Column in Daily Pakistan

PAKISTAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAMME AND IMPORTS

Pakistan’s nuclear programme began for purely peaceful purposes. Pakistan produced two power reactors to generate electricity, is currently constructing a third and is planning a fourth. All are, or will be, safeguarded against military diversion by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under Pakistan’s facility-specific INFCIRC/66 safeguards agreement. Like India, however, Pakistan has never accepted full-scope safeguards on its entire nuclear industry or signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the 1970s Pakistan’s nuclear programme became infused with military objectives. With the exception of the safeguarded reactors, the civilian and military programmes became intertwined. It is difficult to separate the history of one from the other, with the civilian programme falling victim to foreign controls imposed on nuclear exports to Pakistan over concerns about possible diversion to military use. India’s nuclear programme experienced a similar self-induced fate after it used plutonium produced by a Canadian reactor for a nuclear test in 1974. The repercussions from that test were more profound in Pakistan, however, due to its greater dependence on foreign technology and material for its nuclear programme. India, being more self-sufficient, suffered far less from the export control restrictions increasingly imposed by industrialised countries. Pakistan sought other means of pursuing its nuclear objectives. Those means abetted the rise of Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Historical overview of nuclear programme

Origins

A.Q. Khan can be accorded many epithets, including ‘founder of Pakistan’s uranium-
enrichment programme’. However, it is not appropriate to call him, as many do, the ‘father of Pakistan’s bomb’. Two of his countrymen can rightfully claim that title: on the political side, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, minister of mineral resources (1958–62), foreign minister (1963–66), president (1971–73) and prime minister (1973–77); and on the technical side, Munir Ahmad Khan, a US-trained scientist who was the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) from 1972 to 1991. Ironically, M.A. Khan directed the Pakistani bomb project between two positions at the IAEA: first between 1957 and 1972 as a staff member; then as a member of the Board of Governors, and even serving as IAEA Board chairman from 1986 to 1987.

PAEC, which traces its origin to 1954, was founded to promote peaceful uses of atomic energy, inspired and assisted by the US ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme. It was under Z.A. Bhutto’s leadership as minister of mineral resources that PAEC set up the Pakistani Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Technology (PINSTECH) in 1960 and sent hundreds of students abroad to obtain degrees in physics and other nuclear-related science disciplines. The first civilian research reactor, PARR-1, in Rawalpindi, became operational in 1965. By that time, since becoming foreign minister in 1963, Z.A. Bhutto had already begun lobbying in earnest to harness nuclear technology for weapons purposes. After the Chinese nuclear test in 1964, he concluded that India would go nuclear and that Pakistan would have to follow suit. He famously declared in a newspaper interview in 1965 that if India developed nuclear weapons, ‘Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry’ in order to develop a programme of its own. When named president and chief martial law administrator in December 1971, in the aftermath of a traumatic military defeat by India, one of Z.A. Bhutto’s first priorities was to launch a military nuclear programme. He convened a meeting of several dozen scientists and officials in Multan in January 1972 and asked them to produce a nuclear bomb within five years, putting M.A. Khan in charge of PAEC. On a separate track, Pakistan’s first nuclear power plant, KANUPP (Karachi Nuclear Power Plant, a natural uranium reactor supplied by Canada) went critical in 1971 and was inaugurated by M.A. Khan in 1972.

In March 1974, PAEC set up a group tasked with developing a nuclear device. The programme was simply called ‘Research’ and the team was known as the ‘Wah group’, after the city where it was working, where the Pakistan Ordnance Factories are located. After India’s test on 18 May 1974 of what it called a ‘peaceful nuclear device’, a cabinet meeting the following month confirmed the official launch of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, which was until then a ‘hedging’ option. This explains why, notwithstanding Z.A. Bhutto’s initiation of the programme in 1972, the US State Department later concluded that the ‘nuclear design and development work’ began ‘soon after the Indian test’. That test was the tipping point that transformed the 1972 ‘capability decision’ into a ‘proliferation decision’. Z.A. Bhutto was determined to level the playing field and to demonstrate Pakistan’s technological capabilities.

PAEC began reconnaissance for nuclear testing sites as early as 1976. The next year, the ‘Special Development Works’, a subsidiary of PAEC reporting directly to the chief of army staff (COAS), was set up on orders of (COAS) General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq (who took executive control in a 5 July 1977 coup but did not assume the presidency until 1978) to prepare potential sites. PAEC’s work on nuclear weapons was coordinated by its Directorate of Technical Development, established in 1974 and run by Dr Samar Mubarakmand, who was and probably remains the most important scientist in Pakistan’s nuclear hierarchy. The directorate was initially located at Chaklala airport. In 1990, this weapons development unit morphed into a separate organisation, the National Development Complex (NDC).

The uranium programme

PAEC initially chose the most efficient pathway to nuclear weapons, the production of weapons-grade plutonium, which was the route India had also taken. Plutonium was considered the most logical path because once a country has a civilian reactor, a chemical reprocessing plant is all that is needed to recover the plutonium produced in the fission process. This is an easier technology than uranium enrichment. This choice seemed obvious given that M.A. Khan was a plutonium expert. However, the plutonium pathway was littered with obstacles. The KANUPP reactor was inefficient and under IAEA safeguards, and Western states soon limited access to the reprocessing technology necessary to extract weapons-usable plutonium from spent fuel from the reactor. Pakistan, therefore, hedged its bets by pursuing the less technically efficient, but more discreet, highly enriched uranium (HEU) route as early as 1974. Two events prompted this decision: the Indian nuclear test, which prompted an overall acceleration of the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme; and the Western restrictions that began to be applied to nuclear exports in September.

At this point, A.Q. Khan appeared on the scene, as a deus ex machina, bringing the gift of centrifuge enrichment technology. He was not a nuclear physicist but a metallurgist by training. In early 1972, as a recent PhD graduate from a Belgian university, he was offered a job at Fysisch Dynamisch Onderzoek, a subsidiary of Verenidge Machine Fabrieken, a company which worked closely with Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland (UCN), the Dutch member of the Urenco uranium enrichment consortium. He gained crucial knowledge of centrifuge operations by working at the Urenco Almelo plant from 1973 to 1975, where his tasks included translating a German report on centrifuge technology (G1 and G2 centrifuge models). On 17 September 1974, he wrote a letter to Z.A. Bhutto, volunteering his services to help Pakistan with the enrichment route to developing fissile material for a nuclear weapon. His offer was no doubt prompted by the Indian test and the bitterness he shared with his countrymen over the 1971 war. Khan may also have been motivated by the restrictions on nuclear exports agreed upon just a few days earlier by Western countries. In any case, his offer came at the right time; the authorities accepted it but asked him to stay longer in the Netherlands, to learn more.

Khan’s offer may have been a catalyst for ‘Project 706’, the codeword for the enrichment project, which was formally launched in October–November 1974 by Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood under the supervision of M.A. Khan. Pilot installations were set up in Chaklala and Sihala. Z.A. Bhutto approved the enrichment programme and the building of the Kahuta centrifuge plant in February 1975. Kahuta was selected because it was isolated but close to Rawalpindi and its international airport. The army’s Special Works Organisation was brought in to help with construction and purchases. Another army unit was made responsible for the extraction of uranium ore in the regions of Gilgit and Multan.

Realising he was under suspicion from the Dutch government, A.Q. Khan left the Netherlands in December 1975, taking home the centrifuge designs he had stolen (a crime for which in 1983 he was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison by an Amsterdam court, although the sentence was later overturned on appeal). He then went to work for PAEC under the supervision of M.A. Khan and Mahmood. However, he soon expressed dis satisfaction with the slow pace of the programme and threatened to resign. In the spring of 1976, Z.A. Bhutto agreed to give A.Q. Khan control of the centrifuge project, reporting directly to the prime minister. Bhutto also created a three-man ‘coordination committee’ to oversee the project. One member of this committee was Defence Minister Ghulam Ishaq Khan, later, as president from 1988–1993, a key supporter of A.Q. Khan. G.I. Khan’s role was to liaise with the military. The committee, initially named Engineering Research Laboratories (ERL), was inaugurated in July 1976 as an independent entity under A.Q. Khan’s leadership.

Kahuta originally worked on copies of Dutch designs (CNOR and SNOR) made by UCN, and then on German designs (G1 and G2), all of which had been made for Urenco. A.Q. Khan, who had had access to them at the Almelo plant, brought back both sets of designs from the Netherlands. Construction of the centrifuge cascades involved not only the procurement of many spare parts, but also crucial knowledge that Khan tried to obtain from his former European colleagues. The adaptation of the faster-spinning G2 design, capable of enriching more than twice as much uranium per machine than the G1, would prove to be a major technical challenge and required the procurement of large quantities of maraging steel (a high-strength iron alloy used for the G2 rotors; the term derives from ‘martensite age hardening’).

Like his predecessor, Zia directly managed the nuclear programme when he came to power in 1977. He also reinforced ERL’s autonomy. There are various possible explanations for the independence given to ERL. One was Zia’s caution regarding M.A. Khan, who was very close to Z.A. Bhutto. Independence for ERL was likely to induce a brisk competition with PAEC – a healthy process in itself, but also a way for Zia to get information from one on the other. Giving ERL more autonomy may also have been a deliberate strategy to overcome what were seen as the bureaucratic constraints that had hobbled PAEC. Since the policy of direct oversight adopted vis-à-vis PAEC had failed – and PAEC’s own acquisition strategy had not succeeded – it was time for another approach. Finally, ERL autonomy may have been seen as a way to protect the secrecy of the enrichment programme. However, a contrary explanation has also been posited: it is possible that A.Q. Khan was deliberately made the visible face of Pakistan’s programme to act as a ‘decoy’, to shift attention away from PAEC where what was considered the most important work at the time was being conducted.

PAEC’s functions certainly remained central. In addition to the management of nuclear reactors (including fuel fabrication), PAEC retained control of uranium conversion and continued to work on the improvement of enrichment technology. It is noteworthy that 75% of the ERL scientists and engineers were from PAEC. Despite the intense personal and institutional competition within the Pakistani nuclear complex, these were not two entirely separate programmes.

Nevertheless, Kahuta was to become the most visible part of the complex and a ‘symbol of our national defiance’ (in the words of a headline from the 1991 Pakistani Defence Journal). According to A.Q. Khan, ERL succeeded in enriching uranium (in a tiny amount) for the first time in April 1978. The plant was made operational in 1979 and by 1981 was producing substantial quantities of enriched uranium. In May 1981, Zia renamed the laboratories ‘Khan Research Laboratories’ to honour the successful director. The rhetoric used by Pakistanis in general and by A.Q. Khan in particular during the 1980s and 1990s made the mastery of uranium enrichment the quintessential symbol of national pride, scientific and technical modernity, and independence from foreign powers. In 1992, Kahuta was said to have operated some 3,000 centrifuges, mostly of the P-2 design, and was estimated to have a capacity of 9,000–15,000 Separative Work Units (SWU) per year. If these figures are correct, it could produce 45–75kg of HEU a year (enough for two to three warheads, assuming 20kg of HEU is required for a weapon). It is not known how many centrifuges are currently installed and operating at Kahuta.

Unconfirmed news reports from early 2007 indicate Pakistan also developed more advanced centrifuge designs in the mid 1980s, labelled the P-3 and P-4, which resembled other Urenco models. Compared to the P-1, which has a throughput of 1–3 SWU/year and the P-2, which has a throughput of 5 SWU/year, the P-3 has a design throughput of just under 12 SWU/year and the P-4 a throughput of just over 20 SWU/year.

The plutonium programme

The success of the HEU route was important because progress on the plutonium route, which had been initially chosen by PAEC, had slowed due to the actions of Western suppliers increasingly concerned about diversion for non-peaceful purposes. In 1976, Germany cancelled a contract for a heavy-water production plant and Canada terminated its supply of nuclear fuel. In 1978, France withdrew from the construction of a reprocessing plant at Chashma.

PAEC’s plutonium route nevertheless continued in parallel with KRL’s enrichment programme. A heavy-water production facility supplied by Belgium was completed in 1980, with a capacity of 13 tonnes^[1]per year. The unsafeguarded New Labs pilot plant for plutonium reprocessing at the PINSTECH complex near Rawalpindi became operational in the early 1980s. But the only source of irradiated fuel, the KANUPP reactor, was under safeguards. In addition, to produce weapons-grade plutonium, KANUPP would have had to run at low efficiency, thus stretching production time. At 20% efficiency, it would have taken 10 years to produce enough suitable plutonium for one bomb.

The plutonium programme was reinvigorated in the late 1980s, but at a slow pace. A CANDU-type heavy-water-moderated 50MWt reactor at Khushab, built with Chinese assistance and unsafeguarded, began operating in April 1998. Able to produce enough irradiated fuel for about 10–15kg of plutonium per year, it significantly increased Pakistan’s fissile-material production capabilities. In 2000, the New Labs facility began separating plutonium from the Khushab reactor’s irradiated fuel. It has the capacity to separate 10–20kg of plutonium per year, enough for two or three weapons. At Khushab, a new heavy-water production plant was also built, with a capacity recently estimated to be 13 tonnes of heavy water per year.

A second heavy-water reactor is currently being built at Khushab, perhaps as a replacement for the first reactor. According to the US government and some private experts, it resembles the first Khushab reactor and will have a 40–100MWt capacity. Other experts believe its design indicates a 1,000MWt capacity, which could produce enough material for 40–50 weapons a year. In any case, if Khushab-I continues to operate, the addition of Khushab-II would allow Pakistan to increase its rate of plutonium production for weapons by a factor of two to three.

It is conceivable that Pakistan was able to produce plutonium before Khushab-I came on line by diverting fissile material from KANUPP. After Islamabad declared in 1980 that it had begun producing nuclear fuel, the IAEA asked to increase monitoring of the installation, but Pakistan refused. As a result, in 1981 and 1982 the IAEA was unable to conclude that there was no diversion. Having spent 14 years at the IAEA, M.A. Khan was apparently not unduly concerned. Early reprocessing may have taken place at a pilot separation plant built in the early 1970s, or at the New Labs themselves, which reportedly began operating on a limited scale in 1984. Another possibility is that the Pakistanis may have completed the Chashma reprocessing plant after the French cancelled their participation (as Z.A. Bhutto reportedly recommended from his jail cell to M.A. Khan). When the French withdrew in 1978, Pakistan already had 95% of the design plans and, even after the cancellation, French engineers continued with civil construction, and SGN (the French contractor) continued to export equipment to Pakistan, the last SGN technician leaving the site in June 1979. In 1983, a now de-classified US State Department assessment reported that civil works were externally complete. However, it also stated that ‘Pakistan may have difficulty in outfitting the interior of the plant with process equipment and operating it at or near design capacity’. Satellite imagery indicates construction activity in the area resumed between late 2000 and late 2002 and continued steadily through the next four years. Imagery analysis provides circumstantial evidence that the site is intended for reprocessing. It is unknown whether it would be for the original intended capacity of 100 tonnes of spent fuel a year and how close the facility is to being operational. The imagery also depicts what could be a fuel fabrication facility.

Crossing the threshold

According to Pakistani sources, PAEC had its first nuclear weapon design, using uranium-238 (U-238) as a reflector, as early as 1978. The first cold test (triggering the device without use of fissile material) was reportedly carried out on 11 March 1983 by Mubarakmand. In June of that year, the US State Department reported that Pakistan was now able to produce a workable explosive triggering package. This design was intended to be delivered by aircraft. ‘Hot’ testing facilities were completed as early as 1980.

Meanwhile, A.Q. Khan also proceeded with the weaponisation of an HEU device. Many observers argue that his activities in this field were un sanctioned. However, according to A.Q. Khan, Zia had in fact instructed KRL to develop its own weapon in 1982, while keeping the project completely secret. In March 1984, KRL began its own cold tests at Kahuta. In April, A.Q. Khan announced that Pakistan was able to produce HEU.

Pakistan reached the nuclear weapons threshold around 1985–86. The exact date is unclear, and depends on whether one refers to the year enough HEU was produced, or the year when actual weaponisation was achieved. As early as December 1984, A.Q. Khan claimed that KRL was ‘in a position to detonate … a nuclear device on a week’s notice’. A 1986 US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Pakistan was only ‘two screwdriver turns’ from assembling a weapon and could do so within two weeks of making a decision. The crossing of the threshold became public in early 1987, when A.Q. Khan stated in a press interview that the country was now able to build the bomb. His intent was to warn India, which had massed troops near the border in a military exercise calledBrasstacks, but the statement caused problems with the US administration, which had been assuring Congress there was no sign of a Pakistani bomb (see page 94). According to several reports, including testimony of General Naseerullah Babar, the first weapon assembly took place during the nuclear crisis in the winter of 1989–90, when the escalating insurgency in Kashmir prompted India to contemplate limited military strikes at insurgent training camps across the border. It should be noted, however, that President Musharraf claims that as late as 1999 Pakistan’s nuclear capability ‘was not yet operational’.

