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Pakistan polishes its tarnished nuclear
image
By Nadeem Malik
ISLAMABAD - The story of nuclear leaks from
Kahuta, the site of the Khan Research Laboratories
(KRL), Pakistan's main nuclear weapons laboratory, to
Iran, Libya and North Korea has forced Pakistan to
investigate some of its key scientists to prove to the
world that it's a responsible country, not involved in
proliferation, at least not at the state level.
According to official statements, the Pakistan
government has sent official investigators to Iran and
Libya, after the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) sent a letter to Islamabad in the light of its
probe into Iran's nuclear program. Iran disclosed to the
UN inspection agency the names of people who provided it
with nuclear technology - including Pakistani
scientists.
As a result of initial
investigations, the Pakistan government detained key
scientists at KRL, including Major Islamul Haq, the
principal staff officer of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, known
as the father of Pakistan's 30-year nuclear program. Two
army brigadiers dealing with sophisticated construction
and engineering activities and security matters have
also been interrogated.
Pakistan embarked on its
covert nuclear program in the early 1970s to counter the
perceived threat posed by Indian nuclear tests. Khan
spearheaded the whole exercise throughout this period
until his replacement two years ago as head of KRL,
under severe pressure from the United States, which
feared connections of al-Qaeda elements with some
Pakistani scientists.
Khan was associated with
Urenco, a British, German and Dutch consortium, in the
1970s in the Dutch city of Almelo. After his return to
Pakistan, the Dutch government accused him of stealing
centrifuge plans from the plant. He was tried in
absentia and convicted; the verdict was later overturned
on a technicality. Western experts believe that Pakistan
used Urenco gas centrifuge blueprints and information to
build its own facilities. Urenco was the first name to
appear in various international reports with suspicion
of being the primary culprit for leaking uranium
enrichment technology to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
The same company has been linked to the
construction of a new enrichment facility in Hartsville,
Tennessee in the United States. Urenco has major
financial interests in the Louisiana Energy Services,
which was to construct this plant. According to US
officials, concerns about Urenco emerged more than 10
years ago when thousands of centrifuge parts, based on
Urenco designs, were discovered by UN inspectors in Iraq
after the Gulf War.
When the US and the IAEA
engaged in investigations into the Iranian nuclear
program, suspicions emerged that its uranium enrichment
program used technology identical to Pakistan plans. A
report of the IAEA requested all third countries to
cooperate closely and fully with the agency in the
clarification of open questions on the Iranian program,
after conducting field investigations in recent months
in Iran.
According to some reports, Iran has
admitted that its centrifuge enrichment program was
based on Urenco designs. Urenco is the leading firm in
design and operation of centrifuges. To enrich uranium
to weapons-grade, centrifuges are used to process the
raw uranium into fuel for reactors or fissile material
for bombs. This process requires machines that spin at
twice the speed of sound. Pakistan has developed the
capability of producing these centrifuges.
Urenco has denied providing technology or
blueprints to Iran. Investigators are probing the
possibilities of obtaining such designs and expertise
through "middle men and black marketers", or theft from
a nuclear laboratory, including KRL. The IAEA found
traces of weapons-grade uranium in two locations in Iran
where the machines had been assembled and tested. One
such facility was discovered near Natanz in central
Iran, which was similar to Urenco designs, but slightly
modified. The second one was found at Kalaye Electric
Company. According to reports, Iranian authorities told
the IAEA that they bought the enriched uranium outside
the country "on the black market" through middlemen.
This is going to be a long international
investigation to determine who exactly was involved, and
how the delivery took place. But the Pakistani
scientists came under investigations as the Foreign
Office said that the IAEA and the Iranian government had
provided information that warranted such investigations
to determine the veracity of the information and to
ensure the strict export control regime of the country
was not being violated. "We do not proliferate," said
Masood Khan, Foreign Office spokesman. The name of Dr
Khan, a national hero in Pakistan, appeared in the media
when a former Iranian diplomat, Ali Akbar Omid Mehr,
claimed that Khan had visited Iran in 1987, and assumed
that it was for some cooperation.
Pakistani
investigators also picked up Dr Mohammad Farooq, a
senior scientist at KRL dealing with gas centrifuges, in
late November after receiving information from Iran and
the IAEA, which indicated "contact persons" in Pakistan.
Following debriefing sessions of Farooq, Dr Nazeer
Ahmad, the director general of KRL, Yasin Chohan, the
director KRL, and other senior scientists were also
detained.
The sale of nuclear designs and
components is obviously a very secretive business. No
one is sure about its exact potential threat and
capability. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991 that reports started appearing indicating
the scouting of Russian nuclear scientists by aspiring
countries around the world. An interesting finding of
the IAEA was that Iran had been conducting research
using exotic laser technology to enrich uranium for 12
years, and this laser technology apparently had come
from Russia via European suppliers. Some reports claimed
that Iran acquired some of the equipment during the
Iran-Iraq war (1980-88).
Iran informed the IAEA
in August 2003 that the decision to launch a centrifuge
enrichment program had actually been taken in 1985, and
that Iran had received drawings of the centrifuges
through a foreign intermediary around 1987. Iranian
officials further described the program as having
consisted of three phases. The IAEA has condemned Iran
for 18 years of covert nuclear activities, but has
stopped short of taking Tehran to the UN Security
Council for possible sanctions. Interestingly, Britain,
France and Germany have suggested rewarding Iran for
cooperating since October.
