Page 1 of
2 How you helped
build Pakistan's bomb By Catherine Collins
and Douglas Frantz
Globalization, what a
concept. You can get a burger prepared your way
practically anywhere in the world. The Nike Swoosh
appears at elite athletic venues across the United
States and on the skinny frames of T-shirted
children playing in the streets of Kolkata. For
those interested in buying an American automobile,
a word of warning: it is not so unusual to find
more "American content" in a Japanese car than one
built by one of Detroit's Big Three.
So
don't kid yourself about the Pakistani bomb. From
burgers to
bombs, globalization has had
an impact. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - as many as
120 weapons - is no more Pakistani than your
television set is Japanese. Or is that American?
It was a concept developed in one country and, for
the most part, built in another. Its creation was
an example of globalization before the term was
even coined.
A proliferation chain
reaction So where to begin? Some argue
that Pakistan started down the nuclear road under
president Dwight D Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for
Peace program, billed as a humanitarian gesture
aimed at sharing the peaceful potential of atomic
energy with the world. But Atoms for Peace was a
misnomer - a plan to divert growing domestic and
international concern over radioactive fallout
from America's nuclear tests. It would prove to be
a White House public relations campaign to dwarf
all others.
In fact, Atoms for Peace
educated thousands of scientists from around the
world in nuclear science and then dispatched them
home, where many later pursued secret weapons
programs. Among them were Israelis, South
Africans, Pakistanis and Indians.
Homi
Sethna, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy
Commission, spelled out the program's impact after
his country tested its first nuclear device in
1974. "I can say with confidence," he wrote, "that
the initial [Atoms for Peace program] cooperation
agreement itself has been the bedrock on which our
nuclear program has been built".
If you
think that India's program, in turn, did not
inspire Pakistan's, think again.
Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, the late Pakistani prime minister and
father of Benazir Bhutto, first talked publicly
about nuclear weapons in the early 1960s when he
was Pakistan's energy minister. In his 1967
autobiography, Bhutto wrote, "All wars of our age
have become total wars ... and our plans should,
therefore, include the nuclear deterrent." But
Pakistan's generals rejected his ideas, arguing
that the cost of producing a nuclear bomb would
cut too deeply into spending on conventional
weapons. It wasn't until after Bhutto became prime
minister that he officially launched Pakistan's
nuclear weapons program in 1972.
Consider
here, yet another atomic beginning: Pakistan, a
poor, backward country, with little indigenous
technical or industrial infrastructure, made next
to no progress on the nuclear front, despite
Bhutto's enthusiasm, until the arrival of Abdul
Qadeer Khan at the end of 1975.
The
Indian-born Khan had fled his home in Bhopal in
the 1950s to settle in the new state of Pakistan.
There, he went to university, quickly becoming
frustrated by the lack of opportunity. Study and
advanced degrees in Europe followed until,
finally, Khan found himself working at the Physics
Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam in the
spring of 1972.
At the time, powerful
companies like Westinghouse and General Electric
controlled the facilities that provided enriched
uranium to civilian reactors throughout the
Western world. In 1971, in an effort to protect
the fledgling US commercial nuclear industry,
president Richard Nixon had ordered that the
closely guarded enrichment technology not be
shared with any other country, not even allies.
That led other nations to begin developing
their own enrichment technology to ensure
continual access to an adequate fuel supply. The
lab where Khan was employed, known by its Dutch
initials FDO, was the in-house research facility
for a Dutch conglomerate that worked closely with
Urenco, a consortium formed by the governments of
Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands to
design and manufacture centrifuges.
To cut
right to the chase, Khan, who was able to work at
the lab without serious scrutiny from the Dutch
security police, found that he had easy access to
the latest uranium-enrichment technology. Within
three years, he had left the lab - in possession
of plans for Europe's most advanced centrifuge and
a shopping list of relevant equipment
manufacturers, experts for hire, and sources for
the necessary raw materials to enrich uranium for
a nuclear bomb, all scattered across the globe.
Before leaving the lab, Khan wrote to
prime minister Bhutto offering his services, and
he returned to Pakistan to launch that country's
own uranium-enrichment laboratory.
FDO was
just the start of Khan's reliance on the outside
world for bomb-making help. With the support of
Pakistani scientists and military officers working
undercover as "diplomats" at the country's
missions around the world, he set up what became
known as "the Pakistani pipeline", securing
high-tech equipment from literally hundreds of
companies in 20 or more countries.
While
some of this is well known, a series of
little-publicized letters between Khan and a
Canadian-Pakistani engineer, Aziz Abdul Khan, in
1978 and 1979 offer a revealing look at the degree
to which globalization shaped Pakistan's nuclear
program. The so-called Islamic bomb turns out not
to be an indigenous product, but instead a little
bit American, Canadian, Swiss, German, Dutch,
British, Japanese and even Russian.
Aziz
Khan was one of dozens of Pakistani scientists
living abroad whom Khan tried to recruit for what
he described as a "project of national
importance". According to the letters between
them, while Aziz Khan declined the offer, he
agreed to provide A Q Khan with scientific
literature and to spend his vacations at A Q
Khan's laboratory outside Islamabad, training and
mentoring young engineers.
We obtained the
letters - which cover the comings and goings of
nuclear experts from nine different countries -
from an American government official, who, in
turn, received them from Canadian law-enforcement
officers after they were taken from Aziz Khan
following his arrest in Montreal in 1980.
These exchanges provide a rare
behind-the-scenes glimpse into Khan's nuclear
Wal-Mart in its infancy, long before he began
peddling his finished wares to Iran, North Korea
and Libya. After a decade of diplomatic rhetoric
about the need to stop the spread of nuclear
technology, they also offer a window into
the
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