Pakistan originally intended to rely on aircraft as delivery vehicles for its nuclear weapons and in the mid-1980s procured 40 F-16 aircraft from the United States that, when locally modified, could be used for that purpose (although the US deliberately did not configure the aircraft for nuclear delivery). From 1985, however, passage of the Pressler Amendment made delivery of additional F-16 aircraft, as well as spare parts, dependent on annual US presidential certification that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device. That condition became increasingly hard for President Ronald Reagan and then President George H.W. Bush to fulfil, and in 1990 the Pressler Amendment was finally invoked, cutting off military aid and sales to Pakistan, as well as most development assistance. By then, Pakistan had already begun to examine a ballistic missile alternative, prompted additionally by the development of India’s own ballistic programmes. Pakistan thus embarked on a fully fledged pursuit of ballistic missiles from both China and North Korea. A deal reportedly was struck in 1987 with China, which by 1989 had begun supplying missile technology to PAEC.

Not to be outdone, in the early 1990s A.Q. Khan made his own attempts at ballistic-missile procurement. He approached North Korea for liquid-fuelled missiles. This move was fully supported by the Pakistani authorities: Islamabad needed longer-range missiles, and China was beginning to be pressed by Washington to limit its ballistic technology transfers. Pakistani authorities also probably saw an advantage in having two different missile families and another field of intense competition between the two laboratories. Pakistani missile scientists are believed to have inspected the No-dong missile as early as 1992 and were allegedly present during the missile’s flight test in May 1993. At A.Q. Khan’s initiative, then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto initiated an agreement with North Korea in December 1993 to supply No-dong missiles. The deal was reportedly completed two years later and components reportedly began to arrive in 1996 and 1997.

In May 1998, both PAEC and KRL were ready to test nuclear weapons. As the Pakistani leadership was debating the pros and cons of conducting hot tests after India’s campaign, A.Q. Khan claimed that KRL was ‘fully independent in the nuclear field’ and was equally qualified and equipped as PAEC to conduct the tests. After the Defence Committee of the Cabinet ruled in favour of PAEC, he appealed to COAS General Jehangir Karamat, who interceded in his favour. KRL was eventually involved in the testing campaign.

Nuclear imports

Overview

Pakistani nuclear imports from the 1960s to the present range from large, official state-sponsored contracts to a multitude of small-scale operations for critical components or items. Initial imports were complete installations officially designated for civilian use. These included the US-made PARR-1 research reactor and the Canadian-made KANUPP reactor.

In the late 1960s, Pakistan approached the French company SGN for the sale of a reprocessing plant at Chashma, which would use the fuel irradiated at KANUPP. The final contract was signed in October 1974. However, belated non-proliferation concerns led the French to suggest a change in the design (termed ‘co-processing’ rather than ‘reprocessing’) that would make Pakistan unable to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Islamabad’s refusal led to the French withdrawal in June 1978. However, as noted above, Pakistan already had 95% of the drawings, and the French continued civil engineering works. The initial Pakistani–French discussions had taken place before the launch of the military programme, so there may very well have been, at least initially, an honest intention to use the plant for civilian reprocessing, especially since it was to be under IAEA safeguards. M.A. Khan is reported as stating that the plant was not directly intended to produce weapons-grade material, but rather to produce knowledge about how to do so. But there was also a second track: an experimental reprocessing facility was sold by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) in 1971, and installed at PINSTECH. Islamabad then asked the British for a larger plant. When BNFL refused, Islamabad turned to the Belgian firm Belgonucléaire. In the end, it was reportedly the French company SGN which engineered the pilot reprocessing plant, while Belgonucléaire designed the overall building (the ‘New Labs’ themselves) and built a fuel-fabrication laboratory. (The same firm is also reported to have built the Multan heavy-water facility in 1980.)

The launching of the enrichment programme in the mid-1970s signalled the beginning of a vast procurement campaign targeting Western firms. Most of the equipment sought from Europe was for the enrichment process, including components of the centrifuges themselves (high-frequency inverters, high-vacuum valves, scoops pre-forms, and bottom-bearing pre-forms). The shift to P-2 centrifuges, which occurred in the mid-1980s, required the acquisition of large quantities of maraging steel. The procurement network also sought equipment for the plutonium programme (hot cell manipulators, reprocessing equipment, etc.). Beginning in the early 1980s, Pakistani imports included components for the nuclear weapons themselves (high-speed electronic switches – triggered spark gaps or ‘krytrons’ – in particular). Measuring equipment (oscilloscopes and X-ray machines) was also actively sought. Pakistani imports also included nuclear materials (uranium yellowcake, uranium hexafluoride and tritium) and metals (beryllium).

Pakistani imports from the West ranged from full-scale installations to subcomponents. Some of the more significant imports were uranium-conversion facilities (CES Kalthof GmbH, Germany, late 1970s); 6,500 tubes of maraging steel (Van Doorne Transmissie, Netherlands, late 1970s); a yellowcake production unit (Société d’Etudes et de Travaux pour l’Uranium, France, late 1970s); a reprocessing facility (Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelles, France and Belgonucléaire, Belgium, late 1970s); a heavy-water production facility (Belgonucléaire, late 1970s); and a tritium production facility (Nukleartechnik GmbH, Germany, late 1980s).

China has been the most important state contributor to the Pakistani nuclear programme, though the extent of its assistance is difficult to assess. Nuclear cooperation with China is one of the most closely held state secrets in Pakistan; otherwise forthcoming officials respond to questions on the topic with polite but firm silence. A nuclear agreement was signed with China in late May 1976, on the occasion of Z.A. Bhutto’s visit to Beijing, his third since 1972. The agreement, which he referred to as one of the most important achievements of his presidency, is sometimes seen as having opened the way for co operation in the military sphere. On the Chinese side, however, the military and civilian agreements may have involved different bureaucracies. It is possible that nuclear cooperation on both fronts proceeded in parallel, during a period when both Pakistan and China had few other friends. Beijing’s assistance in the development of Pakistani nuclear weapons was reportedly acknowledged by former foreign minister Gohar Ayub Khan in 1998. China’s assistance became much more important in the 1980s as Western countries and firms became increasingly cautious vis-à-vis the Pakistani programme. The US State Department believed in 1983 that Beijing may have helped Pakistan overcome some of the difficulties it had in mastering enrichment technology, and that bilateral cooperation was possibly taking place in nuclear-device design. China may have supplied uranium hexafluoride (and, according to unconfirmed reports, possibly HEU for up to two weapons) to Pakistan. It also supplied (no later than 1983) a weapon design that had been tested in 1966. Chinese nuclear and missile assistance to Pakistan became an increasing source of both US–China tension and internal US political debate, although other priorities in US–China relations were sometimes seen to pre-empt proliferation-related sanctions. Chinese government assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme apparently ended after the international furore sparked by the 1994–95 transfer of 5,000 ring magnets to KRL from the China Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation. The Clinton administration accepted the claim that senior Chinese government leaders did not know about the transfer, and China pledged in 1996 not to allow any further cooperation with unsafeguarded nuclear facilities. Despite lingering suspicions in some parts of Washington, China’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) from 2004 provides an important confirmation of that pledge.

Several African countries were significant suppliers of uranium. A.Q. Khan’s repeated trips to uranium-rich African countries were at least partly in connection with these imports. In particular, Pakistan is known to have imported about 500 metric tonnes of uranium oxide from Niger in 1979 (only 110 of which were declared and safeguarded, because much of it came secretly via Libya).

How the imports network operated

Pakistan’s nuclear programme involved two types of imports: ‘state to state’, that is, sales or exchanges approved by governments on both ends of the transaction, as was the case with many imports from Western countries until the late 1970s and from friendly countries (China and African states) afterwards; and ‘firm to state’: illegal or un authorised sales from Western firms to Pakistan, generally through intermediaries, including both legitimate businesses and front companies.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Western imports were overseen by M.A. Khan, who was, in a sense, the network’s ‘operational commander’. PAEC’s Directorate of Technical Procurement directed the imports. One of the individuals involved was Anwar Ali, now the chairman of PAEC, who played a key procurement role for KRL before A.Q. Khan took over. Another individual who played a critical role was the physicist Siddique (sometimes reported as Sulfikar) Ahmed Butt, whom Z.A. Bhutto asked in 1972 to organise a purchasing network and who for a long time was the ‘tactical commander’ of the imports network. Butt was posted in Belgium in 1975 and in France after 1977. In July 1975, he began coordinating nuclear-related imports, possibly using A.Q. Khan’s ‘address book’, since the latter had by then started giving relevant contacts and information to Islamabad even before returning to his country in December. In August, the Pakistani embassy in Brussels began inquiring about the possibility of buying inverters. The network began operating in earnest in 1976. A.Q. Khan, by then back in Pakistan, and having brought back a list of dozens of companies that supplied centrifuge parts, played a crucial role, one example being the ‘shopping trip’ for enrichment-related equipment he made with his deputy G.D. Alam to Switzerland in 1976. Khan’s early procurement role, however, mostly involved the management of imports related to centrifuge technology. Butt managed both uranium-related and plutonium-related imports, and remained in charge at least until the late 1980s.

The procurement network’s modus operandi included various techniques that enabled its success and longevity:

· Systematically using Pakistani embassies abroad. From the early 1970s until at least the late 1990s, Pakistani embassies around the world, in particular in Europe, were key components of the network, and used diplomatic pouches to send material home.

· Paying above market premium. Direct contracts with Western industrialists were made easier because Pakistan often paid up to 50% more than the market price.

· Keeping one step ahead of export controls. When export controls began to be applied to plutonium reprocessing, the Pakistanis shifted to HEU production. When export controls were reinforced in the late 1970s, they purchased individual components rather than entire units, and developed industrial facilities to manufacture as many parts as possible. Pakistan also sought to import ‘pre-forms’ (unfinished products), which are not necessarily covered by export controls. British engineer and businessman Peter Griffin, who was a regular supplier to Khan for 25 years, boasts that his shipments conformed to whatever export controls were in place at the time.

· Hiding a critical component in a long list of useless material. This ‘needle in a haystack’ tactic, designed to overwhelm Western export controls, was also used later by A.Q. Khan for Pakistani exports.

· Buying a sample and the means to reproduce it. For instance, in 1981–82 Pakistan tried to buy both metal components for nuclear weapons and equipment (such as precision lathes) used to make them from European companies. Once export controls became more stringent, Pakistan did its best to become self-reliant. As A.Q. Khan put it: ‘once the Western propaganda reached its climax and all efforts were made to stop or block even the most harmless items, we said enough and started indigenous production of all sophisticated electronic, electrical and vacuum equipment’.

· Using multiple connections and buyers to look for a given item. To ensure that at least one sale came through, Pakistan often sent two and even three procurement agents or front companies to buy the same product.

· Using front companies. The network created or used front companies in Pakistan, Europe and intermediary countries. Examples in Pakistan include such companies as Al Technique Corporation of Pakistan, Ltd; Allied Trading Co.; ANZ Importers and Exporters; High Technologies, Ltd; Lastech Associates; Machinery Master Enterprises; Maple Engineering Pvt. Ltd Consultants, Importers and Exporters; Modern Engineering Services, Ltd; Orient Importers and Exporters; Technical Services; and the Tempest Trading Company. Other examples in Pakistan include Asiatic Chemical Industries, Ltd; Karachi Silk Mill Co., and Arshad, Amjad & Abid, Ltd. Examples in the United Kingdom included Weargate, Ltd. In Abu Dhabi the network used the services of Khalid Jassam General Trading. One of the most famous Pakistani front companies was the Institute for Industrial Automation, which was the recipient of transfers organised by Henk Slebos, a Dutch metallurgist Khan met in 1964.

· Falsifying the end user. To evade national export controls and internal procedures established by manufacturing companies, the network systematically falsified end-user certificates and forged order forms. South African court documents detail how two South African-based members of the network, Gerhard Wisser and Daniel Geiges, forged order forms for flow meters and other special equipment from Leybold in Germany for Pakistan’s gas centrifuge enrichment plants. They changed the equipment listed on earlier legitimate orders from an innocent company in South Africa in order to circumvent Leybold’s non-proliferation policy. Upon arrival in South Africa, the equipment was exported to Dubai for onward shipping.

· Using multiple intermediaries. Pakistan also increasingly used intermediaries, shipping items to one state, which would then re-export it to Pakistan, using false end-user certificates. The UAE, Turkey and South Africa were among the countries used as transshipmentpoints.

· Enlisting the help of friendly countries. Libya directly helped Pakistan by playing the role of an intermediary for uranium from Niger, and procuring on its behalf. North Korea was reportedly a conduit for some of China’s assistance for Pakistan’s ballistic missiles.

· Involving Pakistani-born foreign nationals. Through financial or ideological incentives, Pakistan enlisted the contribution of foreign nationals of Pakistani origin. A.Q. Khan made extensive use of this method, asking several of his countrymen to come back to Pakistan, collect information, or assist with the procurement of spare parts.

· Making extensive use of personal connections. It is here that A.Q. Khan made possibly his most significant contribution. After returning to Pakistan, he wrote to several former colleagues to get specific technical information and he continued to expand his personal network of accomplices. Key associates of his included long-time acquaintances: Heinz Mebus, a German businessman who had been a college classmate; Henk Slebos; Peter Griffin, who Khan met in London in 1976; Friedrich Tinner, a Swiss engineer Khan met in the 1970s; Gotthard Lerch, a German engineer Khan met in the 1970s; and Abdus Salam, a British national and another personal friend.

This modus operandi resembled that of Iraq in the 1980s, when Baghdad resorted to an increasingly refined imports strategy which heavily relied on multiple fake companies and sought at least two sources for any given material it needed. Iraqi embassies were heavily involved. Several individuals and companies (German and Swiss in particular) were selling to both countries. The Pakistani network, however, appears to have been more centralised. A British intelligence report in 2003 reportedly listed no less than 95 Pakistani organisations and government bodies, including diplomatic posts abroad, which had assisted in the country’s nuclear imports.

It was a ‘grey’ market rather than a ‘black’ one. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan took advantage of the combination of inadequate export controls and the desire of Western firms to sell technology abroad. The first IAEA guidelines published in 1974 were very limited, and it was only in 1978 that the first NSG guidelines were published. National nuclear export controls initially focused on plutonium, in particular on preventing the sale of heavy-water-moderated reactors and reprocessing plants. In the 1970s, the risk of a non-nuclear country developing enrichment activities for military purposes was not taken very seriously, given the technological know-how required.

Many of the components Khan procured were dual use and used in many other industries. The NSG added controls on dual-use goods in 1992 in response to Iraq’s success in procuring dual-use imports for its covert nuclear weapons programme. Many goods useful to nuclear programmes are not included on control lists at all, because their uses are so varied, and were not properly regulated until exporting countries started adopting ‘catch-all’ controls blocking any export suspected to be destined to a nuclear weapons programme, even if it was not on a control list. Falsifying the end user then became the typical evasion technique used by a procurer.

The weakness of export controls and the fatalism of Western suppliers were the strongest factors abetting the import network. Many industrialists reasoned that ‘if we do not do it, others will’ and deliberately violated the law. A wilful naivety and arrogant scepticism about Pakistan’s ability to put sophisticated machinery to military use also played a role, as in the case of UK-based Emerson Electric, which sold specialist high-frequency converters to Pakistan in the 1970s, even though they had been used in the British uranium enrichment programme. Others believed that the Pakistani programme would remain very limited. Several suppliers did not realise they were helping Islamabad to get nuclear weapons – or did not want to know. According to A.Q. Khan: ‘the Western world would never talk about their own hectic persistent effort to sell everything to us … At the time we received many letters and telexes and people chased us with figures and details of equipment they had sold to Almelo, Capenhurst etc. They literally begged us to buy their equipment.’ Some of the main figures involved in Pakistani imports have stated that they consciously endorsed the spread of nuclear technology, arguing that it would make the world more secure. Peter Griffin offered this justification in a 2006 press interview. The network was indiscriminate with regard to its customers, selling enrichment-related equipment and technology services to both Pakistan and India, according to South African court documents.

European firms were particularly targeted due to the extent of A.Q. Khan’s personal contacts on the continent, the existence of liberal trade policies among European Community members (which allowed Pakistan to hide the final destination of a given piece of equipment), and, perhaps most importantly, the lack of commitment shown by many European countries to more stringent non-proliferation efforts, notwithstanding the wake-up call of the Indian test. Until the end of the Cold War, proliferation was not a great concern, and export controls were weak.

