Pakistani's Nuclear Black Market Seen as Offering Deepest Secrets of Building Bomb

The United States has not been allowed to interview Dr. [Khan], and Ms. [Condoleezza Rice] raised concerns about cooperation in the nuclear investigation when she met with General [Pervez Musharraf] last week. But American officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency are beginning to extract...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe New York times
Main Author WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, N.Y New York Times Company 21.03.2005
EditionLate Edition (East Coast)
Subjects
Black markets
Intelligence gathering
Investigations
Khan, Abdul Qadeer
Nuclear physics
Nuclear weapons
Rice, Condoleezza
Pakistan
Iran
North Korea
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Summary:The United States has not been allowed to interview Dr. [Khan], and Ms. [Condoleezza Rice] raised concerns about cooperation in the nuclear investigation when she met with General [Pervez Musharraf] last week. But American officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency are beginning to extract information from Dr. Khan's chief deputy, Buhari Sayed Abu Tahir, who is in jail in Malaysia. ''It's becoming clearer to us that Khan was selling a complete package,'' said a senior American official involved in the setting of nuclear strategy. ''Not a turnkey operation -- that would be overstating it -- but close to it.'' The first public hint that Dr. Khan's network traded in bomb designs and engineering instruction emerged in 1995 after United Nations inspectors in Iraq found a set of documents describing an offer made to Baghdad before the Persian Gulf war of 1991. An internal Iraqi memorandum, dated June 10, 1990, told of an unidentified middleman saying that Dr. Khan could help Iraq ''establish a project to enrich uranium and manufacture a nuclear weapon'' and that he was ''prepared to give us project designs for a nuclear bomb.'' The Libya disclosure touched off a global hunt for more Khan documents. Officials in the United States and Europe said the trail recently led to Dubai, where Mr. Tahir, the Sri Lankan businessman who was Dr. Khan's deputy, ran a front company, SMB Computers. They said reliable network sources had told of seeing bomb documents there that contained step-by-step instructions on how to fabricate components for nuclear arms. Intense searches in Dubai, they added, had so far failed to turn up the documents.
ISSN:0362-4331