See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/273816747

Feroz Hassan Khan: Eating Grass: The Making of the

Pakistani Bomb. Stanford Security Studies. (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2....

Article  in  The Review of Politics · September 2013

DOI: 10.1017/S003467051300082X

CITATIONS READS

0 619

1 author:

Vladimir Rauta
University of Reading
27 PUBLICATIONS   5 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Vladimir Rauta on 31 October 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 720 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The University of Reading, on 31 Oct 2018 at 10:13:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

the study of African politics. As a study of the modern African state, this
volume proudly sits alongside Bayart’s The State in Africa (Polity, 2009),
Herbst’s States and Power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2000), and
Goran Hyden’s African Politics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge
University Press, 2012).

–Christopher Day
College of Charleston

WHY AND HOW THEY DID IT

Feroz Hassan Khan: Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford Security
Studies. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. 552.)

doi:10.1017/S003467051300082X

The construction of the military in Pakistan has for long been a subject of aca-
demic interest. Whether observers close their lens on the functions of the mili-
tary, on the patterns of civil-military interaction, or on the issue of the nuclear
program, Pakistan has provided a vivid and interesting point of inquiry. Most
often, however, the inspecting has followed a path of determining dichoto-
mist understandings and interpretations. On one side, the narrative has
developed a curious case of sensationalism that falls far from factual objectiv-
ity and that carries the mark of tautology. On the other side, the direction
moves away from the limited range and the modest explanatory power of
the aforementioned narrative and captures the intricate realities of Pakistani
military patterns with a refreshingly unorthodox perspective. And following
the latter direction is Feroz Hassan Khan’s recently published book Eating
Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb.
“Why do states pursue nuclear weapons, and how do they do so? What, if
anything, is unique about the Pakistani case?” (3) are the central questions in
Khan’s seminal work on the evolution of nuclear developments in Pakistan.
While abandoning the labyrinthic syntax of “claims and counterclaims” (ix)
that made previous research arduous, Khan breaks down the issue of
the atomic bomb by systematically and analytically looking at how the
https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051300082X

program was organized, at the role played by external powers, and at the
regional implications of the process of nuclear bomb acquisition, as well as
at the setbacks that pushed the program into repeated periods of stagnation.
And all of these purposes are projected onto a background aimed at provid-
ing an evolutionary account of the phenomenon, while maintaining a strong
focus on the etiological dimension. Moreover, what sets Khan’s book apart is
the fact that these research derivatives stem not from a theoretical vacuum,
but rather from a successful juxtaposition of the realist concept of balance
of power with that of strategic culture. For the author, a retired Pakistani
 REVIEWS 721
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The University of Reading, on 31 Oct 2018 at 10:13:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

Brigadier, strategic culture “stands as an important intervening variable

between changes in the material bases of power and state behaviour” (4),
and the relevance of this connects the chapters of the book.
So what is, then, the making of the Pakistani bomb? And most importantly,
what is the relationship between the Pakistani nuclear program and the idea
of “eating grass”? In dealing with these questions, Khan provides a compre-
hensive set of answers in which the history of Pakistan overlaps with that of
the efforts behind the acquisition of the ultimate weapon. In this equation, the
operative word is “effort” as the strong image of “eating grass” captures the
exact extent of the difficulty of establishing and carrying out a nuclear
program: “If India makes an atom bomb, then even if we have to feed on
grass and leaves—or even have to starve—we shall also produce an atom
bomb as we would be left with no other alternative” (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
quoted on 7).
These grim auspices do indeed mark the beginning of the program. Khan
labels this period the reluctant phase. Pakistan’s prospects of developing the
nuclear bomb were unstable throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but the defeat
in the 1971 war and the subsequent independence of Bangladesh solidified
the willingness into praxis, and so triggered the development of the
Pakistani nuclear weapons program. In explaining the decision-making
process, Kahn uses a comparative approach, and, similarly to the Indian
case, he links Pakistan to two key experiences. The first is the moment of
“never again” experiencing a national humiliation or loss (68), and the
second reflects the importance of building national identity and strengthening
it through the managing of a nuclear program. From this point of view, Khan
argues that the Pakistani case falls within the lines of most of the existing cases
of nuclear bomb development, and does not represent a significant outlier.
However, what becomes a distinctive feature of Pakistan’s nuclear program
is the series of historical challenges to Pakistan’s nuclear program. Khan oper-
ates a classification of the setbacks through specific lenses which manage not
only to provide a clear focus, but also to particularize the understanding of
their implications. To begin with, the political side is explored in its domestic
and international dimensions. While the challenges arising from within the
state center on the consequences of sectarianism, such as the Bengali conflict
that produced an exodus of scientific minds, the ones connected to inter-
national politics include the effects of the international nonproliferation
https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051300082X

regime and the subsequent sanctions targeting the Pakistani bomb.

Secondly, the book looks at the technological and social-economic challenges
and at the mutual conditionality between the spheres. Thus, Khan details the
process by which the civil-military relations, the direct economic expense of
the nuclear program, and the increasing reliance on Saudi Arabian and
Libyan funding determined a slowing down of the nuclear development in
terms of time and quality.
The last part of the book moves from the specificities of the Pakistani
nuclear program to the contemporary problems Pakistan faces. In this
 722 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The University of Reading, on 31 Oct 2018 at 10:13:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

section, Khan describes the current status of the institutional binary that pro-
vided the framework for the development of the nuclear program: the
Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and Kahn Research
Laboratories (KRL). With a past consumed by constant attempts at reciprocal
discreditation, the institutional interaction reached a critical point with the
1998 testing of the nuclear bomb. And this was because, for a decade, until
the creation of the Strategic Plans Division, Pakistan saw itself as incapable
of transforming the nuclear weapons into a deterrence force. This situation
was worsened by the crisis generated by A. Q. Khan, one of the leading scien-
tific minds in Pakistan, and the US claims that he represented a proliferation
risk, the episode representing “undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the coun-
try’s nuclear history” (360). The conclusion wraps up the argument by putting
forward two distinctively opposite directions for the future: one that portrays
a robust and norm-complying Pakistan, and one showing a radical and
risk-accepting Pakistan.
Comprehensive, detailed, and written with military precision and objectiv-
ity, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb is an elegantly crafted and
engaging history of the Pakistani efforts to obtain the atomic bomb that
will become a reference work in the study of Pakistan and its nation-defining
relationship with the nuclear program.

–Vladimir Rauta
University of Nottingham
https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467051300082X

View publication stats