There was also strong resistance to perceived American pressure. Some countries, like France and Switzerland, maintained a self-consciously independent political stance. Others, like Germany and the Netherlands, also made the promotion of exports involving precision engineering a national priority. Many European bureaucrats whose jobs involved export controls may have viewed American pressure to stop exports to Pakistan as a covert attempt to obtain a commercial advantage. Finally, the nuclear market was particularly competitive, and many Europeans did not want to see it dominated by the United States. The Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom wanted a competitive enrichment market, and banded together to form Urenco in 1971. It took some time before attitudes changed and non-proliferation concerns at the highest political level translated into action at the bureaucratic level.

The example of the French contract for a re processing plant is telling. Most of the French officials and industrialists involved realised that Pakistan wanted nuclear weapons, but they also badly wanted access to the then-promising Pakistani defence and nuclear market. In the mid-1970s, a change in government in France and US pressure after the passage of the Symington Amendment in June 1976 led Paris to alter its position. The Chashma contract was eventually suspended in 1978. But Pakistan had little trouble convincing some French technicians to remain with them for some time (with the knowledge of French authorities, who viewed the technicians as a potential source of intelligence on the Pakistani programme).

It should also be noted that many Pakistani scientists and engineers gained crucial knowledge about the enrichment process through education, training and internships in European firms (sometimes under the aegis of UNESCO programmes). A.Q. Khan was the best known of these, but certainly not the only one. Tens of scientists were trained in Europe, in particular in Belgium and Germany.

The large number of German companies involved in Pakistani nuclear imports can be explained by several factors. Firstly, German expertise in machine tools, engineering and precision mechanics is renowned. Germany was also involved in the nuclear enrichment industry through Urenco. Secondly, not being a nuclear power, Germany’s export controls in this field were even less efficient than those of France and the United Kingdom, for reasons of expertise. (For the same reason, scientists and engineers with nuclear expertise from the latter countries were likely to be involved in national nuclear programmes, removed from the private market.) Thirdly, German nuclear export controls were, for a long time, notoriously weaker than those of other major European states. This reflected Bonn’s strong political desire to promote an export-oriented economy. During the 1980s, a decade in which the United States reportedly demarched the Bonn government 100 times about German exports to Pakistan, only two officials were assigned to review licences for the exports of nuclear materials. There was also, to an extent, a deliberate policy of self-assertiveness in the face of US pressure. A.Q. Khan also had extensive contacts in Germany dating from his stay in Europe. As a result, in 1990, a member of the German Parliament could say that his country’s export controllers’ motto was still: ‘you never hear anything, you never see anything – and, in particular, you never block anything’. In 1989, the German magazine Stern reported that throughout the 1980s, no less than 70 German firms had sold nuclear-related goods to enterprises known to be associated with the Pakistani programme.

Many of these factors were evident in other European countries, such as Belgium, France, the Netherlands or Switzerland. Swiss firms were particularly involved in the late 1970s. During a stage when export controls did not have catch-all clauses, the firms stuck to the letter of the legal restrictions and ignored what should have been obvious proliferation risks that did not meet the exact criteria of the restrictions. As in the case of Germany, Bern’s legalistic stance was ‘part of a strategy to promote the interests of Swiss industry’. Some have perceived a long-standing divergence between the Swiss ideal of neutrality (including freedom of trade) and the concept of non-proliferation. These attitudes may have persisted: as late as 2004, a Malaysian police report about the network was seen in some federal circles in Switzerland as a possible attempt to negatively affect the image of Switzerland abroad and the competitiveness of Swiss exports.

Pakistan also actively sought materials and equipment from the United States, which was itself not consistent in enforcing its own export control policy. As late as 1994, a US General Accounting Office report stated that US export controls were still woefully inadequate. Between 1988 and 1992, more than 80% (650 of 808) of applications for exports of nuclear-related equipment to Pakistan were approved. Although most of these were for items with legitimate civilian uses, three went to sensitive end users. There were also a high number of documented ‘failures’ by Pakistan to import nuclear-related material from the United States. This indicates both that the United States was particularly targeted, and that US export controls were more efficient than elsewhere. Indeed, by the late 1990s, US export control officials were routinely using catch-all provisions to deny licenses to many kinds of otherwise innocuous items for both Pakistan and India.

In the 1980s, however, non-proliferation efforts in industrialised countries were still frustrated by a political desire not to interfere with national commerce, and by a bureaucratic rigidity unable to respond to the loopholes provided by globalisation. In addition, there was no real deterrent; those convicted of violations of export controls were generally given short jail sentences, if any. Moreover, as noted above, the Pakistani imports network progressively ‘went underground’ in developing more subtle techniques designed to get around the tightening of Western export controls. The procurement network also used sophisticated financing mechanisms. Pakistan often used banking channels in the Gulf to purchase goods in western Europe more discreetly. The external support for the Pakistani programme from Libya (beginning in the early to mid-1970s when Z.A. Bhutto befriended Colonel Muammar Gadhafi) and Saudi Arabia (reportedly in exchange for security guarantees through the resultant technology) often seems to have made use of the same channels. Libya was probably financing the Pakistani programme through the Pakistan–Libyan Holding Company, a joint venture set up in late 1978. One particular institution, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI, which was closed in 1991), apparently was a key node in the financial network used by Pakistan. The BCCI was originally a Pakistani bank. It was only later restructured into BCCI Société Anonyme (Luxembourg) and BCCI Overseas (Grand Cayman). A US Senate report in 1992 attested to the tangled relationship among BCCI, the Pakistani government and the Pakistani BCCI Foundation, which was created as a means of sheltering BCCI profits from taxation and which in 1981 received tax-free status while Ghulam Ishaq Khan was minister of finance. The foundation used some of the profits it received from Pakistani operations to finance projects the Pakistani government was unable to pay for itself. For example, BCCI provided $10 million in grants in the late 1980s to finance an officially ‘private’ science and technology institute named after Pakistani president G.I. Khan and directed by A.Q. Khan. Around the same time, other BCCI officials arranged nuclear transfers paid for by Pakistani front companies through BCCI-Canada.

Current outlook

Notwithstanding the development of Pakistan’s industrial base over the past 30 years, its nuclear weapons programme is probably not completely self-sufficient. Having based its programme on foreign imports, and disadvantaged by a relatively weak industrial base, Islamabad continues to import foreign components for spare parts and upgrades for the modernisation of its facilities and weapons. Even if Pakistan could produce most parts on its own, it would still have an incentive to seek more advanced, higher-quality components from abroad. Pakistan’s P-2 centrifuges are 20 times less efficient than Urenco’s state-of-the-art TC-21 machines. If Pakistan could obtain more efficient centrifuges through the black market, it would have every reason to do so. Now alert to the problem, Europeans are unlikely to let the technology escape again. The construction of a second, probably much larger, heavy-water-moderated reactor at Khushab, which is currently underway, and the reprocessing plant apparently being built at Chashma and related expansion of the plutonium programme will likely require additional imports.

Evidence that Pakistan continued to try to procure from the nuclear black market even after A.Q. Khan was exposed has surfaced in at least two Western court cases. In one set of cases, Pakistani businessman Humayun Khan and his Israeli associate Asher Karni were found to have sought to illegally export to Pakistan 200 triggered high-speed spark gaps, and ten high-end oscilloscopes. This equipment has medical applications but can also be used to test, develop and detonate nuclear weapons (see page 155). In another case, Rainer Vollmerich, a German businessman, was found to have exported to Pakistan, until 2004, mechanical and electronic equipment with military nuclear use (see page 104).

Recent developments confirm that Pakistan continued to seek nuclear imports even after the exposure of the A.Q. Khan network. This should not come as a surprise, since Khan’s network was only one part of the Pakistani procurement effort. In July 2006, the Russian government revealed Pakistan had been actively searching for nuclear-related technology in the country. In fact, Pakistan had to recreate overseas procurement networks when it learned that some of the middlemen it was using were also procuring for Iran. (Not all reported incidents can be taken at face value, however. The Swiss federal police agency stated that in 2004 it precluded two attempts at exporting aluminium tubes of Russian origin to KRL. Since Pakistan’s P-2s do not use aluminium, the tubes in question apparently have other problematic uses.) According to press reports, in July 2005, a confidential report prepared by European intelligence agencies for the EU reported that Pakistan was still ‘shopping’ for high-grade aluminium, ring magnets and machine tools that could be useful for its nuclear programme: ‘since the beginning of 2004 extensive procurement efforts for the Pakistani nuclear sector have been registered’. The document reportedly said the range of materials and components being bought ‘clearly exceeds’ that required for spare parts and replacements for Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Pakistan’s procurement agents also continue to buy older-generation valves not on the NSG control lists but still serviceable for Pakistan’s purposes. The claim by some Pakistani officials that they need to continue buying abroad because of damage done to key installations by the October 2005 earthquake does not explain why these procurements preceded the earthquake date.

Pakistani nuclear forces: current state and likely evolution

Delivery vehicles

Pakistan’s deterrent capability was originally designed for aircraft delivery (French-origin Mirage-5, US-made F-16 and Chinese A-5 aircraft). Although Pakistan is transitioning to a missile-based force, it would make sense for it to continue to maintain an air-based component. Deliveries of American F-16s for conventional defence could indirectly help Pakistan to maintain a significant air-delivered nuclear capability, if it modifies them for this purpose.

Like the nuclear programme, Pakistan’s missile programme has developed along two distinct tracks. One programme, run by NDC in conjunction with the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission and PAEC, has concentrated since the early 1980s on solid fuel-propelled short-range ballistic missiles. The first model, the Hatf 1 (80km range) was flight-tested in 1989 and fielded in 1992. In 1997 Pakistan revealed the Hatf 2a (300km), and the Hatf 3 (290km), and in 1999 the Hatf 4 (750km), also called the Shaheen 1. The latter three missiles are believed to be based on the Chinese M-11, and many analysts believe the Hatf 2a is a renamed Chinese M-11 missile, 34 of which apparently were imported in 1992. A medium-range solid-propellant Shaheen 2 (2,000km), also called Hatf 6, was first tested in March 2005.

Separately, KRL headed a second programme to produce liquid-propellant missiles. With North Korean assistance, KRL developed the Ghauri (1,500km), originally called Hatf 5, beginning about 1993. TheGhauri is basically a North Korean No-dong (itself a scaled-up Scud). North Korea reportedly supplied 12–25 No-dong assembly kits to Pakistan between 1996 and 1997 and North Korean technicians apparently worked in Pakistan on further development of the missile, which was first tested in April 1998. A two-stage Ghauri-2 (2,000km) was tested on 14 April 1999. It, like a reported third version of the Ghauri (2,500–3,500km), is still under development.

Medium-range ballistic missiles entered the Pakistani arsenal only in 2003; the Shaheen-1 is of limited range (650km), and the Ghauri-1 is liquid-fuelled, and, therefore, less reliable and more vulnerable, as well as less accurate. Pakistan’s long-range strike capability (Shaheen-2, Ghauri-2) is still in its infancy. Pakistani planners refer to the Shaheen-2 as the ‘mainstay’ of the country’s future deterrent. TheGhauri-2 would be kept as a redundant or complementary component, especially since it can reach targets located in the centre of India. Some commentators note that the multiplication of missiles and bases make Pakistan a ‘target-rich’ environment and lessens the possibility of a pre-emptive strike.

Warheads and fissile material stockpile

Estimates of the number of warheads in Indian and Pakistani arsenals vary widely, and each country tends to make a worst-case assessment of the other. Based on the best available information, there does not appear to be a significant overall imbalance in favour of either side. Today, Pakistan probably has about 50 warheads. It also has a significant stockpile of fissile material, enough to build a much larger operational arsenal should it so decide. By the end of 2006, Pakistan was likely to have around 1,300–1,500 kg of HEU (enough for 65–75 weapons), after factoring in the 1998 tests. It also has a stockpile of up to 90kg of plutonium, enough for 11–15 weapons, assuming 6–8kg per weapon. By contrast, India has far less HEU, about 100–300kg, but far more separated plutonium, some 500kg (enough for some 100 weapons) after factoring in reactor fuel production and the 1998 tests. Although Pakistan has less strategic depth and fewer nuclear targets than India (which also has to consider Chinese capabilities), there is no obvious ‘Pakistani nuclear inferiority’ in South Asia.

It is reasonable to assume that Pakistan has at least two different basic nuclear weapon designs. Th, e first was, developed by PAEC and was intended to be carried by PAF aircraft. Its yield is reported to be 10–20 kilotons. The second is a 15–25kt HEU warhead of Chinese origin meant to be carried by aircraft or ballistic missiles. This design came from the fourth Chinese test in 1966. By 1983, US intelligence was aware that Pakistan was in possession of this design. In 1998, A.Q. Khan seemed to confirm the design’s origin when he stated that there was no technical need to proceed with hot tests, since Pakistan had a design ‘of proven reliability’. Based on the bomb design A.Q. Khan passed to Libya, the China/KRL warhead is less than one metre in diameter and weighs about 500kg.

There is a debate among analysts as to whether a warhead based on the Chinese design could be carried by Pakistani short-range missiles. For some, it is ‘much too big’. For others, the warhead was made for Chinese M-11 and was thus suitable for its Pakistani version. In any case, it is certainly suitable for longer-range Pakistani missiles.

It is unknown whether the original recipient of the Chinese weapons design was PAEC or KRL, and whether both laboratories worked from the same blueprint. As noted above, both M.A. Khan and A.Q. Khan worked separately on weaponisation, and as a result it is difficult to know ‘who did what’ (especially since PAEC did not know about KRL’s own weapons efforts until 1984). PAEC would have been the logical recipient of the Chinese design. However, documents found in Libya indicate A.Q. Khan was also working on the Chinese blueprint, so he may have been the one who in fact received the design. Several Western officials have stated that ‘all Pakistan’s atom bombs resemble designs that China tested in the late 1960s and passed on to Pakistan decades ago’. One source said that PAEC’s warhead ‘was so similar to Kahuta’s that Khan believed they had stolen his design’ (typical of Khan’s disparagement of anything relating to his rivals at PAEC). In fact, both parties have argued that their own design was passed along to the other one without their consent. This may very well have been true, a result of a conscious decision by Zia, who wanted both laboratories to work as fast as possible to get the weapon. The two designs may have been different. According to an American official, A.Q. Khan’s weapon ‘was inferior in terms of such things as size, power and efficiency’. However, A.Q. Khan disparaged PAEC’s weapon for being ‘bigger’, meaning less practical for delivery by a ballistic missile, especially on long-range missiles that have less throw-weight.

The tests carried out on 28 and 30 May 1998 were of low-yield, HEU fission weapons. The Pakistanis claim that six different nuclear devices ‘of varying designs, sizes and yields’ were tested. They gave different numbers and data as to the characteristics of the tests. Pakistani officials reported the detonation on 28 May of devices of 25kt and 12kt, and of three sub-kiloton devices; PAEC claimed that the total yield was 40–45kt. A.Q. Khan, for his part, claimed that one of the devices tested that day was a boosted fission device, designed to give a yield of 30–35kt, and that the other four other were tactical devices. For the 30 May test, he reported a yield of 15–18kt.

Uncertainties exist, however, as to the number and types of devices actually tested. Seismological data showed that the official number was almost certainly inaccurate. It was probably given for political reasons (one more test than India). The same data indicated very low yields, in the order of 10kt for 28 May and 5kt for 30 May. As far as the 28 May tests are concerned, US intelligence ultimately concluded that probably no more than two devices were detonated, with a total yield of about 6kt. This indicated that the tests were probably a partial failure, although due to a shortage of fissile materials the Pakistanis may have deliberately exploded ‘scaled-down’ versions of their weapons.

Questions also remain regarding the 30 May test. It was done at a different time, in a different location (Kharan) and with a different setup (vertical shaft). It was reportedly ‘a miniaturized device giving a yield which was 60% of the first tests’, a curious description that may have hidden a fizzle, i.e. a partial failure. It is possible that this was
‘A.Q. Khan’s chance to test’. But the most important question is whether or not it was a plutonium test. Initial US reports and a Los Alamos Laboratories analysis based on air sampling reported that this was the case, and although these findings were later disputed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, the question remains open. One possibility is that Pakistan had enough plutonium in 1998 to make such devices (dubious, but not impossible – see pages 20–21), in which case it would have been a PAEC test and not a KRL one. Another possibility is that one of the two laboratories had obtained plutonium from a foreign source (China or North Korea). A third possibility is that it may have been a ‘composite’ (uranium–plutonium) warhead. Finally, some authors have speculated that this may have been a ‘joint venture’ with Pyongyang, i.e. a North Korean test, although there is no credible evidence for this hypothesis.

