The Nuclear Noose Around Pakistan's Neck

[varun]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47-2004Jan30.html

The Nuclear Noose Around Pakistan's Neck

By Pervez Hoodbhoy
Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B04

Thirty years ago, fearful of India's newly acquired nuclear weapons, Pakistan set out on its own quest to become a nuclear weapons state. Lacking a strong technological base, it secretly searched the world's industrialized countries for what was needed. Few could have imagined then that the move from buyer to seller of the world's deadliest technology would be so swift.

But spectacular revelations beginning late last year by Iran, and later Libya, have forced Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to launch an investigation of Pakistani involvement in secret transfers of vital nuclear weapons information and equipment to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Musharraf has conceded the existence of "an underworld of people" in Pakistan who, out of "personal greed," could have sold nuclear secrets.

The figure at the center of the crisis is Dr. A.Q. Khan, Pakistan's most celebrated bomb maker and a national hero, who was fired on Saturday from his job as science adviser to Pakistan's prime minister. In his heyday, Khan was accustomed to adulation and worship. His procurement, by whatever means, of secret centrifuge designs from a Dutch consortium in the mid-1970s was critical to Pakistan's successful nuclearization. With unlimited government resources at his disposal, and free of auditing restrictions, Khan, a metallurgist who is often wrongly referred to as a nuclear scientist, managed to purchase restricted items, which companies in Europe and the United States were willing to sell for the right price, no questions asked. In the process, Khan became a wealthy man....