Before the Bomb: Revisiting Latency and Exploring Difference among Early and Late Developers with Evidence from Pakistan

How does a state (or group of states) become a latent nuclear power? What can we learn from variance among paths to the bomb? A nuclear enterprise is built with nuclear knowledge, things, and work. These elements are more like ingredients for a soup than rungs of a ladder. They need not be combined in the same rate, order, proportion, etc. in every program and historically have not been. Current and former nuclear-armed and high latency states have followed different paths towards and away from weaponization. In Pakistan, from 1947 to 1971 nuclear experts operating without a firm national decision to weaponize nonetheless cultivated opportunities, institutions, and technical capacities to be well-positioned for unexpected developments in a nuclear world. Between 1971 and 1998, Pakistani experts weaponized their nuclear enterprise, building a credible nuclear deterrent force. Throughout both periods, these experts were assessing nuclear risks and evaluating nuclear strategies. The nuclear histories and strategies of later developers are understudied and undertheorized. Rather than shortly before and in the periods after a state possesses a robust nuclear deterrent, co-constitutive technical and strategic ideas about nuclear risks form and change over the entire period of a program’s nuclear history. Leveraging a trove of largely novel archival texts produced by Pakistani experts, I use Pakistan’s latent nuclear history (1947-1998) to show how the development of risk perceptions and strategies by later nuclear powers can fundamentally differ from those of early developers of nuclear weapons.