Eating Grass, Breathing Fire
How Pakistan got the nuclear bomb.
“If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, we will go hungry, but we will get one of our own”.
— Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Pakistan is not a wealthy country. Nearly 40% of its population lives below the poverty line, nearly half are illiterate, and the government has borrowed from the IMF at least 23 times in the last 35 years.
Yet Pakistan has the curious distinction of being one of only nine nations in the world at the bleeding edge of the arms race.
This is because it has nuclear weapons.
How did this troubled nation, born in the bloodshed of Partition, plagued by instability, suffocated by military dictatorship, surrounded by insurgent separatism on its northern frontier and an overwhelmingly larger, fundamentally hostile neighbour to its east, find itself in possession of the ultimate deterrence?
This is the story of how nations react to the threat of annihilation, not with speeches and moral appeals, but through statecraft and subterfuge.
A MAD World
“It is not the fear of death that keeps the peace; it’s the certainty of it”.
— Excerpt from a Cold War strategy brief
The dawn of the Nuclear Age introduced a new idea: the surest way to prevent annihilation is to be prepared to annihilate. Strategist Bernard Brodie recognised the fundamental shift in the logic of conflict: “Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars: from now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them.”
The nuke turned a physical contest into a psychological one: bluffing, posturing, credibility, and fear. Schelling, von Neumann, and the RAND Corporation formalised this idea into what eventually became Game Theory. You must convince your enemy that you can and absolutely will annihilate them if you face the threat of annihilation, and only if that threat is credible will peace be stable. This is the meaning of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Critically, the stability of deterrence depends fundamentally on each contestant’s second-strike capacity, the idea that, even if bombed, a contestant will maintain the ability to inflict annihilation on its adversary.
MAD is a doctrine of perpetual paranoia, one that suffocated the heated mid-century ideological fervour, ensuring that the War stayed Cold. Naturally, then, for nations beset by existential threat the world over, the possibility of abstractifying conflict, of living in peace even if under the shadow of total ruin, of paranoid peace rather than paranoid war, resulted in a desperate and vicious arms race to acquire nuclear deterrence in the name of survival.
This is the world in which Pakistan’s nuclear program was birthed, and the incredible story of the men who risked annihilation in the name of averting it.
The Taste of Grass
“For Pakistan, the bomb is not just a weapon. It is the very key to our national survival.”
— Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
Ambition is often spurred by defeat. Pakistan was always an untenable, idealistic political project. It was formed as a nation torn in half, with eastern and western wings separated by thousands of kilometres of hostile Indian territory. The regions were linguistically, culturally, and ethnically distinct, with the Bengalis in the east, and the Punjabis, Sindhis, Balochis, and Kashmiris in the west. Although each wing of former Pakistan contained roughly the same population, most administrative focus and power remained in the west. Eventually, tensions began to boil over as these contradictions proved untenable for governance, culminating in the brutal civil war of 1971.
The aftermath saw Islamabad surrender to Dhaka and the success of the Bangladeshi independence movement. India, sensing an opportunity to harm its rival, seized the opportunity and intervened militarily on the side of the separatists. They had succeeded in tearing Pakistan in two. The loss of Bangladesh was not just a loss of prestige or a blow to the ideal of a Muslim homeland in the Indian subcontinent: Bangladesh was 14.5% of (united) Pakistan’s total landmass and more than half its total population.
Never again echoed throughout the corridors of Islamabad, as the country was humiliated and dismembered at the hands of its larger, hostile neighbour. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, cemented himself as the leader of the beleaguered nation, and seeing signs of an Indian nuclear test on the horizon, vowed publicly and constantly to guarantee “national survival and honour”, to “eat grass” if necessary to procure a nuclear bomb. The nation seemed to agree: better to die of hunger than of fire.
In a conference in January 1972, just weeks after defeat, he convened the country’s top scientists in Multan, charging them with a sacred mission. “What India builds, we must build.” This narrative of righteous desperation in the face of military humiliation, the bomb as the ultimate guarantor of national survival, became doctrinal.
