President Musharraf and Dr. A. Q. Khan are lobbing tales back and forth across the net of nuclear proliferation. Neither man is ever likely to win a truth-telling competition against all comers, but of the two Dr. Khan is the bigger teller of tall tales. A mythology has grown up around Dr. Khan which has secured for him a place in the national consciousness that is a combination of hero, saint and saviour. The truth is that he is none of these and there is a collective unwillingness to recognise the contribution he has made to the pool of suspicion in which Pakistan floats – trusted by few and mistrusted by many internationally.
Dr. Khan had an unblemished and moderately distinguished career until the mid-1970’s. He had risen to be a senior scientist at the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. His position gave him access to restricted information relating to gas centrifuge technology which separates the fissionable isotope uranium 235 from the gas uranium hexafluoride. Technical details of the centrifuges are restricted because they could be used for the purposes of nuclear proliferation; and here the story gets murky and Dr. Khan makes a career move down some very dark paths indeed.
India conducted its first nuclear test in May 1974, much to the surprise and alarm of the Pakistani government whose own nuclear developments were far behind. Dr. Khan, doubtless acting with what he sawas patriotic fervour passed technical details of the gas separation process to a Pakistani intelligence agency and in so doing moved into the first of his iconic positions as ‘father’ of the national nuclear weapons programme. He decamped from the Netherlands in December 1975 and reappeared in Pakistan in the spring of 1976 and was quickly appointed to lead the national nuclear armament effort. He is often spoken of as the ‘inventor’ of the Pakistani bomb, but he invented nothing – all the inventing, the hard science, had been done at the Los Alamos laboratories by the likes of Oppenheimer in the 1930’s and 40’s, and all that Dr. Khan had done was use information already in the scientific domain as well as utilise the material he stole from his former employer.
The information that Dr. Khan brought with him enabled Pakistan to fast-track its own nuclear development programme, in which it received help from China and North Korea. China provided the drawings for a Hiroshima-type device that was eventually built as a viable weapon. Dr. Khan’s laboratory may have built it, but the Chinese did the foundation work that enabled him to do so.
Dr. Khan became the darling of the Establishment and his company Khan Research Laboratories the hub of a range of weapons development, including the nuclear-weapon capable Ghauri ballistic missile. The establishment of a uranium enrichment capability in a relatively short time aroused the suspicions of western nations. They doubted that Pakistan could have moved so fast unless it was with external help – and there were reports of Chinese technicians at KRL in the early 1980’s. Dr. Khan rejected any suggestion of outside help. Nations are naturally secretive about their weaponry and there was little public knowledge of the nuclear programme; and it was a British newspaper in 1987 that reported Dr. Khan as confirming that Pakistan had a nuclear device. The paper was citing a US intelligence report which Dr. Khan did not deny, and we begin to see a pattern emerging of statements by Dr. Khan being disavowed by the government – as it at the time denied possessing nuclear capability. Dr. Khan for his part denied that he had confirmed their existence but in time-honoured fashion later retracted his denial. The process of affirmation, denial and counter-denial involving Dr. Khan and every Pakistani government ever since has thus been going on for over twenty years and is unlikely to stop any time soon.
The 80’s and 90’s saw western nations become increasingly suspicious of the activities of Dr. Khan and the KRL, and were now convinced of a linkage between China/Pakistan/ North Korea in terms of technology exchange. By October 1990 the US had had enough and by way of sanction against what it saw as rampant proliferation, terminated all military and economic aid to Pakistan. The government agreed to freeze the programme, but Dr. Khan in a 1996 interview admitted that…”at no stage was the programme [of producing weapons grade uranium] ever stopped.” By 1995 the US had found that KRL had bought 5000 specialised magnets from China and that Pakistan was exporting nuclear weapons technology to North Korea. Dr. Khan was becoming something of an embarrassment as KRL activity in the filed of nuclear proliferation was increasingly exposed. In March 2001 he was relieved of his post at KRL and re-appointed to the post of Special Science and Technology Adviser to the President – where a somewhat closer eye could be kept on him.
The crunch came in 2003 when Libya gave up its nuclear weapons programme and handed over the centrifuges that it had bought through Dr. Khan’s ‘black market’ which he operated globally using KRL as a front. Finally there was a smoking gun, and Dr. Khan was holding it. Iran was also an area of operation for the opportunistic Dr. Khan, and the IAEA reported that Iran had created a uranium enrichment facility using centrifuges that bore a marked resemblance to those developed by Dr. Khan in the early 1980’s. More smoke, same gun, same finger on the trigger.
February 2004 saw the government reporting that Dr. Khan had signed a confession that he had supplied nuclear technologies to Iran, Libya, North Korea – and here is the nub of today’s denial ands counter-denial – and that the government had not been complicit in any way in the transactions. He had acted alone. Immediately after his televised confession he was pardoned by President Musharraf and has spent his life since under virtual house arrest.
It is the matter of ‘did the government know’ that is of greatest interest. Dr. Khan’s travels in the course of his proliferating activities – to Iran, Libya, North Korea, the Middle East, Niger and Mali - were mostly on Pakistan government aircraft, the use of which was presumably sanctioned by somebody far up the chain of government. It may also be surmised that not only did Pakistani aircraft carry Dr. Khan and his entourage but they also carried the hardware necessary to make the deals work – and that the government was thus complicit in the act of nuclear proliferation. Were those sanctioning his use of aircraft aware of his activity? We are asked to believe that this is not the case and that Dr. Khan had for years blindsided successive governments and a slew of intelligence agencies. Today, government denial of all knowledge seems disingenuous at best and downright dishonest at worst.
We are unlikely ever to know the whole truth of the Dr. Khan affair. He is reportedly in poor health, and the government has steadfastly refused to allow any outside agency to question him. It is rumoured that his two daughters, resident in the UK courtesy of the fact that his wife Henny is part British and part South African, hold documentation that would expose the Pakistan governments’ linkage to Dr. Khan’s activities. If true, this is his insurance policy, and in all likelihood his best protection for the future.
Dr. Khan may be a national hero, but he has caused immeasurable damage to Pakistan in terms of its international credibility. If Pakistan cannot be trusted to abide by and be a guardian of international protocols, then what can it be trusted with?
Those who laud Dr. Khan should move from their narrow nationalistic position and see him as others do – a duplicitous opportunist who exploited his position of power and privilege. Father of the Muslim Bomb he may be, but father also to a part of the cloud of suspicion that hangs over Pakistan when viewed by the comity of nations.
True or false? Call my Bluff? Neither of the players of this particular game is ever likely to show their hand, and the truth will be forever elusive.
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