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 policy was to make the nuclear weapons programme benefit the economy, Benazir Bhutto took aggressive steps to modernise and expand the integrated atomic weapons programme begun by her father in 1972, who was one of the key political administrative figures of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent development. During her first term, Bhutto established the separate but integrated nuclear testing programme in the atomic bomb programme, requiring the authorisation of the Prime minister and the military leadership. Despite Benazir's denial that she authorised the nuclear testing programme in her second term she continued to modernise the programme which she termed a "contractual obligation".