November 17, 2025 12:46 PM IST First published on: Nov 17, 2025 at 12:46 PM IST Pervez Musharraf acknowledged the murky backdrop to Pakistan’s Nuclear Programme in his memoir, In the Line of Fire, where he concedes that the Pakistani national hero, Dr A Q Khan: “A Q was not ‘part of the problem’ but the ‘problem’ itself”. He accepted, “Our political leaders were intentionally ambiguous in public about our capabilities, for strategic reasons,” and that “possibilities were frightening”, given the inherent nature of the Pakistani Nuclear Programme, where very often the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was up to. But beyond the obvious surreptitiousness of the Pakistani Nuclear Programme (which later metastasised into the infamous proliferation scandal), there is also an ingrained desperation of the Pakistani State. In 1965, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had chillingly claimed, “We (Pakistan) will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own (Atom bomb)… We have no other choice!”.Economically and prophetically, Pakistan is as close as it has come to eating grass, …