When India conducted the “Smiling Buddha” nuclear test in 1974, Pakistan’s worst fears came true, and the quest for a nuclear device shifted into feverish overdrive. It became hard to disentangle state policy from existential fear. A historian later noted that the program came to be seen as “the cornerstone of the very country”.
Bhutto’s government, in its desperation and paranoia, transmuted the bitter disgrace of 1971 into the motivation to embark on the path of “defiance and deterrence”, an imperative that dominated the next 25 years of national priorities.
Pakistan had lost half of itself overnight: it was terrified of losing the rest.
“We were not building a bomb. We were building a deterrent”.
— Munir Ahmad Khan
Bhutto revitalised the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) under Munir Ahmad Khan, a US-trained nuclear engineer. Munir quietly began laying both plutonium and uranium tracks for the full weapon fuel cycle, while constructing an elaborate facade for their use in civilian power plants.
The initial focus was on plutonium. In 1973, after much negotiation, Pakistan struck a deal with France’s SGN to acquire a reprocessing plant, one that could extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The purchase was noticed, causing ripples in Washington, who promptly sent a communiqué to cease and desist procurement of technology that could be used to enrich plutonium. When Pakistan refused to acknowledge this, the US pressured France to stall the contract. Bhutto, panicking, flew fervently between Islamabad and Paris, personally lobbying French President d’Estaing to proceed.
Simultaneously, the PAEC began to covertly pay off employees at an undisclosed Belgian plant to ascertain blueprints for a reprocessing plant that they could later develop themselves. This was coupled with a PR campaign for “peaceful nuclear technology” for civilian purposes.
The US didn’t buy it and in the mid-70s, pressured the IMF, World Bank and USAID to formally cut aid to Pakistan, successfully killing the French Connection. US Secretary of State Kissinger threatened Bhutto explicitly, “We will make a horrible example of you.” Bhutto later quoted this in public speeches to thunderous rallies. He later privately recounted that the strategic payoff was easy to justify. Better poor, hated, and friendless than dead.
This was the situation in which a young engineer by the name of Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQ Khan) first entered the scene. Born in 1936 in British India, AQ Khan studied metallurgical engineering in Berlin in the 1960s, with further study in the Netherlands and Belgium. By 1972, he began working as a metallurgist for a subcontractor of the major nuclear fuel company, URENCO, in Amsterdam. The company supplied enriched uranium nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors in multiple European countries. AQ specifically worked on the advanced German/Dutch “Zippe” type centrifuges, which enriched natural uranium and turned it into bomb fuel and was even involved in component procurement for the Europeans.
Sometimes, all it takes to change history is one man in the right place. India’s Smiling Buddha had a huge effect on the expat AQ, a bookish man then in his mid-thirties. Spurred to act, he dispatched a handwritten letter to Islamabad in July 1974, hoping to reach Bhutto.
“I have acquired very detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the gas centrifuge system and am now in a position to help Pakistan”.
“I am ready to return to Pakistan immediately and offer my services to the homeland, if I am given the opportunity”.
“This is a matter of utmost urgency. India’s recent test has changed everything”.
“With this technology, we do not need to depend on plutonium or any foreign powers. We can develop the capability indigenously”.
In a rare bureaucratic success, the letter actually reached Bhutto, who seized the opportunity and effectively offered Khan carte blanche with state resources. This was nuclear espionage by invitation.
Over the next two years, Khan covertly gathered and copied blueprints and lists for European component suppliers. Dutch Intelligence started to close in on him and notified the CIA. Remarkably, the CIA urged the Dutch to let him continue, expecting him to be part of a larger terrorist network. They hoped to track Khan and then apprehend the source at once, not realising that he really was a lone actor in communication with the Pakistani State.
By late 1975, Khan had noticed that critical projects had been reassigned, and his security access was starting to be tightened. “I knew they were onto me,” he recalled years later. You can feel it in the way people talk to you, the way the atmosphere shifts. I couldn’t wait any longer. It wasn’t fear, it was urgency. I had to get home before the door closed.”
