Then, she added, quietly: “I feel we must ask ourselves: With a population of over a billion people and high rates of poverty amid islands of affluence, what do we do to pick ourselves out of this mess for the future?”
She spoke, too, of the man who would come to be the most controversial figure in Pakistan’s nuclear history: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear physicist colloquially known as the father of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program.
“When I knew him, he was a modest man. The huge ego only started in 1980. I first came across him when he came to see me with Munir,” she recalled, referring to Munir Ahmed Khan, the then-chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. “They seemed like government servants, ready to carry out government orders. The prime minister called them, they came.”
Her tone was neither reverent nor condemnatory — simply descriptive, as if charting a trajectory she’d been able to observe up close. The myth of Khan as a national savior, she implied, had come later, fueled as much by politics and insecurity as by any singular scientific achievement.
This was no press conference. It was a conversation in exile — unguarded, revealing and now historically valuable. At a time when nuclear saber-rattling is back in fashion and disarmament feels like a dream deferred, Bhutto’s words strike like an alarm.
She had walked the corridors of power and knew what it meant to wield terrible responsibility. Yet, she also understood, instinctively, the absurdity of mutual destruction.
“Neither India can use the nuke, nor can Pakistan. Whichever country is throwing that nuke,” she said, “knows there is not enough time or space — and is going to get it [thrown] back.”
More than 20 years later, that logic remains sound.