Alert levels

Pakistani nuclear systems are kept in a low-alert form, probably to minimise the temptation of an Indian pre-emptive strike or the risk of un authorised launch. Missiles are not mated with warheads and the physics packages (the fissile cores) are not inserted into the warheads themselves. According to the Defence Ministry, the launch mechanism, the device and other mechanisms are kept at different places. Nuclear safety, physical security and access (maintenance) reasons all argue for separating the fissile cores from the warheads.

The time required for putting weapons on launch readiness is uncertain. According to a Pakistani scientist, assembling the weapons would only take ‘minutes’, while another account suggests that assembly would be done ‘within hours’. According to former COAS Mirza Aslam Beg, referring to the whole process of assembly and mating, ‘there would be a gap of hours, or even days before [a weapon] could be put together’. Consistently, Beg has also stated that the weapon components were stored ‘many miles away’ from delivery systems.

‘Minimum deterrence’ requirements

Pakistan’s force levels rely on a principle of ‘minimum deterrence’, which was first publicly announced in 1999. After the 1998 tests, Islamabad reportedly adopted a long-term development plan for its nuclear force, with a 15–20-year horizon in mind. A five-year plan for 2000–05 was also adopted. The desired level of minimum deterrence has reportedly been precisely defined. In fact, Islamabad stated in 2005 that it had reached this threshold. The exact significance of what minimum deterrence means to Pakistan is unclear and probably evolving, but a few elements can be inferred from official statements.

The Pakistani government has consistently said that it rejects the logic of parity, and that its goal is simply to attain the ability to inflict un acceptable damage on India. The Shaheen-2 and Ghauri-2 missiles will soon give Pakistan the possibility of covering the whole of mainland India. The difficulty of defining unacceptable damage to India is admitted by Pakistani planners: one quasi-official report by General Mahmud Durrani states that ‘because of the difficulty in predicting unacceptable damage, overkill would by necessity be built into the response’. Islamabad will err on the side of caution. It insists that the level of minimum deterrence can change over time, in light of the evolution of the threat. According to Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar in 1999, minimum deterrence ‘cannot be quantified in static numbers. The Indian build-up will necessitate review and reassessment. In order to ensure the survivability and credibility of the deterrent Pakistan will have to maintain, preserve and upgrade its capability.’ In particular, he later argued that the concept of sufficiency will be Pakistan’s guide in order that assets remain survivable against any surprise attack.

Guaranteed unacceptable damage implies survivability even after a first strike by the adversary. The Pakistanis are likely to use as a baseline planning assumption the possibility of an Indian pre-emptive strike coupled with the deployment of limited missile defence by New Delhi. Pakistani concerns about the possibility of an Indian first strike are well known, and have been compounded by the recent reinforcement of the US–India partnership. Despite future imports of US and Chinese conventional weapons, Islamabad fears that it will be outpaced by its adversary. India will probably move faster than its neighbour in improving its conventional equipments and command, control, communications and intelligence (C³I) capabilities (in addition to missile defence). One US expert estimates that New Delhi might even gain a ‘decisive’ edge in South Asia around 2020. Because the India–US nuclear cooperation agreement would free up domestic uranium for weapons purposes, it could conceivably give New Delhi the capability to fabricate an additional 12 HEU weapons or 75 plutonium weapons a year. In April 2006, the National Command Authority (NCA) stated that ‘in view of the fact that the [US–India] Agreement would enable India to produce significant quantities of fissile materials and nuclear weapons from unsafeguarded nuclear reactors, the NCA expressed firm resolve that our credible minimum deterrence requirements will be met’. This means that Islamabad is worried that India will be able to acquire a disarming strike capability.

Islamabad’s first military priority since the 2003 face-off with India has been to improve the conventional balance in South Asia. However, the Pakistani nuclear and ballistic missile force is still growing, and will continue to do so in the coming years. Musharraf stated in July 2005 that the country’s nuclear programme was progressing ‘ten times faster than before’. Hyperbole aside, there are three reasons for this growth. Firstly, Islamabad is undoubtedly not yet satisfied with its ability to inflict unacceptable damage on such a large country as India, especially with the low-yield warheads Pakistan is believed to have. Secondly, the Pakistanis are probably tempted to have flexible response and escalation dominance options, given their first-use doctrine (see below). Thirdly, a larger arsenal will protect Pakistan against the risk of an Indian first strike.

As an example of the type of calculations that Pakistani planners may make to that effect, a former SPD officer, using calculations which seem based on classic Cold War models, wrote that for a set of ten possible targets, a country may need as many as 68–70 warheads (without taking into account the risk of a pre-emptive strike).

It would also be logical for Pakistan to develop weapons with larger yields, using tritium (which significantly ‘boosts’ the weapon’s yield) and plutonium (which gives a better yield-to-weight ratio than HEU), and perhaps develop thermonuclear weapons (which would need to be tested). The construction of a second heavy water reactor at Khushab and the apparent construction of a reprocessing plant at Chashma signal that Pakistan indeed intends to significantly develop its plutonium weapons stockpile. Whether or not Pakistan already has operational plutonium weapons remains unclear: in October 2006, Musharraf flatly stated ‘we do not have a plutonium bomb’.

But guaranteed unacceptable damage to India can also be ensured through the protection of Pakistani assets. Islamabad could conceivably follow the ‘Chinese way’ and hide some of its missiles, which are all road-mobile, in mountainous areas. Baluchistan would be the best option for that (the north being another option, but roads there are few and tortuous). Due to its remoteness from India, Baluchistan could probably only host the long-range Shaheen-2 missiles (range 2,500km with a 1,000kg payload). A maritime component is also being considered. The 2004 report by Durrani states flatly that ‘Pakistan will work towards the development of a triad by giving the Pakistani Navy nuclear capability’. However, Pakistani planners do not refer to a naval nuclear-strike capability as a priority. Pakistan’s navy is a small coastal defence force, and would need major upgrading to support any kind of nuclear programme. Establishing a triad with a naval leg will depend on five factors: the scope of planned Indian missile-defence deployments; the build-up by India of its own maritime component; Pakistan’s confidence in the survivability of its land-based missiles; available resources and technical obstacles; and the navy’s ability to defend its interests. Such a component would rely on Babur cruise missiles (500km), for which a specific weapon may need to be developed.

Pakistan’s priorities in the nuclear domain for the coming 10–20 years are to improve survivability, penetrability and C³I capabilities. Pakistan’s nuclear programme can be expected to continue to be
military-led and needs-driven, with planning based on rational strategic calculations. Forecasts about the future evolution of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal must also take into account the unquantifiable impact of political debate and public opinion, which, to date, is very solidly in support of the nuclear programme, and unquestioning about its details. In particular, no Pakistani leader can afford to appear ‘weak’ vis-à-vis India. This may impact procurement decisions.

Arms control

It is unlikely that Pakistan would be the first of the four Asian nuclear-capable countries to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), unless Islamabad took the bold decision to do so after a final testing campaign – not unlike France in 1995. It is equally unlikely that Pakistan will be the first to test again. At the same time, if India were to test, Islamabad would probably seize the opportunity for both technical reasons (improving reliability and security, testing new designs) and political ones (settling the score again). Improving the plutonium formulas, testing a small warhead for the Babur missile, and perhaps also testing fusion designs, would be possible objectives of a second Pakistani testing campaign, which is all the more likely to happen since Pakistan, like India, has a small nuclear arsenal, which puts a premium on reliability.

There are thus three scenarios, ranging from the most likely to the least likely: (a) Pakistan resumes testing after an Indian testing campaign, CTBT signature and ratification then becomes an option; (b) Pakistan resumes testing after a critical design flaw is detected in one of its warheads formulas; (c) Pakistan announces that it is joining the CTBT after conducting a final testing campaign.

As noted above, Pakistan has produced a fairly large stockpile of fissile material. If Islamabad refrains from worse-case assumptions, this could make it easier for Pakistan to join a Fissile-Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT). However, Pakistan will want to avoid any regime that would give a ‘perpetual edge’ to India in this regard. Therefore, Islamabad’s position is that three conditions should be met for any FMCT: (a) stockpile reductions should be progressive, (b) transfers of stockpiles to civilian use should be organised so that states with the largest stockpiles lead the way in a verifiable fashion, and (c) caps on future stocks should reduce asymmetries in existing stocks. Pakistani officials insist that any FMCT should be ‘non-discriminatory’ and ‘universal’.

The US–India nuclear deal is likely to induce caution in Pakistani minds. They are concerned that India’s plutonium stockpile, already bigger than Pakistan’s, will overwhelm Pakistan’s capabilities in the future. For political reasons, but also for strategic ones (the fear of pre-emption), Islamabad does not want to be outpaced by New Delhi. Thus Pakistan could not participate in a FMCT without India doing so as well, and in the process reducing any asymmetry.

All Pakistani reactors, with the exception of Khushab, are placed under IAEA safeguards (see chart, page 19). However, the Pakistani government admits that it would be difficult to separate installations dedicated to civilian use from those dedicated to military use.

Nuclear policy, doctrine and planning

Rationales for nuclear weapons

According to a quasi-official report, ‘Pakistan’s nuclear capability is solely for the purpose of deterrence of aggression and defence of sovereignty’.

As with most if not all nuclear weapons programmes, there is a political component in Pakistan’s drive for nuclear weapons. Z.A. Bhutto wanted Pakistan to ‘walk tall’. Maintaining equality with India was a primary motivation for him. Being the first Muslim nation to be endowed with nuclear weapons was also a matter of pride for the Pakistanis, and to this day the programme remains popular in Islamist circles. Domestically, popular support for the programme helped Z.A. Bhutto consolidated his political base and control of the army, which has always played a dominant role in politics as well as national security. Externally, nuclear status was a way to boost Pakistan’s prestige among Muslim nations, including rich Gulf monarchies.

This rationale continued to exist after the 1977 coup that toppled Z.A. Bhutto. In the late 1970s, one scholar noted, ‘Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme became synonymous with national sovereignty and national prestige, even when it was run by the very military that had eliminated Pakistan’s best-known populist politician’.

But the primary rationale for the Pakistani bomb was always focused on security. Islamabad’s humiliating loss of East Pakistan in the 1971 war was a key motivation: Pakistan needed the bomb to ensure its very survival. This ‘never again’ rationale was bolstered by two considerations. One was the perceived inevitability of the Indian bomb after the 1974 test. Another was the perceived lack of a credible security guarantee, from China or the United States.

In Washington’s view, its pledge to defend Pakistan under the terms of the 5 March 1959 US–Pakistan Cooperation Agreement was operative only in case of communist aggression. Pakistan saw it differently and sought more comprehensive security guarantees. It was surprised in 1962 when Washington supported India against China. President John F. Kennedy provided a secret guarantee a few weeks after the war, valid only in case of Indian aggression. Islamabad was disappointed in 1965 and 1971 when the United States did not come to its support against India. (In 1965, Pakistan invoked the 1959 accord, but Washington chose to suspend aid to both parties. In 1971, Islamabad saw that the deployment of an US carrier battle group in the Gulf of Bengal did not have any impact on the conflict.) Pakistan came to believe that its security could be sacrificed on the altar of great-power politics. The Pakistanis continued to ask Washington for formal guarantees, in particular in 1980 and 1998, but to no avail. As Musharraf puts it, ‘we knew we could not count on American protection alone’.

Pakistani leaders regard China as their ‘reliable ally’ (to distinguish it from the ‘unreliable’ United States), but they are aware that even China cannot be counted on for help under all circumstances. When Pakistan sought assistance during its 1965 war with India, Beijing urged it to withdraw its forces from Indian territory. In the 1971 conflict, China officially sided with Pakistan but was of limited help in the face of Soviet threats to destroy China’s nascent nuclear force. During the 1999 Kargil crisis, Beijing appears to have privately echoed the US demand that Pakistan withdraw the infiltrators who had taken up positions on the Indian side of the Line of Control in Kashmir. Chinese leaders, who face their own Islamist separatist challenge in Xinjiang, have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the Pakistan-sponsored insurgency in Kashmir.

While Pakistan is the only country in the world allied to both the United States and China, Islamabad does not believe that either of the two would be ready to risk war to support Pakistan in case of new hostilities in South Asia. And, always worried about Indian conventional superiority, Pakistan considers nuclear weapons as a means to compensate for a possible defeat on the battlefield. Washington has made clear in recent years that its one-time policy of providing Pakistan a technological edge to counter India’s numerical superiority is no longer applicable, and in any case India’s military acquisition budget now dwarfs any foreseeable amount of US military aid.

Finally, an added perceived benefit of the nuclear programme – though probably not an initial motive – was that through it, Pakistan could pursue support for the Kashmir insurgency while deterring a massive Indian conventional retaliation. This misguided belief led to the disastrous Kargil adventure.

Nuclear policy

After the 1998 tests, Pakistan proceeded to a full-scope nuclear review, involving the National Defence College, to develop and test ideas and concepts. In late 1998, doctrine and organisation began to be redesigned. According to one source, the country adopted a three-point nuclear policy in early 2001: Islamabad would not be the first to resume nuclear testing, would not engage in a nuclear arms race with any country, and would not export nuclear technology. Another source reports that a new defence policy was adopted in March 2004. This policy reportedly intended to ‘further strengthen the process of institutionalization of control of strategic assets’ and ‘turn all policies and decisions from an invisible secrecy into a solid documentary form following the recent nuclear proliferation scandal.’

Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister, publicly announced a principle of ‘minimum credible deterrence’ in May 1999. Pakistan’s declared nuclear policy today is ‘to deter all forms of external aggression that can endanger our national security’ by maintaining a minimum credible deterrence. ‘Pakistan will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states’ and vows that it is against an open-ended arms race in South Asia. The overarching principles are said to be ‘restraint’ and ‘responsibility’. As noted above, Pakistan insists that it rejects the logic of parity; that is, it does not seek an arsenal equivalent to that of India. More recently, the Pakistani government has been using the expression ‘minimum defensive deterrence’. This semantic change (from ‘credible’ to ‘defensive’) may be a way for Pakistan to differentiate its concept from India’s stated policy of the same name.

According to Durrani’s report, these ideas translate into four objectives: (1) deterrence of all forms of external aggression; (2) building to this effect ‘an effective combination of conventional and strategic forces, at adequate levels within the resources constraints’; (3) avoiding a pre-emptive strike through protection and the threat of retaliation; and (4) stabilising strategic deterrence in South Asia.

Nuclear doctrine

Pakistan has consistently stated that its nuclear weapons are solely intended to deter military aggression. Officials stress that ‘the use of nuclear weapons as a war-fighting tool is not a contemplated doctrine in Pakistani strategic thinking’. A few statements have referred to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD), suggesting that the Pakistani deterrent may have a role in discouraging chemical or biological attacks. This is all the more likely after India stated in 2003 that its official policy of ‘no-first-use’ would be reviewed in case of a chemical or biological attack. However, Pakistan’s policy is also in line with the ‘negative security assurances’ given by nuclear weapon states: it will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. This means, in practice, that Pakistan reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a hypothetical Indian chemical or biological attack.

Pakistan also reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to non-strategic attacks by India as a ‘last resort’. There have been consistent statements by Pakistani officials since 1987 about the nuclear threshold: ‘if our existence is threatened’ (A.Q. Khan, 1987); to ‘defend the territorial integrity’ of Pakistan (Nawaz Sharif, 1999); if its ‘national integrity was threatened’ (Musharraf, 2000); ‘if its existence is threatened’ (Foreign Minister Inamul Haq, 2000); ‘only if the very existence of Pakistan as a state is threatened’ (Lt–Gen. Khalid Kidwai, 2001).

Pakistan also threatens nuclear retaliation in case of a preventive or pre-emptive strike. Announcing the 1998 tests, Nawaz Sharif stated that ‘these weapons are to deter aggression, whether nuclear or conventional’. Pakistan told India in 1998 that an attack against its nuclear installations (which are the subject of a non-aggression agreement between the two countries) would elicit ‘swift and massive retaliation with unforeseen consequences’. More precisely, according to Durrani’s report, the policy is ‘deterrence of Pakistan’s adversaries from attempting a counter-force strategy against its strategic assets by effectively securing the strategic assets and threatening nuclear retaliation should such an attempt be made’.

Since the 1998 nuclear tests, Pakistan has made a considerable effort to think through its nuclear doctrine, and to integrate the nuclear dimension into its defence strategy. This is made clear, for instance, by the fact that strategic force commanders are now invited to participate in corps commanders meetings. The definition of potential thresholds has been refined, at least in public statements by Pakistani officials. The most authoritative of these statements are made by SPD personnel, in the form of four thresholds which were first mentioned by Kidwai in late 2001.

