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The possession of nuclear weapons haunts the subcontinent. The West has long feared that religious extremism and the violent struggle for dominance in the disputed territory of Kashmir could ignite a nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India. In a welcome rollback of tensions, the two countries pledged last week to work out half a century of differences peacefully in negotiations beginning in February.
Fear of far larger India started Pakistan on the pursuit of A-bombs in the 1960s. The U.S. concluded then that Pakistan's old patron China, also hostile to India, gave Islamabad crude technology for brewing Bombs. But it was the young metallurgist Khan who initiated Pakistan's crucial breakthrough when he went to work for Urenco, the Netherlands consortium that perfected technology for enriching uranium to Bomb-grade strength in gas centrifuges. After Khan went home to Pakistan in 1976, Dutch authorities charged him with stealing the centrifuge plans and tried him in absentia. Khan's conviction was later overturned on a technicality.
Gas centrifuges indisputably formed the basis of Pakistan's nuclear success. At the Kahuta enrichment facility, later renamed the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratories (KRL), the scientist and his team mastered the art of making Bomb fuel. Khan was especially clever at setting up the secret supply network that Pakistan used through the 1980s and '90s to circumvent global controls on sensitive parts and materials, even as the government denied it was doing so. Using shell companies based in the Middle East and willing or unwitting middlemen, Khan managed to scavenge the necessary components from all over the U.S., Canada and Europe.
U.S. officials are convinced that Khan was the key player in the barters that Pakistan made with North Korea. A 1994 agreement with the U.S. froze work at Pyongyang's nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant. Three years later, in exchange for the design of the centrifuges plus components to enrich uranium, Pakistan obtained from North Korea 600mile-range, nuclear-capable Nodong missiles that Khan's lab retooled and renamed the Ghauri. U.S. intelligence alleges he made a dozen or so visits to Pyongyang over several years.
Iran may have been another client. Investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who examined suspected nuclear facilities in Iran late last year found signs of a Pakistan connection. They uncovered evidence showing that when Iran's own efforts to master enrichment failed in the late 1980s, Tehran acquired Pakistani-style centrifuge technology, including parts and detailed designs for machines remarkably similar to ones in KRL's workshops. Western intelligence says Khan paid several clandestine visits to Iran's Bushehr nuclear-power plant, though he denies it.