He escaped in time. In early 1976, the prodigal son returned with the keys to the kingdom: centrifuge blueprints, technical design notes, and a voluminous Rolodex of European companies that sold high-speed motors, vacuum pumps, maraging steel, and more.
By mid-1976, AQ had set up a secret enrichment facility at Kahuta, on the outskirts of the capital. The effort, internally nicknamed Project 706, was guarded by soldiers in plain clothes and cloaked in extreme secrecy, posing as a random research lab while it was kitted out with thousands of centrifuges in the basement. Within a few years, the Khan Research Lab (KRL) finally started producing enriched uranium. One observer later quipped that “it was Harry Potter wizardry”; they couldn’t believe that it was working.
Pakistan now had two simultaneous bomb efforts: the uranium from Kahuta and plutonium from the PAEC’s attempts to build a reprocessing plant.
Khan’s industrial espionage has become the stuff of legend. CIA documentation reveals that his “shopping expeditions” across Europe were “surprisingly, remarkably successful”. He set up front companies across Europe, ordering dual-use parts, ensuring that for each part, for example, a motor, there was a “public/civilian” use case to tout as a pretext.
If suppliers got cold feet, Khan nonchalantly comforted them and, if necessary, moved on to other suppliers. In fact, he was so successful that between 1974 and 1977, he had procured over twice what Pakistan actually needed for initial efforts, firstly for contingency, and secondly, to sell forward to willing buyers on the black market.
The CIA increasingly made him a national priority, worrying that he might well be the most prolific nuclear proliferator in history, given that most of the excess materials ended up in Iran, North Korea and Libya through the 80s and 90s. A contemporary at the lab later recalled that “Khan had a total blank check: he could buy anything at any price.”
Pakistan’s nuclear program would move in a distinctly militaristic direction after Bhutto’s deposition in 1977 at the hands of his own chief of army staff, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, in a military coup. A year later, in 1978, Zia assumed the presidency and ruled for life until he died in a plane crash in 1988. His paranoia about spies and moles would lead to even greater secrecy and urgency within the nuclear program itself – a key component of its eventual success.
Throughout the late 70s and 80s, the KRL duplicated research efforts and ensured comparable labs were dotted all around the country, cloaked under various guises - from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants to chicken farms, all while powdered uranium was enriched in whirring centrifuges in their basements.
By 1983, the KRL finally managed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels of 90% purity. The URENCO heist had paid off: Pakistan was nearly ready.
Within the halls of the Red Zone of Islamabad, the whispers referred to AQ Khan as the “Invisible General”, “Dr AQ”, the “Baba-e-Bomb” (the Father of the Bomb), the “Mohsin-e-Pakistan” (Saviour of Pakistan).
“I wrote that letter with full awareness that I could be arrested or killed. But I felt I had no choice. India had tested. We had to respond”.
— AQ Khan
The Dragon and Oil
China was critical to the operation. Starting in the 1970s, Beijing began quietly telegramming critical advice to Islamabad, often in coded messaging. It later transpired that Mao and Bhutto had struck a secret deal in 1976 after the French deal fell through: Bhutto offered Pakistan as a willing counterbalance to India in exchange for assistance with the bomb. Mao saw a common rival and accepted the gambit. The first nuclear bombs that Pakistan tested were predicated on China’s 1966 Chic-4 design. China smuggled 50 kg of weapons-grade uranium into Pakistan in 1982, enough for two early bombs, along with 10 tons of UF₆ (Uranium Fluoride) for later purification.
Chinese technicians troubleshooted early centrifuge operations at Kahuta, and these technicians were even invited as state guests to observe Pakistan’s first nuclear tests. AQ Khan later said that Pakistan sent its own researchers to China to build a small enrichment plant in Hanzhong in the 1980s, to try to return the favour and cement the alliance.
Washington, watching the shadows flicker, confronted Beijing about the programme. China responded with flat denial and public condemnations about any purported nuclear program in Pakistan.
