The Pressler Amendment ties aid to a nuclear certificate

Background

By the mid-1980s, members of Congress were increasingly uneasy about evidence that Pakistan was advancing towards a nuclear weapon while receiving large amounts of US aid. Some wanted assistance cut off; others, including the Reagan administration, argued that Pakistan’s role against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was too important to jeopardise. Representative Stephen Solarz had already sponsored a law requiring an aid cut-off to countries that illegally sought to procure nuclear-related material from the United States¹.

What happened

The amendment sponsored by Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota was signed into law by President Reagan on 8 August 1985 as section 620E(e) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961². It provided that no assistance could be furnished, and no military equipment or technology sold or transferred, to Pakistan unless the president certified in writing to Congress, in the fiscal year concerned, that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device and that the proposed US assistance programme would significantly reduce the risk that it would come to possess one².

Congressional Research Service analysts later described the law as a compromise between those who wanted aid stopped because Pakistan was continuing to develop its nuclear option and those who favoured continued support for its role in Afghanistan³. In practice it allowed aid to continue so long as the president was willing to certify, which Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush did each year from 1985 to 1989 through formal determinations^4,5.

Perspectives

Pakistani officials and commentators objected that the amendment singled out Pakistan, while India, which had conducted a nuclear test in 1974, faced no comparable country-specific condition. To many in Pakistan it later came to symbolise the transactional nature of US friendship: tolerated while useful, punished afterwards⁶. In the United States, nonproliferation advocates criticised successive certifications as increasingly hard to reconcile with intelligence about Pakistan’s programme, while the administrations of the day argued that aid gave Washington leverage that a cut-off would remove^1,5.

Why it mattered

The amendment turned a nuclear dispute into an annual legal test. As long as the Soviet army was in Afghanistan, the certifications continued. Once the war ended, the same law left the president with no flexibility: in October 1990, when President Bush did not certify, most US aid and military sales to Pakistan stopped automatically⁵.

Legacy

The Pressler Amendment remained in force through the 1990s, with partial relief under the Brown Amendment of 1995, and was not set aside until after September 2001. For a generation of Pakistani officers and officials, ‘Pressler’ became shorthand for the unreliability of the United States as an ally.