Though alarmed by the discovery of Pakistan’s emerging nuclear capabilities, the Jimmy Carter admin refused to confront Islamabad for fear of alienating it at a time of challenging developments in the region.

The US state department knew Pakistan’s uranium enrichment programme using gas centrifuge technology way back in January 1979, along with a nascent enrichment facility in Kahuta, according to newly declassified and available American government documents.

The documents posted on Tuesday by the National Security Archive, a non-government organisation that seeks to challenge government secrecy, published state department telegrams and internal memorandums from the time. Though alarmed by the discovery of Pakistan’s emerging nuclear capabilities, the Jimmy Carter administration refused to confront Islamabad for fear of alienating it at a time of challenging developments in the region - the Iranian revolution and growing Soviet Union influence in Afghanistan.

The Carter administration also did not want to push Pakistan too hard because it saw it as a counterweight to Soviet-partner India, the documents show. “Pakistan is moving rapidly and secretly towards the construction of facilities which will give it nuclear explosive capability perhaps within two to four years,” wrote Harold Saunders, the then assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, and Thomas Pickering, then assistant secretary for oceans, international environmental, and scientific affairs, to then secretary of state Cyrus Vance in January 1979.

Pakistan would test its nuclear weapons, thus made its programme public, almost 20 years later in 1998, in response to Pokhran II tests by India, which, incidentally, had first revealed its nuclear capabilities in 1974 with Operation Smiling Buddha.

Saunders and Pickering had gone on to lay down policy options for the United State to response, among them was aid-cut, which was not recommended as it could “complicate” matter, and direct contact with the Pakistanis, including an invitation to President Zia ul-Haq when the “dust has settled on the Bhutto case”. Former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been overthrown by Zia in 1977, was on death row then, and hanged in April 1979.

President Carter, who came to office as a strong opponent of proliferation, faced an “acute dilemma” over Pakistan because, the National Security Archive said citing another January 1979 State telegram, “we (the US under Carter) wish to be more supportive” of Islamabad in the wake of a revolution in Iran and growing Soviet influence in Afghanistan.