AQ Khan also managed to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in external financing from Gaddafi in Libya and Saudi Arabia, who hoped to receive components and assistance in return. “There is the Christian bomb. There is the Jewish bomb. There is the Hindu bomb. Why not an Islamic bomb?” said Bhutto to Gaddafi, in a secret 1974 meeting organised by Khan, to sell him on the idea of financing in exchange for a stake in the eventual weapons program.
Saudi Arabia was similarly sold on the idea, as it began to feel the need for a Sunni ally to counterbalance a nuclear India and an increasingly militarised Iran. It began to supply oil freely to Pakistan for a few months after the US imposed sanctions on Pakistan in the 90s. Pakistani officials gave the Saudis the impression that the deterrent umbrella would be extended to Saudi Arabia should the need arise.
By the 80s, however, despite the foreign support and financing, Zia made very publicly clear that no external parties, be they Libyan or Saudi, owned Pakistan’s precious deterrent. It was, first and foremost, fundamental Pakistani survivalism. They would maintain control.
Sabotage
China and the US weren’t the only two parties with a vested interest in the covert program. In the 80s, Israel and India joined the fray.
Israel, a beneficiary of its own covert nuclear program, had just destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in a black-ops airstrike in 1981, and on hearing rumours of an “Islamic bomb” immediately began to view Pakistan, like India did, as an existential concern.
In 1983, Pakistani counterintelligence, intercepting logistical communiqués between Israeli “diplomats” (suspected Mossad) and Indian intelligence, found hard evidence of a planned joint Indian-Israeli strike on the KRL covert nuclear facilities, starting with the flagship plant in Kahuta and then moving on to the other sites.
At the same time, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 pushed Pakistan into the US’ arms as a critical ally. Strategic interdependence can push even enemies into each other’s arms, particularly when facing common threats, and how cause prioritisation necessitates political compromise: it did not matter how sceptical the US was of Pakistan, they were focused entirely on the Soviets, and Pakistan rationally took advantage as best they could. Reagan even sent Pakistan F-16s and intelligence and turned on the aid hose on the condition that Pakistan did not actually test the nuclear bomb.
One Pakistani general later quipped, “The Americans needed us then, so they were as quiet as a dead mouse about the bomb.” And so, the Pakistanis maintained restraint and sent soldiers into Afghanistan to help the West. Reagan, choosing Cold War victory over non-proliferation, even quietly tipped off Zia about the impending Indian and Israeli bombing run.
Pakistan then scrambled to organise a private back-channel meeting with India in which the PAEC’s Munir Khan personally threatened India’s nuclear chief, Raja Ramanna, that “if your jets come, we will retaliate against Bombay.” India’s PM, Indira Gandhi, her hands full with local issues, put the project on ice, much to Israeli frustration.
Meanwhile, in a now-legendary story, Indian Intelligence sent a Bangladeshi agent, codenamed “Majnun”, into Kahuta to pose as a scientist, gain intel, and undertake sabotage. Depending on who tells the story, Majnun either disappeared after inflicting setbacks or was caught and executed. In any case, his efforts had little impact on slowing Pakistan down.
Mossad needed a new strategy and began to sabotage the supply lines that AQ Khan had spent the last decade establishing. In 1981, a series of mysterious explosions destroyed facilities at Switzerland’s Cora Engineering (uranium fluoride feeds and cooling systems), Germany’s Wallischmiller (remote-handling equipment, think: robotic arms to handle sensitive equipment), and the home of German nuclear scientist Dr. Heinz Mebus. Mebus happened to be out for a walk, but his dog died in the blast.
Another German supplier from a Wallischmiller subsidiary recounted receiving phone calls from anonymous numbers: “The attacks we carried out… could happen to you, too”. A Swiss banker who intermediated many of these transactions was extorted by what he believed were Israeli Intelligence officials, who warned him to cease dealing with Pakistan. European suppliers started to back out, fearful for their lives, at which point Pakistan came out swinging. AQ Khan publicly declared in the media that it didn’t matter if they were bombed, “We can build 10 more Kahutas!”