· The spatial threshold. The penetration of Indian forces into Pakistani territory on a large scale may elicit a nuclear response. One can imagine that the critical distance would vary according to the location: the threshold could be low in Pakistani Kashmir because of the symbolic value of the region, and also in Punjab, the ‘core’ of Pakistani power. This would be particularly true if the major city of Lahore, located only 30km from the border, were threatened. Many analysts, including some Indians, believe that the Indus Valley, the ‘lifeline’ of Pakistan, is another ‘red line’ that Indian forces should not cross. The capture of key objectives in this crucial northeast–southwest axis (such as Multan, Rahimyar Khan, Sukkur or Hyderabad) might well provoke nuclear retaliation by Pakistan.

· The military threshold. The destruction of a large part of Pakistani land or air forces could lead to a nuclear response if Islamabad believed that it was losing the cohesiveness of its defence and feared imminent defeat. Here Pakistani thinking is identical to the guidelines given to the NATO commanders during the Cold War. This criterion is even more important for the Pakistani army because of its critical role in maintaining the country’s stability. As noted above, an attack on a nuclear installation has also been posited as a threshold.

· The economic threshold. Economic strangulation is also a potential Pakistani red line. This primarily refers to a potential Indian Navy blockade of Karachi (the main port), or the stopping of the Indus water flow (the ‘lifeline’ of Pakistan). It could also refer to the capture of vital arteries such as the Indus.

· The political threshold. Finally, Pakistani planners suggest that a destabilisation of the country by India could also be a nuclear threshold if Islamabad believed that the integrity of the country were at stake. Stated scenarios are political destabilisation or large-scale internal destabilisation. One example would be encouraging the breakaway of one or more Pakistani provinces.

Pakistani planners insist that these thresholds are indicative scenarios and that they should not be viewed in isolation one from another.

Nuclear planning

Like India’s statements, Pakistani rhetoric on nuclear planning is oriented towards massive retaliation. As early as 1987, Zia is reported to have told Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi: ‘if your forces cross our borders by an inch, we are going to annihilate your cities’. In 2002, Musharraf used similar language. He stated that ‘any incursion by the Indian forces across the Line of Control will unleash a storm that will sweep the enemy’ and he underlined Pakistan’s ability to inflict ‘unbearable damage to the enemy’. The classic expression ‘unacceptable damage’ is widely used in Pakistan. Islamabad believes in the theory of ‘deterrence of the strong by the weak’; that is, the possibility of a smaller country deterring a larger one through the threat of damage incommensurate with the stakes of the conflict. American scholar Peter Lavoy emphasises that escalation dominance operates at all rungs of the military ladder – from low-intensity conflict through to nuclear war.

It is thus assumed that Pakistani nuclear planning would target Indian cities, due to the relatively low number of warheads it is believed to have, and the poor accuracy of most missiles currently in service (see page 23). Musharraf is reported as saying that Pakistan’s aim is to be able to have ‘enough missile capacity to reach anywhere in India and destroy a few cities, if required’. Pakistani analysts regularly mention numbers in the region of a dozen cities. Delhi is probably first and foremost amongst them: because Pakistan has a small number of low-yield warheads, it is likely to have a strategy akin to that of the United Kingdom during the Cold War, which primarily targeted Moscow. It has also been suggested that a deterrence strategy that threatens large populations is justified in Pakistan in Islamic terms as a suitable way of employing ‘terror’ in warfare. However, it is also likely that as its nuclear force grows and evolves, Pakistan will diversify its set of potential targets, as other nuclear-capable countries have done. In a discussion of the ‘pain threshold of the opponent’, Pakistan Army Brigadier Naeem Ahmad Salik identifies possible targets as ‘major population centres, industrial complexes, major military bases, and communication hubs’.

Islamabad will certainly want to avoid an all-or-nothing strategy, both to reserve forces for a second strike and for other strategic and political reasons. It has certainly also developed limited options, on Indian territory but also perhaps on its own territory. Invading Indian forces might be targeted by low-yield weapons. The goal of such a strike might be not only to signal resolve, but also perhaps to force Washington to intervene, politically or even militarily. Technically, a strike on an Indian formation would be feasible without excessive collateral damage: many areas along the border are sparsely populated, and prevailing winds blow eastward.

Being in a situation of perceived conventional inferiority vis-à-vis a mortal enemy, Pakistan’s conception of nuclear planning is close to NATO Cold War thinking, and its employment policy may very well look like flexible response. Despite Islamabad’s rhetoric about a massive retaliation-type response – a choice that some commentators believe would be logical given the lack of strategic depth – it is likely that Pakistani doctrine allows for some limited nuclear options. Pakistani interest in Western concepts of controlled escalation can be traced back to US military training given in the late 1950s, both in Pakistan at the Quetta staff college and in the United States. Given the small size of its force, however, a more appropriate reference might be the French two-rung escalation ladder of a final warning followed if needed by unacceptable damage.

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A.Q. Khan and onward proliferation from Pakistan

Chapter three
This chapter examines the known cases of nuclear exports undertaken by the A.Q. Khan network (and, in the case of North Korea, by Khan himself, independent of his foreign associates) and is intended to enable a fuller understanding of the involvement and responsibilities of each of the various actors at work: Khan, his foreign business partners and the relevant Pakistani authorities, military and civilian. After describing the conditions that allowed Khan to make the transition from importing for Pakistan’s national nuclear programme to exporting to other states through his own independent network, the chapter examines, in chronological order, the interactions between Khan and Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya, and notes the unanswered questions about what Khan sold and to whom else he might have offered his nuclear wares.

Transition from imports to exports
From the outset, Pakistani government authorities provided A.Q. Khan with a remarkable degree of power and autonomy, partly because he demanded it, partly because of the very sensitive nature of his work, and partly because he was able to achieve tangible results faster than the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), the rival scientific laboratory to Khan Research Laboratories (KRL). At first, President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto directed the nuclear weapons programme personally, without much bureaucratic involvement. A small organisation was set up to troubleshoot security, finances and other issues that A.Q. Khan or PAEC Chairman Munir Ahmad Khan raised; its job was not to regulate the activities of either KRL or PAEC.

As A.Q. Khan began to make real progress with his centrifuge project at Kahuta, Bhutto’s successor, General Zia ul-Haq, who did not particularly care for the PAEC chairman, provided A.Q. Khan with further sweeping responsibilities. Because of mounting concerns about US and other foreign intelligence penetration, Zia ordered increased secrecy and compartmentalisation of the nuclear weapons programme, thus allowing Khan to operate much more independently.

An unhealthy rivalry with PAEC propelled Khan towards even greater secrecy and opaque business practices. The Pakistani government encouraged the strategic laboratories’ rivalry and was only interested in tangible results for the weapons programme. The fact that Khan operated beyond the remit of the vaguely stated laboratory guidelines surprised nobody, as every official involved in the nuclear programme recognised that improvisation of various sorts was required to circumvent foreign export controls and other international non-
proliferation constraints. While PAEC was accountable to governmental authorities, KRL was not, and it expanded its responsibilities beyond its mandate into designing bombs, developing trigger mechanisms, reducing uranium gas into metal and working on design assembly itself. It is unclear whether this initiative had been officially sanctioned by the authorities or was a unilateral decision on Khan’s part. Apparently, Zia had privately authorised the more results-oriented A.Q. Khan to continue activities that were parallel to programmes that PAEC was conducting. In turn, Zia encouraged M.A. Khan to report on A.Q. Khan. The bitter rivalry between the two organisations handicapped the safeguarding of Pakistan’s nuclear secrets.

The PAEC–KRL rivalry was played out in three significant ways. The first was a public-relations battle waged by each organisation to win popularity by defaming the other. KRL employed at least 20 journalists in this vein, with PAEC following suit, but to a far lesser extent. The second aspect was fierce bureaucratic infighting. More generally, this rivalry stimulated Khan to operate beyond the vague governmental guidelines and to undertake his procurement and production activities in extreme secrecy – partly so that PAEC officials could not discover what he was up to. PAEC’s failure to procure a plutonium reprocessing facility was partially blamed on its hesitant leadership and outmoded bureaucracy. In contrast, A.Q. Khan’s success in achieving his objectives confirmed the value of being freed from bureaucratic constraints. During the 1980s, Pakistan found itself immersed in clandestine activity. The covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan made Pakistan a hub of covert supplies and transfers. This environment enabled Pakistan to bring in nuclear-related shipments under the guise of other clandestine weapons and equipment bound for Afghanistan’s ‘jihad’. Pakistani import- and export-control organisations (customs, immigration, etc.) became more inefficient and corrupt.

By the mid-1980s, A.Q. Khan had begun work on a second-generation centrifuge design, designated the P-2 (like the P-1, based on a Urenco design – see pages 18, 20), which had rotors made of maraging steel (an iron alloy that has superior strength without losing malleability), enabling it to spin at twice the speed of P-1 centrifuges and to enrich uranium more than twice as efficiently. As the acquisition priorities of KRL gradually shifted to materials required for the advanced P-2 designs, Khan was left with an surplus inventory of P-1 centrifuges and related components. This gave him and his foreign-based partners the opportunity for a more profitable business model by exploring export markets. In two notable instances, however – those of both Iran and Libya – it may have been a case of interested customers first reaching out to the network, rather than the other way around, although accounts differ on this and many other points. To meet the growing demand for its wares, the network established a nuclear supply line with a life of its own. Thus, instead of reducing the supply line after Pakistan had acquired the essential ingredients to produce weapons-grade material, the network redoubled its acquisition efforts to go after more advanced technologies (for the P-2 centrifuges), as well as greater quantities of materials which were not needed by Pakistan but could be resold to customers elsewhere in the market for P-1 centrifuges.

Khan’s nuclear acquisition activities were largely unsupervised by Pakistani governmental authorities and his orders of many more components than Pakistan’s own enrichment programme required apparently went undetected. He had access to autonomous import and export privileges that no other organisation in the country possessed. It is unclear whether the excessive orders placed by Khan all arrived in Pakistan or went to Dubai for storage or dispatch to their final destination. Having expanded into other areas related to the manufacture of nuclear weapons and their associated delivery systems, Khan now had reason to seek more foreign shipments and to charter more aircraft to transport the goods. No one apart from the president had authority to question the contents or justification of Khan’s imports or exports. This was owing to Zia’s decision to give Khan a very long leash as long as he delivered the goods for Pakistan’s own bomb programme – which he always did.
Most of Khan’s onward proliferation deals were struck during a particular era of Pakistan’s troubled political life. Between August 1988 (when Zia died) and October 1999 (when Pervez Musharraf took over), the structure of power in the country was diffuse and complex, with three different poles: the presidency, the army and the prime minister. The civilian leaders had little involvement in nuclear matters, policymaking was personalised and democratic institutions were weak. For over two decades, from 1976 onwards, Khan’s foreign travels were not checked and his itinerary was a national secret, especially after the trial in the Netherlands, for which he was sentenced in absentia (see page 18). The Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was the only other organisation that escaped governmental accountability, due to the covert nature of its role in the war in Afghanistan and in other intelligence and counter-intelligence operations.

The fact that Khan was privy to the highest national secrets meant that his activities could not be easily questioned. His security apparatus was not designed to monitor him, but rather to protect him and his organisation from external spies and anything that might compromise his foreign procurement for Pakistan’s nuclear programme. All KRL security personnel reported to him, and those military officers posted to him or other strategic organisations were appointed by the army after screening. Most were either retired or on the verge of retiring from military service, and a posting to guard the most coveted national organisation became a matter of pride. Security personnel were assured that there would be financial benefits and privileges so long as Khan considered them to be indispensable to the security and advancement of the programme.
The network of brokers, financiers and front companies that Khan created to supply Pakistan’s enrichment programme was also available to him for the new export opportunity that had become apparent. Khan’s network initially consisted of a loosely connected set of intermediaries, which gradually evolved into a business enterprise. Contacts with Iran in 1987 represented the first known case of foreign associates working on Khan’s behalf for purposes other than importing goods and technology for Pakistan.

Iran
The Khan network’s first known involvement in onward proliferation started with a discreet overture from Iran during the Zia regime in the mid-1980s. According to officials who were close to Zia, Iran approached the Pakistani government through official channels but did not receive the fuel-cycle technology it was seeking. Although the Pakistani press reported in November 1986 that Zia had given a green light to an Iranian request for nuclear cooperation, according to his aides he directed his nuclear programme managers just to ‘play around’ with the Iranians ‘but not to yield anything substantial at any cost’. Zia calculated that the initiation of civil nuclear cooperation with Iran was a prudent way to satisfy the political imperative of maintaining good relations with Tehran while at the same time not compromising Pakistan’s own covert nuclear weapons effort. He did not want to invite even more international non-proliferation scrutiny and pressure at a time when Islamabad was attempting to manufacture nuclear weapons while simultaneously maintaining close military ties with the United States. Pakistani officials across the board insist that Zia did not approve any nuclear dealings with Iran that would involve the provision of sensitive technology. They argue that his strong Sunni beliefs and his strategy to increase the role of Sunni Islam throughout Pakistani society and official institutions put him at odds with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and made any sensitive dealings with Iran very unlikely.
In 1987, the chairmen of the Pakistani and Iranian atomic energy commissions entered into a formal agreement on peaceful nuclear cooperation that emerged from official contacts beginning in February 1986 when Iran’s President Seyyed Ali Khamenei (later supreme leader) visited Pakistan. This deal included a provision for Pakistani scientists to train at least six Iranians at the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH), training that was also offered to other Muslim countries. That month, A.Q. Khan reportedly visited Iran’s Bushehr reactor to witness the damage caused by Iraqi bombing of the facility. In this and in subsequent visits he promoted centrifuges as a viable uranium enrichment technique, a technology that Iran had begun to explore in 1985.

In early 1987 KRL scientists began to publish papers describing the construction of more advanced centrifuges with maraging steel. Because KRL was now openly boasting about its technical capabilities, foreign intelligence operatives started taking notice, and some entered into direct communications concerning possible business transactions with Khan and his cohorts.

1987 deal
After Zia parried Iran’s request for sensitive nuclear cooperation, Iranian intelligence agents apparently set about trying to find another way of tapping into Pakistan’s nuclear technology. The first confirmed contacts occurred in 1987. Which side initiated it is unclear; Iran was looking to buy and Khan had goods to sell. One contact was made in Switzerland, possibly through one of Khan’s long-time associates and regular suppliers, German engineer Gotthard Lerch. The first substantial deal occurred in 1987 in Dubai, where Iranian officials reportedly met Indian-born businessman S. Mohamed Farouq, head of the family-run computer import–export company SMB Group, and his Sri Lankan nephew Buhary Syed Ali Tahir. (S. Mohamed Farouq should not be confused with Muhammad Farooq, a centrifuge expert at KRL, who was involved extensively with Khan’s nuclear smuggling.) SMB had sold computers to Khan and continued to operate a legitimate computer business until at least 2004, but by 1987 Farouq and Tahir were also ready to act as Khan’s agents in marketing P-1 centrifuge components. The reported presence in some of the 1987 Dubai meetings of German engineer Heinz Mebus (who died in 1992), another long-time friend and supplier to Khan, is further evidence that the Khan network was already developing into a multinational import–export organisation. A key Iranian interlocutor in the 1987 meetings was reportedly Mohammad Eslami, representing an Iranian military front company. Eslami is now a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; his involvement indicates the military orientation of the Iranian nuclear research and development programme from as far back as 1987.

In a meeting in 1987, the Khan network submitted a one-page handwritten offer, consisting of a menu from which the Iranian buyers could choose, with prices reportedly ranging from millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. In what was cast as a five-point phased development plan, Iran was offered: a disassembled sample of P-1 centrifuge machines; drawings, descriptions and specifications for production; drawings, specifications and calculations for a complete plant; materials for 2,000-centrifuge machines; and auxiliary vacuum and electric drive equipment. The Iranians reportedly closed a deal for $3 million in Dubai in 1987. They did not buy everything on the list, instead deciding to procure some items on their own, using the supplier information that Khan had also provided as a ‘buyer’s guide’.

At a 1987 meeting in Dubai, or perhaps later (Iran has not been forthcoming to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the details), the network provided a 15-page document describing procedures for the re-conversion and casting of uranium metal into hemispheres, which IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei later characterised as ‘related to the fabrication of nuclear weapons components’ and a ‘matter of concern’. Iran’s claim that the Khan network provided the document on its own initiative is not consistent with what is known about the exchange of price lists. The IAEA has not reported any evidence to contradict Iran’s claims that it did not purchase the uranium re-conversion and casting equipment or do anything else with the document. In 2005, Iran showed both the one-page handwritten offer and the 15-page design document to the IAEA, but, as of April 2007, has not allowed it to take the originals back to Vienna, where they could be subject to forensic examination to provide further clues as to their origin. In 2005, Iran also showed the IAEA other documents relating to the 1987 offer, including: drawings of components and assemblies of P-1 centrifuges; technical documents describing manufacturing, assembly and operational procedures; diagrams of research centrifuge cascades; and a design layout for six cascades of 168 machines each. Iran later built a pilot plant at Natanz designed to hold six cascades of 164 machines each.

