Benazir Bhutto to take the service's entrance exams later in the year. In July 1977, Zulfikar Bhutto—who had just been re-elected in a general election—was overthrown in a military coup led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Chief of Army Staff. Both Zulfikar and Benazir believed that Zia's coup had been assisted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Zulfikar claimed that in a 1976 meeting, U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger had told him that the U.S. would make "a horrible example" of him if he did not terminate Pakistan's efforts to built a nuclear bomb. Now in control of the country, Zia declared
Benazir Bhutto and March 1989, she authorised cold tests of nuclear weaponry, without fissionable material, although this did not satisfy the military authorities. In 1990, shortly before leaving office, the U.S. Ambassador Robert Oakley informed her that information obtained by U.S. satellites indicated that her commitment to not produce weapons-grade uranium had been breached at the Kahuta enrichment plant. In the 1980s, Benazir Bhutto started aerospace projects such as "Project Sabre II", "Project PAC", "Ghauri project" under Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan in 1990 and the "Shaheen programme" in 1995 under Dr. Samar Mubarakmand. In opposition to her conservative opponent Nawaz Sharif, whose