In May 1998, right before the initial planned hot tests, three Baloch separatists hijacked a civilian Pakistani airliner, threatening to kill everybody on board unless the government scrapped the planned tests in Balochistan. The separatists demanded the plane be flown to India, where they expected safe haven. In reality, the plane flew in a gigantic circle only to land in Hyderabad, Pakistan where the airport itself was disguised as the airport in Hyderabad, India. The signage, uniforms and other clarifying signs on the airport were changed to Hindi or disguised. Once the plane landed, special ops commandos stormed the plane and secured the hostages. The separatists were executed later that month.
Pakistan suspected Indian intelligence involvement in the effort. In any case, India and Israel were desperate and furious: it was too late. Pakistan was now ready to conduct hot tests.
Breathing Fire
The Pakistanis were one screw short of completion all through the 80s. They had been “cold-testing” deployment mechanisms: drilling about two dozen kilometre-deep holes in Baluchistan’s Ras Koh mountains, and detonating cold (no nuclear material) bombs inside them, studying the seismographs, and burying the results. The government shrewdly decided instead to acquire as much American goodwill as possible while it was still needed in the twilight years of the Cold War. They waited for 10 long years until their hand was forced.
In May 1998, India forced that hand. Vajpayee’s government in India conducted Pokhran-II, a series of five public nuclear tests, in a show of force, openly declaring itself a hostile nuclear neighbour. Clinton, sensing the worst, promptly called up Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, urging restraint.
The Pakistanis were under pressure: should they risk impoverishment and alienation or death by Indian adventurism? After 25 years of eating grass, was it now finally time to breathe fire?
On the 28th of May 1998, 24 years after AQ Khan’s pivotal letter, Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices underground in the foothills of the Ras Koh range in Chagai, Balochistan. They detonated a sixth on the 30th.
As the desert was lit on fire, before the orange dust had a chance to settle, Nawaz Sharif proclaimed triumphantly on TV, “Pakistan has settled the score. Today, we have settled the account of the nuclear blasts by India”.
The nation erupted in euphoria. Crowds poured into the streets, schoolchildren chanted national slogans at assembly, and it was difficult to find coverage of anything else on national TV. ”We have emerged as a nuclear state on our own terms”, declared Sharif. Pakistan was finally equipped with its own Sword of Damocles.
Indian news outlets like the Hindu or India Today were deflated, acknowledging the loss of strategic advantage even as Vajpayee, India’s Prime Minister, put on a brave face, “We are not surprised. We had expected it”.
India’s quest to achieve an absolute strategic advantage over Pakistan had been foiled by the tenacity of Pakistani scientists, engineers, and statesmen, who sought their own deterrent by any means necessary.
“In slavery, neither sword nor strategy works; But when a man tastes conviction, the chains cut themselves”.
— Muhammad Iqbal
Promise and Perfidy
What is the price of safety? Money moves quicker than people, and the day after, sanctions, trade embargoes, instability, cancelled aid, and capital flight promptly followed. In June 1998, and already nearing debt default, burning through its foreign reserves trying to keep its currency afloat, Sharif implored the nation to stay strong, and brace for austerity, even reciting Bhutto’s iconic declaration that “We will eat grass if we must”.
The Washington Post ran an exclusive titled “Let them eat grass”, highlighting the discord between the expensive arms race and a population riddled with poverty.
A Pakistani newspaper ruefully noted, “We have the Bomb, but we have no water in Karachi”. A resident mourned, “The atom bomb may be good for the country, but we haven’t had a single drop of water in the last four days… how can we celebrate a bomb in the middle of famine?”
And yet, for many, all this misery was the acceptable cost of conviction. The tests meant one thing above all else: Pakistan had finally caught up. Pakistan would survive.
The economic and material costs of deterrence are high: decades of lost development, stability, peace, investment and industry. Pakistan spends more on defence (4% of GDP) than on health and education combined (3%). For most developed nations, the numbers are about 2% and 15% respectively.
