Soon after Bhutto assumed control of Pakistan, he established nuclear weapons development. On January 20, 1972, Abdus Salam, after being requested by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, arranged and managed a secret meeting of academic scientists and engineers with Bhutto in Multan city. It was there that Bhutto orchestrated, administered, and led the scientific research on nuclear weapons as he announced the official nuclear weapons development programme. In 1972, Pakistan's core intelligence service, the ISI, secretly learned that India was close to developing an atomic bomb, under its nuclear programme. Partially in response, defence expenditure and funding of science under then-Prime Minister Bhutto increased by 200%. In the initial years, Abdus Salam, a Nobel laureate, headed the nuclear weapons program as he was the prime minister's science adviser. He is also credited with recruiting hundreds of Pakistani scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to the nuclear weapons development program; he later formed and headed the Theoretical Physics Group (TPG), the special weapons division of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) that developed the designs of the nuclear weapons.