Pakistani government attitudes
After the deaths of Zia in 1988 and Khomeini in 1989, new leaderships emerged in each country that were much more inclined towards mutual cooperation on a wide range of issues. In Pakistan, General Mirza Aslam Beg, the new chief of army staff, openly supported Iran’s cause and suggested that Pakistan cooperate with Iran, Afghanistan and any new Islamic republics that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in an alliance of sorts organised around ‘strategic defiance’ of the United States and its Western allies. Beg has also been an ardent supporter of Iran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons. Although his direct involvement is unconfirmed and he denies it, he is widely suspected of having been an accomplice of A.Q. Khan at least in terms of awareness, if not encouragement or even outright direction. According to US Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley and Assistant Secretary of Defense Henry Rowen, Beg threatened to transfer nuclear technology to Iran if Washington cut off arms sales to Pakistan.

Two unnamed former high-level Pakistani officials were reported as saying that in 1989 President Hashemi Rafsanjani sought Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s consent regarding a deal for nuclear weapons technology that Beg had initiated. The two officials say she told both Rafsanjani and Beg that she did not approve. For his part, Beg was quoted as saying that, by Bhutto’s own account, it was she who had been approached by the Iranians with a similar proposition for a $4 billion transfer. Beg also said Iran was willing to pay $6bn or more. This price, however, seems exaggerated as it is very much higher than Khan’s 1987 and 1993 enrichment deals with Iran.

Although Beg denies having authorised any onward proliferation from Pakistan to Iran, he has confirmed that serious nuclear discussions took place between the nations at that time. According to an unnamed former cabinet minister, these talks continued after Benazir Bhutto’s departure from office in 1990. Several sources have reported that an agreement was reached in 1991 between General Asif Nawaz, Beg’s successor as chief of army staff, Rafsanjani and General Mohsen Rezai, head of the Revolutionary Guard, which involved Pakistani nuclear weapons-related technology in return for Iranian oil. Oakley claimed that Beg agreed to abandon the deal at his urging, and that Nawaz Sharif (the new prime minister) and Ghulam Ishaq Khan (Zia’s successor as president and a trusted insider since the days of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) told Rafsanjani that the deal had not been approved by the president or the parliament and that Pakistan would not implement it. Western intelligence officials worried at the time that a deal might have involved a nuclear weapon design that Pakistan had originally obtained from China (which later turned out to be the case for Khan’s deal with Libya).
G.I. Khan provided continuity in the direction of the nuclear weapons programme and protected A.Q. Khan from government oversight (see chapter four). Several of Benazir Bhutto’s advisers, including her security affairs adviser, Major General Imtiaz Ali, and her military secretary, Zulfiqar Ali, reportedly encouraged meetings between Khan and Iran. Bhutto was reportedly aware of the nuclear discussions during both of her terms of office (1988–90 and 1993–96). These individual leaders may all have been inclined to help Iran, especially after the autumn of 1990. The US reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (2 August) and the first-ever refusal by the White House to certify to Congress that Pakistan did not have a military nuclear programme because of the incontrovertible evidence to the contrary (1 October) gave ammunition to those, such as Beg, who urged defiance of the West.

However, no evidence has emerged that a clear directive was ever given to Khan to provide nuclear technology to Iran. In any case, the onward proliferation not only continued after the departure of G.I. Khan, B. Bhutto and Beg from power, but also expanded, from 1994. The diffusion of domestic political power among the troika of the president, prime minister and army chief obscured the command and control authority over the covert nuclear weapons programme. Further, as these power centres jockeyed for supremacy, each undermined the standing of the other. This situation provided Khan with a relatively free rein as long as he did not alienate the collective leadership and continued to produce the desired results for the nation’s nuclear weapons programme.

1993–94 deal
Iran received more from A.Q. Khan than nuclear designs and equipment. The equipment supply documents the Khan network provided the Iranians allowed them to contact suppliers in Europe, Russia and Asia to acquire nuclear-related equipment and technologies. However, officials in Tehran realised that mere shopping was not enough, and they again turned to Khan for assistance. Iran claims that there were no contacts with the network between 1987 and mid-1993, when it says Tahir offered to supply an Iranian company with P-1 designs and components for 500 P-1 machines, as well as drawings for the more advanced P-2 centrifuges. After the preliminary contacts, Rafsanjani sent Iranian officials to Dubai to meet with Tahir and Farouq. A deal was struck, an initial payment of $3m was made, and the first deliveries started in early 1994 using Iranian merchant ships. The total amount of money Iran paid and to whom it went is unknown. Whether Iran obtained more than the 500 unassembled centrifuges it admitted to receiving from the Khan network is also unknown. Iran told the IAEA in 2003 that the centrifuges in its possession were domestically produced. But because the components had been used in Pakistan’s own enrichment work, they had traces of highly enriched uranium (HEU) particles. When the IAEA inspectors produced evidence of those particles, Iran acknowledged the foreign origin of the centrifuges.

Some of the old centrifuge machines were reportedly damaged when the Iranians unpacked and tried to assemble them. Iranian scientists found it difficult to advance from research to operational enrichment, and blamed their lack of progress on the ‘poor-quality components’ provided by the Khan network. Acquiring the components, their specifications and detailed drawings, however, allowed Iran to skip many research steps, in both centrifuge operations and component manufacturing. It was able to embark on a strategy to make thousands of centrifuges on its own and to order parts from companies in the Khan network. Iran continued to draw on the advice of network intermediaries, by its own admission meeting with them 13 times between 1994 and 1999.

As Pakistan–Iran relations began to deteriorate over the mounting proxy war and sectarian tensions in Afghanistan, business with the Khan network continued, although the Iranians did not entirely trust A.Q. Khan because of the troubles they were experiencing with his centrifuges. Diversifying away from its reliance on Khan, Iran sought other suppliers for the components and materials it required. An Iranian contractor acknowledged seeking to procure 4,000 magnets for use in P-2 centrifuges from a European intermediary. Iran claims that none were delivered from the intermediary in question, but that other magnets relevant to P-2 centrifuges were procured from other foreign suppliers in 2002.

In 2006, when the IAEA was able to interview Tahir for a second time (following up an initial 2004 interview), he claimed, with no hint of purposeful exaggeration, that three complete P-2 centrifuges were sent to Iran in 1997 as a model for manufacturing more. However, he provided no supporting documentation. Iran also admits to having received P-2 designs from the Khan network, but claims it obtained no P-2 centrifuges from abroad and that no work was carried out on the P-2 design prior to 2002. The IAEA has found inconsistencies in Iran’s story about the P-2s, which, in 2007, remained one of the key outstanding questions for the agency. IAEA officials suspect Iran may have a parallel, undeclared P-2 development programme.

Over time, Iran gained experience in manufacturing its own centrifuge components and constructed two facilities in Natanz, an above-ground pilot plant designed for 1,000 centrifuges and a much larger underground facility planned to hold 54,000 centrifuges. A facility this size would give Iran the capability to produce approximately 20 bombs’ worth of HEU per year if it chose to break out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal. Iran apparently only has the parts for several thousand centrifuges, however, and to meet its industrial-level goal it would have to rely on additional black market procurement of maraging steel, and possibly other materials, in which it is not self-sufficient. Nuclear Supplier Group export controls and Security Council sanctions make that a difficult proposition for Iran.

By the beginning of 2007, Iran had about 370 centrifuges running intermittently with uranium hexafluoride (UF6) in the pilot plant and was beginning to install the first of what it said would be 3,000 centrifuges in the underground facility. Although Iran had not yet demonstrated an ability to run the cascades continuously, it had proven that it could produce centrifuges, balance and spin them for months at a time, and enrich uranium in small amounts to reactor-grade levels (3.5–5%). If Iran is able to install 3,000 centrifuges and bring them into operation (a goal it ambitiously set for May 2007), and if it were to throw caution to the wind and withdraw from the NPT, continuous operation of a facility this size would, theoretically, enable Iran to produce one weapon’s worth of HEU in 9–11 months.

Iraq
Given Khan’s budding business with Iran, it is somewhat surprising that in 1990 the network next sought to expand its international business by selling enrichment technology to Iraq, with which Iran had just fought a bitter eight-year war. At the time, Iraq had a very advanced clandestine programme to produce nuclear weapons. The full extent of Iraq’s widespread and sophisticated nuclear procurement activities was not well known until it came to light after the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent weapons inspection and dismantlement campaign of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. Yet Western governments and policy analysts – and certainly Khan and his European colleagues – were aware that Baghdad was renewing its efforts to build nuclear bombs in the aftermath of the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor at Tuwaitha. Iraq gave priority to the development of electromagnetic isotopic separation techniques to enrich uranium, but also pursued gas centrifuge and other enrichment technologies. Media accounts revealed Iraqi attempts to acquire maraging steel, vacuum pumps and other specialised machinery, all necessary for the production of uranium enrichment centrifuges. There were unconfirmed press reports that Iraq acquired uranium melting information from Pakistan in the late 1980s.

A.Q. Khan and his associates apparently believed that Iraq’s interest in uranium enrichment provided a business opportunity that was too potentially lucrative to pass up. Information that Khan had promoted a deal with Iraq emerged in 1995 with the defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who directed UN weapons inspectors to a chicken farm he owned. There, inspectors found thousands of documents on paper and microfiche related to Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons development programmes. Included among these documents was a 1990 memo labelled ‘top secret’ and ‘personal’, which described a meeting in Baghdad between Iraqi intelligence officers and an intermediary for Khan believed to have used the name ‘Malik’. The intermediary told the Iraqis that Khan was prepared to provide enrichment technology and project designs for a nuclear bomb and to ‘ensure any requirements or materials from Western Europe [were transported] via a company he owns in Dubai’. The memo said ‘the project has been given the code name “A-B”’, which IAEA investigators took to mean ‘atomic bomb’. The asking price was $5m in advance, with an additional 10% commission to be paid on all procurements.

Another document obtained by inspectors indicated that Jafar Dhia Jafar, the former head of Iraq’s nuclear agency, had responded positively, telling the intelligence service to explore the offer, although with the caveat that it could be a sting operation orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies. There was little other evidence of the offer or any other follow up, which in any case would have been impossible after the initiation of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991 and the subsequent intrusive inspection operations conducted by the UN. IAEA efforts to investigate the matter in the mid-1990s, and again in 2004 following Libya’s revelation that it had received a bomb design from Khan, reached an impasse because all the individuals involved were either deceased or refused to be interviewed. IAEA officials were nevertheless fully convinced that the offer was genuine and unsolicited.

North Korea
A.Q. Khan’s nuclear export business took a new turn in the late 1990s when he provided North Korea with a number of gas centrifuges, associated material and technical assistance, expanding on deals in which North Korea provided No-dong missiles to Pakistan. His foreign network associates were not known to be involved in these transactions – only Khan and his fellow Pakistani collaborators. In his 2006 autobiography, Musharraf wrote that in early 1999, when he was serving as army chief, he discovered that some North Korean nuclear experts, operating under the guise of missile engineers, had been given secret briefings at KRL. As described below, North Korean interaction with KRL regarding ballistic missile exchanges was permitted as a secret government-to-government deal, but the Pakistani government claims that A.Q. Khan was not authorised to interact with the North Koreans on nuclear matters. Musharraf wrote that he summoned him to explain his interaction with the North Koreans on nuclear technology, but Khan flatly denied the charge.
After Khan was arrested in 2004, Pakistani officials claimed that he had confessed to having transferred centrifuges and related technology to North Korea, beginning in the late 1990s. The Clinton administration reportedly learnt of the transfers in 1998 or 1999. The first media claim of a North Korean enrichment programme came in March 1999, sourced to a US Department of Energy intelligence report. The CIA concluded, however, that North Korea began its centrifuge-based uranium enrichment programme in 2000. This conclusion derived in part from imagery analysis of unmarked containers loaded on Pakistani C-130 transport aircraft.
The most detailed account of the enrichment technology transfer comes from Musharraf’s autobiography, in which he stated that ‘A.Q. Khan transferred nearly two dozen P-1 and P-2 centrifuges to North Korea. He also provided North Korea with a flow meter, some special oils for centrifuges, and coaching on centrifuge technology, including visits to top-secret centrifuge plants.’ Musharraf’s 2006 account is curious in two respects. Firstly, in 2005 he mentioned only half that number (‘probably a dozen’). Western governments believe that the actual number was about 20. Secondly, it was the first reference to P-2s going to North Korea; previous reports about Khan’s confessions mentioned only P-1 centrifuges. According to a government official who briefed the press after Khan’s televised confession, Khan, in a 12-page signed confession, accepted full responsibility for ‘supplying old and discarded centrifuge and enrichment machines together with sets of drawings, sketches, technical data and depleted hexafluoride (UF6) gas to North Korea’.

A dozen centrifuges would have been insufficient to produce enough HEU for a nuclear bomb. Along with the centrifuge designs Khan provided, however, they could be used as a template upon which North Korean scientists and engineers could base their own centrifuge production plans. As with Iran, Khan also reportedly provided a ‘shopping list’ to North Korea, which enabled Pyongyang to purchase additional components directly from other foreign suppliers. In 2000, North Korea began to seek such materials in industrial-scale quantities, leading intelligence analysts to believe that it had progressed beyond the research and development stage in its uranium enrichment centrifuge programme. Such procurement attempts included equipment suitable for use in UF6 feed and withdrawal systems, as well as high-strength aluminium tubes that matched the specifications of vacuum casings for Urenco centrifuges. In April 2003, the French, German and Egyptian authorities intercepted a French cargo ship in the Suez Canal carrying a 22-tonne shipment of these tubes that North Korea had ordered from a German firm. This shipment was apparently part of a larger, 200-tonne consignment of aluminium tubes sought by North Korea, which would have been sufficient for 3,500–4,000 centrifuges. If North Korea were to construct 3,500 centrifuges based on the P-2 design, it would have the ability to produce almost 90kg of weapons-grade HEU annually. North Korea attempted to circumvent German export controls by claiming that the tubes were intended for a Chinese company, Shenyang Aircraft Corporation.

As is the case with some of Khan’s other customers, which side initiated the centrifuge deal is unclear. As noted in chapter two, there were a few reports in the late 1980s of North Korean procurement of equipment useful for gas centrifuge enrichment. Until Khan provided centrifuges a decade later, however, North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme was assumed to be limited to the plutonium route. North Korea froze the plutonium programme under the terms of the October 1994 Agreed Framework deal with the US. Seeking an alternative uranium enrichment path to nuclear weapons violated that agreement and, when the US confronted Pyongyang about the enrichment efforts, led to its demise. Whether North Korea nevertheless proactively sought the centrifuge technology or whether, as one former US negotiator privately surmised, it ‘fell into their laps’ through a Khan offer, is unknown.

Pakistan–North Korea connections
Khan’s business dealings with North Korea were rooted in Pakistan’s odd relationship with the Pyongyang regime, dating back to the early 1970s. At that time, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whose original People’s Party had strong socialist overtones, was impressed with the regimented government and economy of Kim Il Sung. Bhutto was known to be an admirer of many of the revolutionary leaders of the time, including Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito and Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, and had a material interest in improving ties with these leaders too. Ever since the United States had embargoed military sales to Pakistan after the 1965 Kashmir War, Pakistan looked to the East as an alternative source, and purchased a mix of Chinese and Russian weapons, equipment and transports. The military items produced by North Korea were compatible with other Soviet-bloc material and were considerably cheaper. Moreover, the North Koreans were easier to deal with than the Soviets, who had a far closer relationship with India. Bhutto approached North Korea in 1971 for assistance in replenishing Pakistan’s depleted stock of military equipment and established full diplomatic relations in 1976, when he was accorded an elaborate welcome in Pyongyang. His daughter, Benazir Bhutto, received a similarly lavish state reception 17 years later, in December 1993. Like her father, she also secured an agreement to acquire missile technology.