Facing an aggressive neighbour four times larger in landmass and six times larger in population has turned Pakistan into a garrison state in permanent vigilance. The militarisation of the nation has left permanent scars; Pakistan still struggles with basic literacy, malnutrition and power shortages. The social contract has steadily frayed. Once a nation has spent 25 years cementing a security establishment, it is hard to return to normalcy: the public remains in a state of siege, paranoia, and vigilance, an attitude instrumentalised neatly to maintain the Army’s centrality and the constant overreach of the intelligence services into civilian life. Pakistan’s politics has been remoulded along praetorian lines as drastic measures once necessary for survival have cemented themselves as ordinary and permanent. While the paranoid survive, it hurts to stay paranoid. Pakistan has generated a culture in overshoot, where the instruments of survival begin to suffocate the very society they are meant to protect.
Statecraft is often undertaken in the shadows, in basements, behind barbed wire, and under threat of death. State security routinely depends on bribery, extortion, theft, black markets, surveillance, sabotage, and the threat of death. This is the logic of survival. Nuclear bombs are not built in the open: AQ Khan’s acquisition of the blueprints was outright theft: false end-user certifications, shell companies in Dubai and Singapore, and an under-the-table network for procurement spanning China to Libya. Consider the smuggling of uranium from China to Pakistan via the mountains, the CIA overreaching by holding back the Dutch from picking up AQ Khan in 1975, hoping to find a larger network.
In the end, the story of how Pakistan became a nuclear power is one of boldness, intrigue, desperation, and peril. A poor country reeling from defeat and existentially threatened managed to pull off an extraordinary multi-decade plan, staving off sanctions and sabotage, forging secret alliances, and ensuring survival.
Pakistan finally managed to breathe fire. It is now time to provide water at home.
“I told Bhutto Sahib we would get the bomb. I promised it. I kept that promise”.
— AQ Khan
Author: Nasir Al-Hindi works in Emerging Markets investment in London, before which he trained as a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in statecraft, politics, technology, science, and mysticism.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.
Further Reading
Monographs & Scholarly Works:
Abbas, Hassan. Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb: A Story of Defiance, Deterrence & Deviance. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Bennett-Jones, Owen. “One Screw Short: Pakistan’s Bomb.” London Review of Books, 41(3), Feb 2019.
Levy, Adrian & Scott-Clark, Catherine. Deception: Pakistan, the U.S. & the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy. Walker & Co., 2007.
Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford University Press, 2012.
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992. Blackwell, 1992.
Khaldun, Ibn. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. 1377 (various translations).
Schelling, Thomas. The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University Press, 1960.
Brodie, Bernard. The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. Harcourt Brace, 1946.
Fukuyama, Francis. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. Cornell University Press, 2004.
Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Articles & Reports:
Middle East Eye (June 25, 2025). “‘Why not an Islamic bomb?’: How Israel planned and failed to stop Pakistan going nuclear.” (Reporting on Israeli-Indian 1980s plot).
The Economic Times (Jan 6, 2022). “Israel-India nuclear strike plot shelved in the ’80s, reveals report.”
PBS Frontline (2003). “Pakistan’s Secret Bomb” – interviews and timeline (PBS.org archive).
Atomic Heritage Foundation. “A.Q. Khan Profile” (atomicheritage.org) – summary of Khan’s network.
Bennett-Jones, Owen. “One Screw Short: Pakistan’s Bomb.” London Review of Books, Feb 7, 2019.
The Washington Post (June 11, 1998). “Pakistani Politicians’ Rallying Cry: ‘Let Them Eat Grass.’”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung via JPost/TOI (Jan 2002). Report on Mossad’s 1981 sabotage campaign in Europe.
Financial Times (multiple). Analyses on Israel’s security state and regional arms races (FT archives, 2015–2023).
Dawn (Karachi) Archive: “A leaf from history: N-deal angers US” (Apr 21, 2013) – on 1970s French reprocessing deal.
National Security Archive Briefing Book #773 (Aug 30, 2021). “Pakistan’s Nuclear Program Posed ‘Acute Dilemma’ for U.S. Policy” – declassified docs 1978–79.
Institute for Science & International Security (ISIS) Reports: on Pakistan’s test sites and proliferation activities (isis-online.org, 1998–2010).