Amazon for nukes
Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistani hero and rogue nuke-peddler, has died
He sold vital blueprints to Iran, North Korea and—a step too far—Libya
WHEN INDIA set off a nuclear bomb in the desert of Rajasthan in 1974, describing it implausibly as a “peaceful nuclear explosion”, a young Pakistani metallurgist in the Netherlands was ready to volunteer his services to his own country. A few months later, Abdul Qadeer Khan was sitting down with the prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and explaining the possibilities of spinning uranium in centrifuges to make it usable in bombs. The “man makes sense”, noted Bhutto. Within a decade, Pakistan had the ability to build and test a nuclear bomb; in 1998 it did so, following a series of Indian tests.
In later years Mr Khan and his acolytes would cast this moment as if it were Albert Einstein writing to Roosevelt, revealing the secrets of the atom. “A country which could not make sewing needles, good bicycles or even ordinary durable metalled roads was embarking on one of the latest and most difficult technologies,” Mr Khan recalled. In fact Pakistan, humiliated and dismembered by India in the war over Bangladesh in 1971, had begun pursuing nuclear weapons long before.
But Mr Khan’s knack for self-promotion was such that it was he—and not Munir Ahmad Khan, a rival nuclear physicist—who got much of the glory. After AQ Khan’s death on October 10th, at the age of 85, Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister (the three were unrelated, though all of Pushtun origin), declared him a “national icon”. He was buried with full honours.
For Western spies, though, Mr Khan’s sin was not so much vainglory as entrepreneurship. He had been under surveillance for years when he left the Netherlands in 1975 with stolen blueprints for centrifuges and details of the companies that supplied their components. In the years that followed, Mr Khan sold this information first to Iran and later to North Korea—which provided missile technology in return—and Libya. He sold a Chinese bomb design to Libya for tens of millions of dollars and offered it to Iraq, too. Where this money went remains unclear, though an investigation by Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau found that Mr Khan owned several houses and had $8m in bank accounts in Pakistan, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.
This black market was the biggest and most advanced network of nuclear proliferation ever built. Its full extent remains unclear to this day. Mr Khan had travelled to at least 18 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. The CIA believed that Osama bin Laden himself had sent envoys to Mr Khan, although these approaches were thought to have been rebuffed.
It was Mr Khan’s dealings with Libya’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, that were his undoing. The CIA, increasingly worried about the prospect of jihadists getting their hands on a nuke, had penetrated a Malaysian factory in Mr Khan’s network. When it sent centrifuge parts to Libya in late 2003, spies tracked the shipment and had it diverted to Italy, where the incriminating equipment was impounded. Libya came clean and its nascent nuclear programme was dismantled. In February 2004 Mr Khan appeared on Pakistani television and admitted to “unauthorised proliferation activities”. It was, he said, an “error of judgment”.
Pakistani officials professed themselves shocked that their prize scientist—the only double recipient of the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the country’s highest civilian award—had been up to such mischief. Mr Khan, who spent years under de facto house arrest, said he took “full responsibility”. Yet the idea that he had run an international nuclear cartel for over a decade and meanwhile acquired a lavish lifestyle, all without the country’s powerful armed forces noticing, strained credulity.
In an interview in 2008, Mr Khan, in disgrace internationally but still a national hero, whose name was affixed to schools and hospitals, came close to recanting his admission of sole responsibility and hinted that he had covered for others. “I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation,” he boasted, “and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself.”