The ‘Asian cooperation’ policy forged by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, however, became less significant after his ouster in the July 1977 coup orchestrated by Zia, in his capacity as army chief. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, and the new US government of President Ronald Reagan lifted all sanctions on Pakistan in 1981, Zia’s priorities shifted to the jihad in Afghanistan and the acquisition of Western armaments to restore the military balance with India. North Korea had disappeared from Pakistan’s radar screen. Within a few years, however, three factors brought North Korea and Pakistan back towards a strategic partnership. Firstly, Pakistan needed to match India’s Agni and Prithvi ballistic-missile programmes, and North Korea was known for its ballistic-missile production. Secondly, the Pakistani armed forces needed conventional weapons, including artillery and anti-aircraft guns, which North Korea had, while North Korea needed money and had a reputation for exporting military supplies at cheap rates. Thirdly, North Korea was developing expertise on the plutonium route to nuclear weapons production, and Pakistan was making rapid advances along the uranium enrichment route. Each country stood to gain much from the other.

In the 1990s, Pakistan’s security predicament was compounded by new two factors, both involving India. The first had to do with the growing air-power imbalance with India and Pakistan’s desire to obtain a reliable airborne nuclear delivery system. Washington’s October 1990 implementation of the Pressler Amendment sanctions essentially froze Pakistan’s air force procurement, save for some imports of low-technology aircraft from China. The delivery of F-16 aircraft that Islamabad had already purchased from the United States was stalled, and because of intense US pressure and their own non-proliferation concerns, European suppliers were reluctant to come to Pakistan’s assistance.

The second factor that worried Pakistani defence planners was the rapid maturation of India’s ballistic missile programme in the wake of a military crisis over Kashmir in 1990. India first test-fired its short-range Prithvi ballistic missile in February 1988 and introduced Prithvi missile batteries into service with the army in 1994.

Further, the two-stage intermediate-range Agni-1 ballistic missile, which the Indians considered a technology demonstrator and not a developed weapons system, underwent three test flights between 1994 and 2002. The emergence of an Indian ballistic-missile capability created a new missile gap for Pakistan, and also raised the prospect that India would have both missile and aircraft delivery systems for its covert nuclear arsenal, while Pakistan would not have much of either. To compound Pakistan’s problems, the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which was originally established in 1987, was now operating rather effectively. Most European suppliers were members of the MTCR group and thus refused to supply Pakistan with the means to produce missile delivery systems.

Khan’s contacts with Pyongyang
Just as A.Q. Khan filled a vital strategic need when US and French non-proliferation pressures blocked Pakistan’s plutonium route to nuclear weapons in the 1970s, Khan stepped in once again to provide Pakistan with an alternative nuclear weapons delivery option by obtaining intermediate-range liquid-fuel ballistic missiles from North Korea. Prior to this development, Pakistan had obtained short-range, solid-fuel M-11 missiles and related technology from China, Pakistan’s all-weather strategic ally, but KRL was not the recipient. The solid-fuel missile programme was the research and development responsibility of the National Defence Complex in conjunction with PAEC. KRL was responsible for the liquid-fuel missile programme. North Korea’s 1,000–1,500km-range No-dong ballistic missile was well suited to Pakistan’s pressing strategic requirement. (The range of the No-dong, like that of virtually all ballistic missiles, depends on the payload weight and other design configurations.) The sharing of missile expertise began in 1992, when Pakistani officials travelled to North Korea to view a prototype of the No-dong. In November 1995, North Korea and Pakistan apparently struck a deal for 12–25 No-dong missiles, and at least one transporter erector launcher or mobile erector launcher, the delivery of which reportedly began in 1996–97.

It is widely assumed, but impossible to prove, that the provision of centrifuge technology was at least partly in exchange for the No-dong missiles, and that the deal was authorised by Pakistan’s top leaders. According to North Korean Politburo defector Hwang Jang Yop, a No-dong–HEU deal was concluded in the summer of 1996. Overhead imagery of Pakistani aircraft in Pyongyang is often cited as proof of official involvement in the nuclear deal. It is likely that at least some of the centrifuges, parts, blueprints, designs and possibly UF6 North Korea obtained were transported in C-130s belonging to the Pakistani air force or to charter companies connected to the air force. It was much easier for Khan to ship nuclear components to North Korea than to Iran because there was already an authorised trade in sensitive military equipment with Pyongyang dating from the early 1970s. Pakistani aircraft carried ballistic missiles and their components, surface-to-air missiles, artillery and other conventional military equipment from North Korea. The business activities of KRL had grown over the years, involving much more than simply nuclear enrichment, and extending to the production of missiles, mines, electronics and artillery. Khan also bought anti-tank missiles from North Korea to help fulfil KRL’s orders from the Pakistani army. This conventional trade could have masked nuclear trafficking. Movements of military cargo in and out of Pakistan at that time were characterised by extreme secrecy and compartmentalisation. US arms shipments through Pakistan for anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan contributed to a climate in which questions were not asked about arms imports and exports. In one incident in 2000, Pakistani intelligence authorities had obtained a foreign liaison tip-off that a chartered C-130 aircraft going to North Korea to pick up conventional missiles was carrying ‘irregular cargo’ on Khan’s behalf. Pakistani intelligence operatives quietly raided the aircraft, but found nothing. Apparently, Khan had been tipped off (see pages 96–7). The fact that there was an unannounced search suggests that such cargo was not regularly screened. In sum, evidence of official Pakistani–North Korean sensitive technology transactions does not necessarily indicate official Pakistani–North Korean nuclear collaboration.

Pakistani policymakers knew, of course, about the cooperation with North Korea on missiles, many of them having been directly involved in its continuation. It seems unlikely that they would have been unaware of the nuclear cooperation that was occurring at the same time. Although Khan and his KRL team were able to make many decisions independently, they had no authority on national security decisions. According to an unconfirmed press report, Khan claimed that three different army chiefs of staff – Abdul Waheed (1994–96), Jehangir Karamat (1996–98) and Pervez Musharraf (1998–present) – were aware of his nuclear deals with Pyongyang. Current and former military officers strongly deny this accusation, but the military’s dominant role in nuclear oversight since 1977 is reason to believe that Khan would not have traded the centrifuge technology without the army’s approval. The armed forces certainly would have been privy to any discussions concerning the acquisition of the No-dong, a system carrying serious implications for any military force posture. Transferring nuclear technology to the North Korean pariah state would also have had severe consequences for the nation’s foreign policy and international reputation. The claim that Khan could not have sold his country’s nuclear secrets without the expressed approval of Pakistani civilian and military leaders is supported by an economic rationale, in the sense that many analysts doubt Pakistan could have paid for the missiles outright. In 1996, Pakistan was in a financial crisis, with its foreign exchange reserves equivalent to only three weeks of imports. The country was only able to avoid default with help from the International Monetary Fund and by borrowing $500m from domestic banks.

Beginning with Benazir Bhutto, successive Pakistani governments have insisted that the ballistic missile cooperation with North Korea was based on a cash payment, rather than a quid pro quo exchange for Pakistani nuclear technology. Pakistan claims it paid a total of $210m to North Korea for the entire missile package, including the transfer of technology. It is difficult to corroborate this claim through publicly available information. The figure is low in comparison with the $3bn Saudi Arabia reportedly paid for 36–40 Chinese CSS-2 ballistic missiles in the late 1980s. On the other hand, $210m for the No-dong package is in line with estimates that the shorter range Hwasong-5 and -6 missiles cost around $1.5–2m each and that the longer-range Taepo-dong has been priced at $6m. Given the enormous strategic importance of No-dong missiles to national defence, $210m would have been within Pakistan’s financial means. Despite its low foreign reserves, Pakistan’s arms imports during the 1995–96 timeframe were valued at $819m. The overall defence budget in the mid-1990s was around $3bn annually.

A difficulty in assessing the Pakistani government claim is that there is little public evidence of monetary payments from North Korea to Khan or his associates for the centrifuges. The Islamabad government would have an incentive to disclose any such transactions that might have come to light in its investigations of Khan because this would help to distance the government from Khan’s transactions. But to date no such evidence has surfaced.

One other possible explanation for Khan’s nuclear assistance to North Korea was that he acted largely of his own volition, for his own profit. As already noted, Khan had broad autonomy as head of KRL. There appears to have been poor state control of critical nuclear technologies and components, including centrifuges. Khan could ship large consignments in and out of the country with little oversight, particularly before the creation of the military’s Strategic Plans Division in 1999. In this scenario, Khan could have begun to assist North Korea in the late 1990s for personal gain. At this time, his own importance was diminishing because PAEC, not KRL, was responsible for weaponising Pakistan’s deterrent. He would also have had a motivation to spur North Korea to speed up deliveries of No-dong missile technology, allowing Khan to test the Ghauri in 1998,a full year before PAEC could field a solid-fuel alternative. The broad cooperation between Pyongyang and Islamabad, however, is significant reason to suspect state complicity, at least in terms of having knowledge of and thereby implicitly condoning the centrifuge deal.

Libya
In 1997, the Khan network began what became an extensive nuclear export business with Libya, involving nuclear specialists, middlemen and supplier companies from three continents. Of all Khan’s deals, the most is known about the Libya connection because of Tripoli’s disclosures and its cooperation with inspectors after Gadhafi decided in 2003 to renounce and dismantle his nuclear and chemical weapons programmes and to restrict its ballistic-missile capacity. Following on from secret negotiations with the US and UK to lift sanctions implemented in response to the Lockerbie bombing, Libya contacted MI6, the UK intelligence service, in mid-March 2003 to initiate talks on dismantling strategic weapons programmes in exchange for removing other sanctions and normalising relations. Secret talks then expanded to include the US. Libya was reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of its nuclear programme, however, until the German-registered vessel, BBC China, bound for Libya with centrifuge equipment from the Khan network, was diverted to Italy in a joint US–UK–Germany–Italy operation. This interdiction demonstrated to Tripoli that its clandestine supply network had been compromised. The US and UK intelligence officials involved in the highly confidential negotiations provided additional evidence of what they knew and, in December 2003, Libya revealed even more. During a trip by MI6 and CIA officers to Libya early that month, Libya handed over a copy of a nuclear weapon design that it had received from the Khan network, as detailed below.

Libya’s unrelenting interest in nuclear weapons
Gadhafi’s aspirations for acquiring weapons of mass destruction had been widely known ever since he overthrew King Idris I in 1969. In the 1970s, Gadhafi’s endeavours to buy nuclear weapons off the shelf took him to China, France, India and the Soviet Union. These efforts did not yield any results; however, Gadhafi did succeed in acquiring 2,263 tonnes of yellowcake (uranium oxide concentrate) from Niger in 1978 and 1981. In the same period, Gadhafi befriended Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was vigorously pursuing nuclear weapons in response to India’s May 1974 nuclear explosive test. Bhutto was in desperate need of finances, as well as raw materials, for a crash programme that Pakistan had embarked upon with very little prior infrastructure. During 1973–82, Gadhafi reportedly provided financial assistance and passed 450 tonnes of the yellowcake Libya had obtained from Niger to Pakistan. In return, Libya apparently sought assistance from Pakistan with ‘hot cells’ for extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium. Libya had hoped that Pakistan would provide weapons-related technology in return for aid. Libya reportedly gave $100–500m to Bhutto, whose Islamic rhetoric about the programme excited many revolutionary leaders of the time. However, on the government-to-government level Pakistan agreed only to offer training for Libyan personnel at PINSTECH and no more. The Pakistan–Libya nuclear cooperation at the government-to-government level ended once Bhutto was overthrown.
For a decade from the mid-1980s onwards, the Libyan nuclear programme was largely frustrated by the unwillingness of potential nuclear suppliers to deal with the regime. Libya acknowledged that, in July 1995, it made a strategic decision to reinvigorate its nuclear activities, including gas centrifuge enrichment. At this point, Libya tried to set up a two-track programme. The first track involved a plutonium route for which it unsuccessfully sought assistance from Argentina, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Japan. Its second track was to follow the uranium enrichment route to fissile-material production. In the early 1990s Libya had managed only to operate a single centrifuge, which it had obtained from Germany. In 1997, Libyan intelligence initiated contact with Khan, and followed up with a meeting in Istanbul among Libyan intelligence agency head Matooq Mohammed Matooq, A.Q. Khan and Tahir, to conclude a deal for the wherewithal for a uranium-centrifuge enrichment programme.

Centrifuge enrichment equipment
Shortly after Libya’s initial contact with Khan in 1997, the Khan network started to send Libya 20 complete P-1 aluminium rotor centrifuges (re-designated as L-1s for ‘Libya-1’), along with most of the components for an additional 200 centrifuges. The aluminium rotors and ring magnets were mysteriously missing. In 2000, Khan sent Libya two test P-2 (renamed L-2) maraging steel centrifuges. Both of these centrifuges had been used in the Pakistani nuclear programme, and both were contaminated with HEU particles. Gadhafi then ordered 10,000 additional P-2 centrifuges, enough to produce significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium after they were installed and operating effectively. The first deliveries were made in December 2002. The focal point of the Libyan research and development activities was a facility named Al Hashan on the outskirts of Tripoli. By April 2002, one nine-machine cascade had reportedly been completed and was under vacuum with all the pipes, electrical connections and processing equipment set up. But for unknown reasons Libya then decided to dismantle the cascades and to move them to Al Fallah. By the end of 2003, the Gadhafi regime had acquired a significant number of L-2 components, but again, no rotating parts were delivered, apparently because of difficulties manufacturing them in the network’s overseas facilities. The network considered making them in Dubai, South Africa, Turkey and Malaysia, but for reasons that remain unclear ultimately decided to produce the rotors in Libya itself. When US and UK officials and IAEA inspectors arrived in late December 2003 and January 2004 to begin the dismantlement process that Libya had pledged, the components were still unassembled and were found in unopened boxes. Libya also received computer compact disks containing a full set of P-1 and P-2 centrifuge drawings together with assembly and test instruction manuals. The network arranged training in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia for Libyan technical personnel. To manufacture centrifuge components that were difficult to procure elsewhere, particularly the maraging steel rotors, and to repair damaged centrifuges, the network established a workshop at Janzour, Libya, code-named Project Machine Shop 1001, and purchased the necessary machining equipment.

Supplying 10,000 centrifuges, each of which has approximately 100 parts, meant that the supplier network would have to procure or manufacture over a million components and ship them all to Libya. Some of these components must have been difficult for Khan to procure through the network’s traditional means. Khan’s supply to Iran and North Korea of designs, mostly used centrifuges and components, and UF6 was bold enough (although the full extent of Khan’s sale to both countries is unknown). The enormous Libyan project posed problems that were vastly more complicated. To meet the challenge, the Khan network increased the capacity of front companies in Malaysia, Turkey and South Africa (as described below) to manufacture certain products and, in Khan’s biggest innovation, to establish factories in non-traditional supplier countries to procure, assemble and manufacture the components for the enrichment process.

Uranium hexafluoride
As part of the 2000 deal to supply 10,000 P-2 centrifuges, the Khan network agreed to sell Libya 20 tonnes of UF6 (enough, when enriched to 93%, for about three implosion-type weapons). Probably because of difficulties obtaining that amount, less than 2 tonnes were delivered: two small cylinders in September 2000, one containing 25kg of unenriched UF6 and one with the same amount of UF6 with depleted uranium (.03% U235); and in February 2001, 1,700kg of UF6 slightly enriched to 1%. The origin of the uranium has not been definitively established, but the evidence points to North Korea with Pakistan and Dubai as transit points. Tahir told Malaysian investigators that the UF6 was shipped on Pakistani planes, although Pakistan says it came from North Korea. Suspect bank transactions preceding the UF6 transfers include a payment made by Libya, and a North Korean receipt of a similar amount, although not necessarily enough to cover that amount of UF6. There seems to be no doubt that the cask containing the 25kg of UF6 originated in Pakistan. It is not confirmed where the cask had been and what was the origin of the material inside it. US experts detected plutonium traces on the container that were identical to traces previously found at North Korea’s Yongbyon complex, which indicates that the container was as some point in proximity to that site. IAEA tests on the same container did not yield the same plutonium traces, although the IAEA swipe samples were not as extensive as those taken by the US of the entire container. The isotopic composition of the UF6 itself did not match known samples of uranium from anywhere else in the world. By a process of elimination, and in connection with the plutonium particles and the suspect bank accounts, US intelligence analysts deduced that it came from North Korea. This analytical conclusion, however, does not conclusively rule out other countries as the source of the UF6. And there is no other evidence that North Korea has a uranium-conversion facility capable of producing the uranium gas.
One additional possibility is that North Korea sent natural yellowcake to Pakistan, which Pakistan then converted and shipped to Libya, but this hypothesis is flawed. While KRL almost certainly had the means to convert uranium gas into uranium metal, there is no evidence that Khan had the expertise and equipment to turn yellowcake into uranium tetrafluoride and then into UF6. If Khan had such a capability, it seems likely that he would have offered it to other countries, but there is no evidence that Khan offered any country assistance with uranium conversion. Libya did import (but never used) a modular uranium-conversion facility in 1986 from a Japanese company that was not known to be linked with the Khan network (the name of the company has not been disclosed). If Pakistan were assisting North Korea in making UF6, it would point to official state involvement through PAEC, the organisation responsible for Pakistan’s uranium-conversion capability. To date, there has been no allegation of PAEC involvement with Libya.

