How Pakistani's network offered the whole kit Nuclear proliferator / Scientist and black marketeer

• Published in: International herald tribune
• Main Author: William J. Broad, David E. Sanger and Raymond Bonner
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Paris New York Times Company 13.02.2004
• Edition: International edition
• Subjects: Bush, George W; Khan, Abdul Qadeer
• ISSN: 0294-8052

Hints of [Abdul Qadeer Khan]'s operation were an open secret for years among intelligence officers and officials in Pakistan, the United States and elsewhere. But Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, confronted Khan only after the BBC China was seized on its way to Libya and evidence of the network tumbled out. Last week, Khan issued a public confession and then was pardoned by Musharraf. Khan's start came with India's first atomic test in 1974, an event that so traumatized Pakistan that developing its own weapon became the country's most pressing goal. Khan, a bright young Pakistani metallurgist working in the Netherlands, lent his aid. From his perch at Urenco, a European consortium, he possessed blueprints of the world's best centrifuges the hollow metal tubes that spin very fast to enrich natural uranium into bomb fuel. A set of thousands of centrifuges, called a cascade, concentrates the rare U-235 isotope to make a potent fuel. At first, Western intelligence agencies tracking Khan were perplexed. In the 1980s, I remember being told by officials that Khan was overordering centrifuge parts and they couldn't understand why, recalled Simon Henderson, a London-based author who has written extensively about Khan. It eventually became clear that the extras went to clients outside Pakistan.