibanization, the dawn of scientific
enlightenment among the masses recedes daily. Pakistan fails
the third criterion as well.

The arguments given above must have left some readers
puzzled, and others angry but still confident that I am
taking them for a ride. Everyone knows that nuclear bombs
and long-range missile technologies are extremely complex
systems. So if a country is indeed scientifically
impoverished how can it possibly manufacture them?

A large part of the answer lies in the modular nature of
modern technology, and the ease with which separate modular
units can be transported and then joined together to form
highly complex and effective systems. You only need to know
how the units are to be assembled, not how they work.
Therefore, making bombs and missiles of the type Pakistan
and India possess is now the work of engineers, and no
longer that of scientists. Even here global technological
advancement has created enormous simplifications.

Consider, for example, that 30 years ago an electronic
engineer working on a missile guidance system had to spend
years learning how to design extremely intricate circuits
using transistors and other components. But now he just
needs to be able to follow the manufacturer's instructions
for programming a tiny microprocessor chip, available from
almost any commercial electronics supplier. Today
sophisticated motorists and hikers can buy so-called GPSS
units costing a few hundred dollars to determine their
coordinates, and similar units can guide a missile launched
thousands of missiles away to better than 50 meters
accuracy.

Modular technology applies also to rocketry, including
engine design and aerodynamic construction. Computer
controlled NC machines have made reverse engineering of
mechanical parts easy. No longer is "rocket science" a
correct expression for indicating scientific complexity.
Famine-stricken North Korea, with few other achievements,
clearly has a very advanced missile program. In fact it has
been repeatedly accused of transferring this technology to
Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq. None of these countries has a
reputation for scientific and technological excellence, yet
all three have intermediate range missiles.

The facts about nuclear weapons are equally stark.
Unquestionably the first atomic bomb was a exceedingly
brilliant, if terrible, achievement by the world's finest
physicists. It required the creation of wholly new physical
concepts, based on a then very newly acquired understanding
of the atomic nucleus. The ensuing technological effort, the
Manhattan Project, was quite unparalleled in the history of
mankind for its complexity and difficulty.

But here too the passage of 5 decades has changed everything
and the design of atomic weapons, while still non-trivial,
is vastly simpler than it was. Basic information is freely
available in technical libraries throughout the world and
simply surfing the internet can bring to anyone a staggering
amount of detail. Advanced textbooks and monographs contain
details that can enable reasonably competent scientists and
engineers to come up with "quick and dirty" designs for
nuclear explosives. The physics of nuclear explosions can be
readily taught to graduate students.

Implosion calculations are also far simpler now. This owes
to the free availability of extremely powerful but cheap
computers, as well as numerical codes which allow one to see
how a bomb's characteristics change as one changes sizes and
shapes, purity of materials, etc. In contrast, the early
bomb calculations had been painfully carried out by hand or
by programming huge and primitive vacuum-tube computers.
Today's pocket calculator, worth only 500 rupees, has more
computational power than the room-sized early computers
worth millions of dollars.

In a world where science moves at super-high speeds, nuclear
weapons and missile development is today second-rate
science. The undeniable fact is that the technology of
nuclear bombs belongs to the 1940's, and the furious pace of
science makes that ancient history. Nevertheless, the reader
may still demand an answer to the question: exactly how hard
is it to make nuclear weapons?

Hard and easy are relative terms. Therefore, to make things
more precise, consider the following hypothetical situation.
Let us suppose that the developed countries exercise no
export controls, or that a given third-world country has a
sufficiently clever purchasing network to get around these
controls, and hence that it can obtain all the non-military
technologies it wants. Assume also that it has the cash to
pay for such commercially available equipment, electronic
systems, machine parts, special steels and materials, and so
forth, as are needed in a modern industrial setting. And,
finally, suppose that the country either possesses naturally
found uranium, or waste material from some reactor. What,
then, would be the chances of success?

Botswana, Lesotho, and Somalia still couldn't make it, I'm
afraid. Nor could Madagascar or the Maldives. Libya or Saudi
Arabia would also have great difficulty unless they hired
scientists and engineers from abroad. But one can count more
than sixty countries currently without nuclear weapons,
which could very well have them if the conditions of the
above hypothesis were fulfilled -- and, of course, if they
wanted the weapons.

It is not my purpose to denigrate the considerable
achievement of Pakistani and Indian nuclear and missile
experts. They have accomplished their goal of being able to
reduce each other's countries to radioactive ashes in a
matter of minutes. This is no mean feat because even today
substantial engineering ingenuity is required to make any
textbook method actually work. It takes intelligence to get
complex machines to work, and reliably convert formulas
given in books and documents into bombs and rockets. But
this does not amount to scientific genius or to meaningful
overall advancement of the nation's technology.

Does it really matter that making bombs and missiles is no
longer high-science? The answer is, yes, for three reasons.
First, making these weapons no longer impresses the rest of
the world. There was indeed a time when being nuclear and
missile armed meant that a country was big and powerful, but
today's international pecking order is determined by a
nation's economic, not military, strength. India had hoped
for a Security Council seat after the May 11 tests but
miserably failed.

Second, the highly focussed, and hugely expensive, Pakistani
and Indian weapons programs are wasteful because they use
scientific principles discovered and developed elsewhere and
so cannot produce any important spin-offs. In contrast the
strongly research-oriented military-industrial complex in
the US has often produced new spin-off technology with
enormous applications, the internet being one example.

Thirdly, the irrelevance of high-science to bombs and
missiles has yet another, and still deeper, implication.
Pakistan has established that even a scientifically
impoverished country can, with minimal infrastructure,
produce bombs that will go off and missiles that will fly.
The prescription for success is sufficient money and
resources, a few hundred engineers working under the
direction of effective and intelligent group leaders, an
international buying network, and the will to do it all.
Therefore one does not need high-class research scientists
or world-class universities. A couple of good engineering
institutes will suffice, together with a few good schools
and colleges. More would be welcome, but an expensive
luxury. Hence Chaghi cannot give an impetus for resurrecting
an education system that had collapsed over a decade ago.

The Pakistani state has declared bombs and missiles as the
touchstone of scientific progress and its present elation is
understandable. But it has been able to acquire these
without having created an educated society, or working
science institutions, or even attempting to move towards a
society where science can ultimately develop. Historically,
every society where science has flourished has necessarily
submitted to the power of reason and been radically
transformed. When science came to Europe three centuries
ago, it swept away the old theocratic medieval order and
replaced it with ideas of progress, humanism, and
rationalism. Curiously the offspring of science, technology,
has been summoned to serve and defend an increasingly
Talibanized Pakistan. The country's emerging new medieval
theocracy, that now impatiently awaits its turn for power,
counts upon having at its disposal the power of fiery jinns
to use as it wills.

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