A Q Khan: Nuclear hero to Pakistan, villain to west

[Neo]

A Q Khan: Nuclear hero to Pakistan, villain to west

Tuesday, 01 Sep, 2009

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is hailed as a national hero for transforming his country into the world's first Islamic nuclear power but regarded as a dangerous renegade by the west.

Revered as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Khan was lauded for bringing the nation up to par with arch-rival India in the atomic field and making national defence ‘impregnable’.

But he was surrounded by controversy when he was accused of illegally proliferating nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Khan was placed under effective house arrest in 2004 after he admitted running a proliferation network to the three countries.

In February a court declared him a free man but the government restricted his movements. Khan Tuesday said those restrictions had been lifted after he complained to the high court.

Born in Bhopal, India on April 1, 1936, Khan was just a young boy when his family migrated to Pakistan during the bloody 1947 partition of the sub-continent at the end of British colonial rule.

He did a science degree at Karachi University in 1960, then went on to study metallurgical engineering in Berlin before completing advanced studies in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The 72-year-old's crucial contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme was the procurement of a blueprint for uranium centrifuges, which transform uranium into weapons-grade fuel for nuclear fissile material.

He was charged with stealing it from The Netherlands while working for Anglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium Urenco, and bringing it back to Pakistan in 1976.

On his return to Pakistan, then prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto put Khan in charge of the government's nascent uranium enrichment project.

By 1978, his team had enriched uranium and by 1984 they were ready to detonate a nuclear device, Khan later said in a newspaper interview.

Khan's aura began to dim in March 2001 when then president Pervez Musharraf, reportedly under US pressure, removed him from the chairmanship of Kahuta Research Laboratories and made him a special adviser.

But Pakistan's nuclear establishment never expected to see its most revered hero subjected to questioning.

The move came after Islamabad received a letter from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN watchdog, containing allegations that Pakistani scientists were the source of sold-off nuclear knowledge.

Khan said in a speech to the Pakistan Institute of National Affairs in 1990 that he had shopped around on world markets while developing Pakistan's nuclear programme.

‘It was not possible for us to make each and every piece of equipment within the country,’ he said.

Khan was pardoned by Musharraf after his confession but later retracted his remarks.

‘I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself,’ Khan told AFP in an interview last year while under effective house arrest.

The scientist believed in nuclear defence as the best deterrent.

After Islamabad carried out atomic tests in 1998 in response to tests by India, Khan said Pakistan ‘never wanted to make nuclear weapons. It was forced to do so.’

[Neo]

A.Q. KHAN, national hero to many and villain to others, is a free man again.

Five and a half years since his sensational confession on national television, Mr Khan is almost sure to use the days ahead to portray himself as a victim of Gen Musharraf’s (retd) rule and to try to salvage his reputation with the help of sympathetic elements in the media. But perhaps just as Mr Khan was wronged in 2004 for being singled out, he is wrong for blaming Mr Musharraf alone. The fact is, A.Q. Khan is regarded by the country’s nuclear establishment as a disgraced scientist and it was this collective, we stress collective, judgment that resulted in his downfall. Few here fault Mr Khan for engaging a shadowy network of nuclear proliferators to help build a nuclear programme when not one of the nuclear haves in the world was willing to sanction such technology for Pakistan. But the difficulty arises once it becomes clear that Mr Khan was not just taking from that network, but supplying it with centrifuges and blueprints for various parts of a nuclear programme for sale onwards to other countries. It is certainly doubtful that Mr Khan acted entirely on his own, but there is no question that he was part of a network that nearly rendered Pakistan a nuclear rogue state in the eyes of the world — a near-disastrous outcome that is worsened by the fact that a motive as base as material greed was involved.

Be that as it may, what will worry the nuclear establishment is that Mr Khan will go beyond his bitterness towards a former dictator and perhaps start to talk about the many, many secrets he undoubtedly keeps regarding the country’s nuclear programme. And they will certainly worry that a free A.Q. Khan is a vulnerable A.Q Khan — vulnerable to foreign agencies that would love nothing better than to get their hands on the man. We hope, therefore, that Mr Khan will be cautious in his words and movements, and that those who interpret what he says and does keep in mind that he has an axe to grind.