The Nuclear Bombshell That Never Went Off

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Say you’re a member of Congress, and a Pentagon expert tells you that top officials are secretly letting Taiwan go nuclear, to contain China’s emerging threat.

Do you: (1) start an investigation, with an eye toward hearings to grill officials on the facts, or (2) drop it and stand aside as officials run your whistleblower out of town?

In the real-life case of Pakistan and nuclear weapons, the answer from Congress has been (2). Twenty years ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee learned that officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations were looking the other way while Pakistan acquired U.S. technology for its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Later, the United States allowed Pakistan to tweak its U.S.-supplied F-16s to carry nuclear bombs over India.