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Father of Pakistani Bomb Sold Nuclear Secrets
In a dramatic television appearance Feb. 4, Abdul Qadeer Khan,
the father of the Pakistani bomb, acknowledged that during the past
two decades he had secretly provided North Korea, Libya, and Iran
with crucial technological and intellectual building blocks for
making nuclear weapons. Khan, considered a national hero, apologized
to the people of Pakistan for what he had done and was pardoned
by Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf shortly afterward.
At a time when U.S. and British intelligence agencies are under
scrutiny for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, President George W. Bush is touting the breakup of Khan’s
network—believed to span some half-dozen countries—as
a victory for the intelligence services.
In a speech Feb. 11 at the National Defense University in Washington,
D.C., Bush reported that the picture of Khan’s network was
pieced together over several years by U.S. and British intelligence
officers, who gradually uncovered the network’s reach and identified
key agents and money men. Bush said operatives monitored the travel
of Khan and his senior associates, shadowed members of the network,
recorded their conversations, and penetrated their operations. “We’ve
uncovered their secrets,” the president stated, “and all
Americans can be grateful for the hard work and the dedication of
our fine intelligence professionals.”
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei,
told reporters Feb. 5 that the Khan case “raises more questions
than it answers” and that cracking the case of the Pakistani
scientist represents only “the tip of an iceberg” in the
wider global nuclear black market. “We need to know who supplied
what, when, to whom,” ElBaradei stressed. “Dr. Khan was
not working alone.” In an op-ed published in The New York
Times Feb. 13, ElBaradei underlined the need for urgent action
to toughen the world’s nonproliferation regime to stop the
spread of nuclear weapons and called for strengthening export controls
and accelerating movement toward nuclear disarmament.
The disclosure of Khan’s network comes amid some progress in
relations between India and Pakistan. In the first formal peace
talks between the two countries in more than two years, officials
from India and Pakistan met in Islamabad Feb. 16 and 17 to lay out
a timetable for moving forward with a “composite dialogue”
aimed at resolving a number of sticky issues, including the bitter
controversy over the disputed regions of Jammu and Kashmir. That
dispute has helped plunge the two countries into three wars and
repeated threats of war since the partition of the subcontinent
more than 50 years ago, including crises in 1999 and 2002 that raised
fears of an atomic exchange between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.
The Indian government has been relatively silent on the revelations
about Khan’s network. When questioned by Arms Control Today,
a spokesperson for the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C., declined
to comment on the affair and instead pointed to an article published
in the Hindustan Times Feb. 14 that stated, “In a way,
the Khan episode is a vindication of the Indian stance (since the
1980s) that Pakistan’s nuclear program is, as it always was,
a clandestine venture. But even in its state of alarm, the world
community, notably the United States, is tending to be soft on the
system which jeopardized international security by sponsoring terrorism
and selling nuclear technology.”
On Feb. 23, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made his
first public comments about the Khan network, stating during a news
conference in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, “We hope
that under the guidance of the United Nations a system will be developed
to prevent such clandestine transfer of nuclear capability….It
is a serious issue. We are taking whatever steps necessary on the
security front.”
In pointing to Khan, the White House has avoided criticizing Musharraf
or the Pakistani government—key allies in the U.S.-led war
in Afghanistan and the effort to dismantle the Al Qaeda terrorist
organization. They have neither complained about Musharraf’s
decision to pardon Khan nor raised public questions about the extent
to which the Pakistani government or military were involved in the
illicit network. “The government of Pakistan is interrogating
the network’s members, learning critical details that will
help them prevent it from ever operating again,” Bush noted.
“President Musharraf has promised to share all the information
he learns about the Khan network and has assured us that his country
will never again be a source of proliferation.”
In his speech, Bush said Khan was the illegal network’s “leading
scientific mind as well as its primary salesman.” The Pakistani
scientist made frequent trips to consult with his clients, selling
blueprints for centrifuges to enrich uranium and uranium hexafluoride—an
essential raw material. Although low-enriched uranium is used in
civilian nuclear reactors, highly enriched uranium can be used in
making nuclear weapons.
Bush said that Khan and his associates provided Iran, Libya, and
North Korea with designs for Pakistan’s older centrifuges,
as well as designs for more advanced and efficient models. The network
also provided these countries with components and in some cases
with complete centrifuges. Khan and his associates used a factory
in Malaysia to manufacture key parts for centrifuges, Bush said.
Other necessary parts were purchased through network operatives
based in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, who set up front companies
to fool legitimate firms into selling them materials.
There is some disagreement over when the United States began providing
Pakistan with information about illegal nuclear activities. According
to Department of State spokesperson Richard Boucher, the United
States has had “long-standing concerns” about nuclear
proliferation from Pakistan and has provided the country with information
about those activities for years. However, in an interview published
Feb. 10 in The New York Times, Musharraf said Washington
had not provided evidence until October 2003.
“Certainly, our nonproliferation dialogue with Pakistan goes
back much farther than [October],” Boucher said. He also praised
Pakistan for taking “this matter seriously over time…and
what they’re doing to make sure that Pakistan is not a source
of proliferation.”
Musharraf said he first heard about suspicions that Khan was sharing
information with other countries in February 2000.
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