1979: US Embassy in Delhi Says Pakistan ‘Two or Three Years’ from Getting Bomb

The US embassy in Delhi, India, sends a cable to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. The cable states that Pakistan will be able to explode a bomb within “two or three years”—most likely by 1981. However, Pakistan’s progress will not be that fast and it will not actually manage to produce even a small amount of weapons-grade uranium until the spring of 1981 (see (March-April 1981)). [Levy and Scott-Clark, 2007, pp. 86] The cable will be intercepted by India’s Research and Analysis Wing and shared with Israeli intelligence (see 1979).