History
The Punjab region became predominantly Muslim due to missionary Sufi saints whose dargahs dot the landscape of Punjab region. The predominantly Muslim population supported Muslim League and Pakistan Movement. After the independence of Pakistan in 194t Muslim refugees settled in the area. Kahuta was a small incorporated village until the 1970s when KRL was constructed by the Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers under Engineering officer Major-General Zahid Ali Akbar, Director of Project-706. During 1960s and 1970s, Kahuta was inhabitant by retired officers of the Pakistan Armed Forces.
In 1970s, the Ministry of Defence was tasked by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to search for a remote location for performing atomic and weapon-testing experiments for the integrated atomic bomb project in 1976. The residents of Kahuta were paid handsomely and were re-located in populated cities of Pakistan. The Uranium Coordination Board (UCB) headed by Ghulam Ishaq Khan financed the reconstruction of the site. Major-General Zahid Ali Akbar and later completed the drawings, surveying and measured the area aerially. Within the week, the whole site was acquired by the Ministry of Defence, and the army truckloads, heavy engineering vehicles arrived the next day to re-built the site. All incoming materials and research equipment were labeled as common items and engineering tools to conceal the true nature of their purpose. Scientists and engineers working and living in Kahuta were censored by the senior military officials. Soon, the site was classified and abandoned for public with only few allowed to resides. The Engineering Research Laboratories (now KRL) was established by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as a research government national facility under the Ministry of Defence.
Read more about this topic: Kahuta
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)