Pervez Hoodbhoy

Hoodbhoy has taught in the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad for more than 35 years and now also teaches at the School of Science and Engineering at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has won many awards, including the Abdus Salam Award for Mathematics, the Book of the Year Award from the National Book Council of Pakistan, and UNESCO's Kalinga Award for science popularization. In addition to producing many documentaries for Pakistani television, he has written the books, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality and Education and the State: Fifty Years of Pakistan. He is a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors.

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Articles by Pervez Hoodbhoy

Opinion
12 February 2013
Nuclear Weapons

Scientists and an atomic subcontinent

Pervez Hoodbhoy

In India and Pakistan, leaders have rarely weighed the consequences of their actions. Instead, they have simply reacted to events and circumstances.

Opinion
8 August 2011
Nuclear Weapons

What next: A Sunni bomb?

Pervez Hoodbhoy

The Islamic Republic of Iran stands at the threshold to the bomb. In 2010 it had more than enough low-enriched uranium (some 2,152 kilograms) to make its first bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium. The LEU would have become highly enriched uranium in roughly 10 weeks had it been fed into the 4,186 centrifuges then operating. Thousands of other centrifuges are also known to be operating at the Natanz secret nuclear facility.

Opinion
3 June 2009
Nuclear Weapons

Whither Pakistan? A five-year forecast

Pervez Hoodbhoy

First, the bottom line: Pakistan will not break up; there will not be another military coup; the Taliban will not seize the presidency; Pakistan's nuclear weapons will not go astray; and the Islamic sharia will not become the law of the land.

That's the good news. It conflicts with opinions in the mainstream U.S. press, as well as with some in the Obama administration. For example, in March, David Kilcullen, a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, declared that state collapse could occur within six months. This is highly improbable.

1 July 2005
Feature

Would You have Dropped the Bomb?

Martin E. MartyPervez HoodbhoyThomas DonnellyRobert L. GallucciGar AlperovitzRichard B. FrankMary PalevskyTadatoshi Akiba
“All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last,” wrote the French novelist Marcel Proust. In 1945, our collective state of mind was despair. World War II touched every inhabitable continent, leaving more than 50 million dead and millions of others as refugees.
1 September 2002
Opinion

Nuclear Gamblers

Pervez Hoodbhoy
“We can make a first strike, and a second, or even a third.”