On December 18, 2003,
Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Seyed Salehi, and the
director general of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, signed
an additional protocol to Iran's Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) safeguards agreement, granting agency
inspectors greater authority in verifying the country's
nuclear program. The additional protocol requires a
state to provide an expanded declaration of its nuclear
activities and grants the agency broader rights of
access to sites in the country. The IAEA director
general is scheduled to provide the next report, on the
implementation of agency safeguards in Iran, to the IAEA
board of governors in February, prior to the board's
next meeting in March.
Pakistan apparently wants
to move forward in its investigations before the next
IAEA report to make a point that the state was not
involved in proliferation. The particular concern for
Pakistani authorities is said to be the fact that
nuclear programs in Pakistan and Iran are based on
highly enriched uranium, which was detected by the IAEA
at two of the sites in Iran. This raises suspicion of
close involvement of "some individual or individuals in
the process", as stated by President General Pervez
Musharraf at the weekend.
Musharraf maintained
that since the entire program has been covert for the
past 30 years, autonomy had been granted to certain
individuals to keep it a secret while acquiring the
required capabilities. This "freedom of action" appears
to be the real factor, according to official claims.
Officials of the Interior Ministry have said that the
government has extended its probe to Dubai in the United
Arab Emirates, where some individuals acted as front men
to buy state-of-the-art dual use equipment from the
international market.
The recent arrest of Asher
Karni, an Israeli citizen living in South Africa, at
Denver international airport on January 2, indicates how
such front men act in such deals. The man was accused of
illegally shipping triggered spark gaps to Pakistan. The
spark gaps are capable of sending synchronized
electronic pulses, which can be used to destroy kidney
stones - or in the nuclear field.
A recent
report of the US on chemical and biological weapons said
that the IAEA had documented almost 400 cases of
trafficking in nuclear or radiological materials since
1993. Many such supplies are subject to few controls or
are poorly guarded, particularly in the former Soviet
Union. Reports also have cited weak protection of spent
fuel at nuclear facilities in the US.
Other
experts worry about the security of the nuclear
facilities in Pakistan, India and other developing
countries. An estimated 1,300 kilograms of highly
enriched uranium and 180,000 kilograms of plutonium, the
main fuels for a nuclear device, exist in civilian
nuclear facilities around the world. There are nearly
450 nuclear power plants, nearly 300 nuclear research
reactors, and 250 nuclear fuel cycle plants around the
world.
In April 2000, customs officers from
Uzbekistan discovered 10 lead-lined containers at a
remote border crossing with Kazakhstan. These containers
were filled with enough radioactive material to make
dozens of crude weapons, each capable of contaminating a
large area for many years. The consignment was addressed
to a company in Quetta, Pakistan, called Ahmadjan Haji
Mohammed. Quetta, where border controls are virtually
non-existent, is the main Pakistani crossing into
southern Afghanistan, and only a six hour drive from
Kandahar, the chief southern town in that country.
The US report also mentioned that in 1994, Czech
police seized three kilograms of highly enriched
uranium. During the same year, German police seized 360
grams of plutonium. In 2001, Turkish police caught two
men with 1.16 kilograms of weapons grade uranium.
The report maintains that a crude but deadly
radiation dispersal device fashioned from stolen nuclear
material (from a nuclear waste processor, a nuclear
power plant, a university research facility, a medical
radiotherapy clinic, or an industrial complex) and a few
sticks of dynamite could spread radioactive material
across an area without a nuclear detonation. Such a
weapon could kill many, contaminate a square mile for
many years, and cause widespread panic.
The US
strengthened its export control regime after September
11, and recently the US Defense Authorization Bill for
fiscal 2004 incorporated a plan for "the assessment of
strategies or options for dealing with nuclear-capable
nations that may provide nuclear weapons to terrorist or
transnational groups, and an assessment of the effect of
the strategy on the nuclear programs of emerging nuclear
weapons states, including North Korea, Iran, Pakistan
and India".
The Iranian and Libyan
investigations pointed fingers at individuals from
Pakistan, and some Dubai-based companies are also being
mentioned. Some reports claimed that these companies
bought loyalties of some individuals to provide
sensitive information to Iran.
The uranium
conversion facility of Iran, according to IAEA reports
and Iranian claims, was originally based on a design
provided by a foreign supplier in the mid-1990s. The
plant was supposed to have been constructed by the
supplier under a turnkey contract, but the contract was
cancelled in 1997 and, according to Iran, the supplier
did not provide any equipment. Iranian authorities said
that they received from the supplier the blueprint of
the facility, including equipment test reports and some
design information on the equipment, but claimed all the
parts and equipment for the plant were manufactured
domestically.
Pakistani investigators may have
looked at the two major facilities in Iran in their
probe to find out the extent of involvement of Pakistani
scientists, but nothing is said about the military
officials who have actually controlled all the
operations over the years.
Pakistan's nuclear
program conceived by then prime minister Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto in the early 1970s, was supervised in the 1980s
by General Zia ul-Haq and his close associate, Ghulam
Ishaq Khan, who became president after Zia died in a
mysterious plane crash. General Aslam Beg replaced Zia
as the chief of army staff after his death in 1988. The
timing of the Iranian nuclear advancement and changes in
Pakistan coincide. Nuclear proliferation due to a
deliberate act of some individual, or with the
connivance of the army, is obviously the responsibility
of the army chief.
On the sidelines of the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Musharraf told Associated
Press: "The security of all of this is a military
responsibility. As long as the military of Pakistan
remains, nothing can go wrong." The president denied
involvement of the army. He also said that proliferation
of nuclear technology in the world was not possible
without the help of Europe, which has all the technical
know-how and expertise in the field.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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