In an article I wrote for daily Dawn, I contended that the language used in the Pressler amendment — a Pakistan-specific non-proliferation legislation passed by the United States Congress in 1985 — was vague and imprecise enough to be open to interpretation. The amendment had stated that Pakistan was not to be provided any military or technology equipment unless the US president certified that it was not in ‘possession’ of a nuclear explosive device and that the economic or military assistance provided to the country would aim at significantly reducing such an eventuality. My interpretation of ‘innuendos’ in the amendment’s language was based on the definition of the term ‘possession’ in a US State Department report. Mr Pressler, it’s time to accept that the executive branch of the US government lacked the intention to make non-proliferation a national priority. Pakistan has simply benefitted from this policy choice In his response to my article, former Senator Larry Pressler, the author of the amendment, held that the language of the amendment was not nebulous, and, since he wrote the amendment, he knew exactly what it meant. Unfortunately, neither the Reagan nor the Bush administrations cared much for Mr Pressler’s understanding of the word ‘possession’ when they certified Pakistan’s ‘non-possession’ status. Under Reagan, the State Department interpreted the amendment to suit its foreign policy agenda of ‘continuation of economic and military aid to Pakistan’. President Reagan provided three consecutive certifications in 1985, 1986 and 1987 on Pakistan’s non-possession of nuclear explosive devices. Later in 1989, the Bush administration provided the fourth and the last Pressler certification. Against this backdrop, Mr Pressler needs to learn a lifelong lesson that one can control what they write but they cannot control how the writing will be interpreted. The US State Department officially defined ‘possession’ of nuclear weapons and published the definition in minutes of the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings in 1987. It read as follows: “In assessing the question of ‘possession’ under Section 620 E (e), two considerations are key to recognising that the President must make any ultimate judgement. First, the statutory standard is whether Pakistan possesses a nuclear explosive device, not whether Pakistan is attempting to develop or has developed various relevant capacities. Formulations that would have required certification of the absence of activities relevant for the development of a nuclear explosive device were rejected by the Congress in favour of the current statutory language requiring certification of non-possession. A distinction must therefore be drawn between the ability to achieve possession of a nuclear explosive device, and actual possession of such a device. Second, a state may possess a nuclear explosive device, and yet maintain it in an unassembled form for safety reasons or to maintain effective command and control over its use or for other purposes. The fact that a state does not have an assembled device would not, therefore, necessarily mean that it does not possess a device under the statutory standard. A judgement concerning possession can only be made upon an evaluation of all relevant facts and circumstances of a particular case.” This understanding of ‘possession’ of nuclear explosive devices clearly provided the benefit of doubt to Pakistan. And it has been enough for certifications to be provided and aid to flow in. As much as Pressler et al wished the amendment to scare Pakistan into submission — it did not. The only requirement from Pakistan by the Reagan administration was nuclear assurance on ‘non-possession’ and by the Bush administration on ‘low uranium enrichment levels’. In order to preserve its national interest, Pakistan provided those assurances. Mr Pressler calls that ‘lying and misbehaving’. But it would be lying if the other party was kept in the dark. In this case, it was mutual reprieve. Pakistan’s lying was smart, deliberate and acceptable to the Reagan administration as long as the latter was not embarrassed before the world. Senator Pressler’s papers are not yet available in the public domain but there is plenty of archival material in the John Glenn archives in the Ohio State University on the subject — since Senator Glenn wrote extensively about the Pressler amendment in his papers and floor speeches. For the scholars of US non-proliferation policy, Pakistan appears to be an outlier which is conveniently sidelined as an anomaly. But my in-depth research on the subject covering five US administrations from Ford to Bill Clinton suggests that Pakistan secured nuclear capability as a result of deliberate US foreign policy choices. And this policy persisted even after the end of the Cold War. Those who have made Pakistan the poster child of nuclear proliferation shame the country by invoking AQ Khan, time and again. Interestingly, there is no evidence from any of the five presidential archives I have visited to suggest that any administration reprimanded Pakistan for AQ Khan’s procurements between 1974 and 2001.The US had intel on AQ Khan and his clandestine activities since the late 1970s. Over the next two decades, there is nothing that AQ Khan did that was not in the knowledge of the US intelligence community. But despite grave concerns, the intelligence on AQ Khan was never used as a leverage to restrain Pakistan’s nuclear weapon development. Mr Pressler, it’s time to accept that the executive branch in the US lacked the intention to make non-proliferation a national priority, with respect to Pakistan. The latter simply benefitted from this policy choice. The writer is a nuclear historian. She is director Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research at University of Lahore, Pakistan