Bomb design
Libya claimed that the documents for a nuclear weapon design and fabrication that it received from the Khan network in late 2001 or 2002 had been provided as a , ‘bonus’ for $20–50m and that it took no steps to assess the credibility or to explore the practical utility of the information – an assertion viewed with scepticism by the IAEA. The documentation included assembly drawings and manufacturing instructions for components of the ‘physics package’: explosive parts of the weapon, the detonator and fissile materials. It did not include the associated electronics, cabling and firing sets. Also missing were some of the key scale drawings of the explosive lenses. The bomb design was about 95% complete and was far more detailed than what has been available on the internet or through other unclassified sources. The material laid out a step-by-step process of casting uranium into a metal bomb core and building the explosive lenses to compress the core. The designs were for a ten-kilotonne implosion device following a late 1960s Chinese design, weighing 453kg. It was too large to fit on any missiles in Libya’s arsenal. Many of the bomb design documents were described as copies of copies, and included handwritten notes from lectures by Chinese weapons experts, that seemed to confirm that they had been reviewed by KRL. In January 2004, Libya turned over to the US and UK (through the IAEA) the design documents in the form Libya said they had come, wrapped in the original Islamabad drycleaner’s bag. (As noted above, Libya had already provided a copy to UK and US intelligence officials a month earlier.) Lacking trained personnel in the necessary fields, it is unlikely that Libya would have been able to fill in the missing drawings on its own to produce a workable bomb. On the other hand, if Iraq, North Korea or Iran, with their much larger industrial infrastructure and cadres of qualified engineers, had received the same set of designs, they probably could have completed the missing pages indigenously. As discussed below, whether any other customer received a bomb design is unknown. That such a national security asset was included so casually in the deal with Libya is reason to believe that the Khan–Libya nuclear connection was not authorised by the Pakistani government.

The make-up of the Khan network
The Khan network was not a hierarchically structured enterprise, but rather a collection of connected nodes in various countries, which sometimes operated in league with Khan and at other times functioned independently. At least 30 companies and middlemen sold nuclear-related goods through the network. The vast majority of individuals involved in the Khan proliferation network had a long history of procuring and selling items for the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme. And when Khan managed to shift his primary business operations from imports to much more lucrative exports, many of his European and South African accomplices stayed with him. The new ‘business model’ orientation offered the European members of the network much more money in comparison to what they had previously got from Pakistan’s secret nuclear programme coffers, and they were asked to carry on with the very same expertise in manufacturing, logistics and finances that they had developed to such perfection in aiding the Pakistani (and, in some cases, Iraqi) nuclear weapons effort.

The Libya deal showcased the organisation’s complex and transnational nature and differed from the Khan network’s transactions with Iran and North Korea in three important respects. Firstly, most of the proliferation occurred after Khan was removed from KRL in 2001 for defying government attempts to control his foreign dealings (see pages96–8). Secondly, it was the first time the network had managed to produce outside any single country the entire panoply of materials, tools and technologies needed to fabricate gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Thirdly, the deal differed in scale from those involving Iran and North Korea because each of those countries already had a fair degree of technological expertise in the nuclear sciences. Libya had almost no pre-existing capability and wanted the Khan network to facilitate the entire enrichment process.

Libya contracted Khan to manufacture centrifuge components, to assemble them into workable centrifuges ‘offsite’, and then to install and operate them at a location outside Tripoli. The vast size and scope of the order broke new ground for the network, requiring Khan to transform both his organisation and its business practices to provide full service as a completely private sector entity. The Libyan case also reveals how sophisticated the network had become. Khan suggested, for example, that the Libyans build sheds for centrifuges that would look like goat or camel farms as a means of camouflage. The manner in which the business was conducted would have maximised profits for the network and kept the Libyan programme dependent on Khan for advice for many years into the future.

The Dubai hub: After Khan was removed from KRL in March 2001 (see chapter four) he moved his base of network operations to Dubai. This was where components were stored and transhipped, and where his most important associate, Tahir, kept office, as managing director of the SMB Group, a position he took over from his uncle Farouq. Tahir was Khan’s main intermediary with Tripoli when the Libya operation began in 1997. Other Dubai-based companies, such as the Aryash Trading Company and Gulf Technical Industries (GTI), often appear in reports on the Khan network as prominent links in the traffic in sensitive items. GTI was managed by British citizen Peter Griffin and his son Paul, both of whom deny any wrongdoing and against whom no charges have been filed.

The South African connection: In South Africa, the Khan network worked with companies and experts who had been involved with the South African nuclear weapons programme before it was abandoned in 1993. One such expert was Gerhard Wisser, a German living in South Africa, who had supplied vacuum pumps and other equipment to Pakistan in the 1980s in addition to doing work for the South African nuclear programme. In Dubai in 1999, Tahir offered Wisser a lucrative commission to arrange for the manufacture of ‘certain pipe-work systems’. Wisser engaged a former associate who had also worked for the South African nuclear programme, Johan Meyer, owner of the engineering firm TradeFin, based in Vanderbiljpark. Along with a third associate, Swiss citizen Daniel Geiges, they built a complex steel system to feed and withdraw UF6 gas into a centrifuge cascade. The massive system filled 11 40-foot shipping containers and was estimated to be worth $33m. The network also asked TradeFin to manufacture maraging steel rotors for Libya’s L-2 centrifuges. In late 2000, TradeFin ordered a specialised Spanish-made lathe from GTI but ultimately decided not to produce the rotors, either because of a price dispute or because they were unable to acquire the maraging steel that was needed. TradeFin consequently returned the lathe to GTI in December 2001. In 2004, inspectors discovered the lathe in Libya.

The Malaysian production plan: To evade export controls from members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and to take advantage of his Malaysian wife’s connections, Tahir contracted Scomi Group Berhad, a Malaysian oil and gas firm, to manufacture thousands of centrifuge components for the Libya operation. Scomi set up a subsidiary, Scomi Precision Engineering (SCOPE), with a 40-person facility in Shah Alam, Malaysia, but Scomi officials have been cleared of having known that the components were destined for a nuclear weapons programme in Libya. The two-year $3.5m contract was signed in the name of GTI, though Peter Griffin denied any involvement, arguing that Tahir had forged the documents. At Tahir’s request, Urs Tinner, son of long-time Khan associate Friedrich Tinner, began consulting for the SCOPE factory and arranged to import lathes as well as cutting, turning and grinding machines. Between December 2002 and August 2003, SCOPE manufactured and sent 14 types of centrifuge components (of the approximately 100 components needed in total) to Dubai.

The Turkish mini-hub: The Khan network relied on workshops in Turkey as mini-hubs to procure sub-components from Europe and elsewhere, and to assemble centrifuge motors and frequency converters to spin the centrifuges at the high speeds necessary to separate different uranium isotopes. Elektronik Kontrol Aletleri (president: Selim Alguadis) and ETI Elektroteknik (president: Gunes Jireh, company partly owned by Dutch businessman Henk Slebos) imported centrifuge motors and aluminium castings from Europe, assembled them, and sent them to Dubai. Alguadis contends that he did not know their destination was Libya. In 2003, a shipment of electrical components was sent with false end-user certificates to Dubai, and was loaded aboard the BBC China. When the ship was diverted to the southern Italian port of Taranto in October 2003 and Italian authorities removed a shipment of centrifuge components from Malaysia, the other components from Turkey were not discovered and continued on to Libya. The Libyan government alerted international inspectors to their arrival in Tripoli in March 2004 and they were subsequently removed by the US.

Other manufacturing sites: The Khan network acquired specialist equipment and materials from companies or intermediaries in many other countries, including Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK. In Asia, the network acquired specialist balancing machines made by Hanbando Balance, Inc., one of South Korea’s most prestigious manufacturers of balancing technology. A small South Korean firm, De Young Engineering, purchased four of these machines and exported them to Libya in June 2002. It is likely that Hanbando was unaware of the final destination of its dual-use product. The Japanese company Mitutoyo falsified export documents for the specialised three-dimensional measuring machines (needed to build uranium-enrichment centrifuges with the necessary precision) it sold to the network for the Libya programme.

Soured Pakistan–Libya connections
The Pakistani nuclear connection with Iran and North Korea can be logically discerned, but the Khan network’s cooperation with Libya is more puzzling, unless it is viewed as a straight business deal. In the case of neighbouring Iran, with whom Pakistan had previously had a strong relationship, there were still residual notions of ideological affinity. In particular, the strategic inclination of Beg, in his capacity as army chief, towards Iran, and the significance of his notion of strategic defiance could explain why he might have had some sympathy for Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. In the case of North Korea, the country-to-country strategic relationship was based on defence cooperation that had existed since the mid-1970s. In the case of Libya, there was no ideological or military connection with Pakistan in 1997, when the initial contact with KRL was made. Nor had there been any government-to-government connection, except during the early 1970s when Gadhafi and Bhutto were close and Libya was interested not only in assisting Pakistan financially, but also in providing natural uranium for the Pakistani nuclear weapons effort. Pakistan’s relations with Libya had soured owing to Bhutto’s hanging by Zia in 1979. The relationship was only revived in the year 2000, when Musharraf visited Libya. Unlike with North Korea and Iran, there were no compelling reasons for Pakistan to engage in strategic cooperation with Libya, nor were there any peculiar personality inclinations. Nevertheless, the network struck up a profitable proliferation business.

Libya proved to be the network’s biggest customer, paying the network at least $100m, according to the US. At a time when Pakistan had become closely allied with the United States in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, it is illogical that the government of Pakistan would have risked such a deal with a pariah country for such a meagre sum. The amount also seems insignificant compared to what other Arab countries with oil money were prepared to offer, such as the $3bn Saudi Arabia is said to have paid China for CSS-2 ballistic missiles in 1988.

Other potential customers
Whether the A.Q. Khan network had other customers has been a matter of intense interest to foreign analysts and investigative agencies. KRL openly advertised its enrichment wares, telling a visitor at a Karachi trade fair in 2000, for example, that everything described in a glossy brochure – all the components to operate a uranium enrichment plant and support services – were available for purchase. Khan is reported to have visited at least 18 countries in the years before his 2004 arrest: Afghanistan, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and the UAE. The CIA monitors several of these countries for indications that they might harbour nuclear weapons ambitions, in part because of their reported past links with Khan. Khan’s repeated travel to Africa, sometimes accompanied by KRL scientists and Pakistani army officers, also raised questions. In trips to Nigeria, Niger, Mali and Sudan he might have been discussing uranium procurement, and, in Timbuktu, Mali, personal business related to his hotel investment there. Another possibility is that he was prospecting for additional customers. Some unconfirmed press reports have also claimed that Sudan was used as a warehouse between 1999 and 2001 to store advanced dual-use engineering equipment of European origin.

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have an alliance in which it is understood that Pakistan will come to the kingdom’s aid if it is under dire threat. To firm up this alliance, Saudi Arabia has reportedly provided financial support for Pakistan’s nuclear programme, dating from the 1980s. In 1990, the Saudis were reportedly tempted to seek Pakistani nuclear warheads for the CSS-2 missiles they had acquired from China. In May 1999, Saudi defence minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz made a widely publicised visit to KRL facilities, the first foreign leader to do so. Pakistani officials assert that Khan’s purpose was to market a missile, not nuclear technology. The Saudi defence minister reportedly toured KRL again in August 2002, although by this time Khan had been removed. Khan, for his part, visited Saudi Arabia at least twice, in November 1999 and September 2000. It is common for Pakistani officials to visit Saudi Arabia, for the hajj and other legitimate reasons, but Khan’s visits bear scrutiny. An investigation of his front office in Dubai found records of telephone calls to Saudi Arabia (whether for legitimate or illicit business is unknown). According to US ambassador Chas Freeman, King Fahd bin Abdulaziz told high-level US officials on several occasions that Saudi Arabia would need a nuclear deterrent in case Iran developed an atomic bomb. In 2003, several sources asserted, without firm evidence, that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia agreed on a ‘nukes-for-oil’ barter, although in this case it would have been a strictly government-to-government deal, not involving the Khan network. There is no hard evidence of a formal offer or nuclear transfers from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, and the aforementioned visits may just reflect the depth of the long-standing relationship between the two countries.

Reports of Khan discussing nuclear training assistance with the United Arab Emirates were also in a government-to-government context.

Syria leads the list of countries suspected of having acquired nuclear technology illicitly through the Khan network, although the allegations have not been substantiated. The CIA’s unclassified report to Congress on WMD technology transfers in 2004 expresses concern that expertise or technology could have been transferred to Syria, but attributes the intelligence only to reports in the Pakistani press that ‘Pakistani investigators in late January 2004 said they had “confirmation” … that A.Q. offered nuclear technology and hardware to Syria’. The original press report adds that the deal never materialised. One pair of experts claims that Khan offered nuclear technology to Egypt, which turned it down. The South African government’s indictment of Geiges and Wisser for unauthorised import and export of centrifuge equipment states that in 1988–90 they offered various kinds of centrifuge technology to an unnamed client, who ultimately declined the offer on the grounds that it was stolen property.

It is also possible that KRL exported nuclear materials as well as centrifuge technology and know-how to China, whose enrichment programme reportedly suffered difficulties. Given the very close relationship that exists between the two countries in this and other fields, this would likely have been a government-sanctioned activity, if it occurred.

Other unknowns
What happened with the rest of the nuclear equipment Libya ordered from the Khan network but never received is another of the major questions remaining after the network was broken up. Investigators who compared Libya’s records and interviewed network members say critical components disappeared in 2003, heightening suspicions about an unidentified ‘fourth customer’. After the interdiction of the BBC China made it clear that the network had been compromised, those involved began to destroy evidence and to dispose of stockpiled equipment. Rotors and other centrifuge components, precision tools and parts for lathes disappeared. Additionally, the network had an unknown number of complete P-2 centrifuges in Dubai that it used as demonstration models. Two were transferred to Libya, leaving at least a handful unaccounted for. Although not in a complete state of readiness, these would present a significant proliferation risk if they were to fall into the wrong hands. Network intermediaries contacted by investigators claimed that they destroyed the machines in order to remove incriminating evidence, but it is more likely that they simply hid or sold these valuable commodities.

A related question is whether other production facilities for the Khan network remain undisclosed. The 4,000 centrifuges that the US removed from Libya in 2004 were missing their most important parts – the fast-spinning rotors. Although the network set up a workshop to produce the rotors in Libya, it is questionable whether Tripoli could find enough technicians with the specialised skills needed for the assembly of these precision components. It remains possible that the rotors were ordered from an as-yet undisclosed factory elsewhere.
It is also unknown whether all members of the Khan network have been identified and put under at least some kind of law-enforcement watch. Approximately 50 individuals may have been actively involved in the network. Worldwide, 38 individuals are known to have been investigated. Certainly not everyone who assisted Khan in Pakistan has been named. It is likely that some of Khan’s associates in other countries are still at large.
The unanswered question of greatest concern is which other countries or non-state actors might also have received copies of a nuclear weapon design besides Libya. If the designs were given to Libya simply to sweeten the deal for centrifuges, it is logical to assume that Iran and North Korea, and any other customers, would have been offered copies as well. The uranium-casting documents Iran received from the Khan network have been described as ‘part of the same recipe’ as Libya’s bomb design. Libya denies having received any weaponisation information in electronic form (in contrast to the centrifuge drawings it did receive on compact disks). However, the bomb designs were reportedly digitised and copied onto computer disks at the Khan office in Dubai. According to testimony introduced in May 2006 at Lerch’s trial in Mannheim, Urs Tinner admitted to having atomic bomb construction plans in his office that he had received from Tahir. Lerch’s attorney said a customs agent memo quoted Tinner as saying that the designs were original drawings from the 1980s and that he had provided a copy to the IAEA. The Swiss and American authorities, as well as the IAEA, have been trying to find out what other use the Tinners may have made of the bomb designs, including the nightmare scenario of whether they sold any copies to terrorist groups.

The IAEA and Western intelligence agencies are also still trying to confirm the extent and nature of the assistance Khan gave Iran and North Korea.

A.Q. Khan’s personal motives and world view
In the beginning, Khan was working only for Pakistan’s national interest, which was to procure nuclear weapons technology by any means. He was encouraged to engage in parallel business dealings so that KRL could decrease its reliance on state funding. He was not the first to benefit from the illicit trade in destructive technologies, but he accelerated the consolidation of the market and, in doing so, did much to spread nuclear weapons technology. He removed key obstacles in Pakistan’s successful quest for nuclear weapons. Khan’s personal and Pakistan’s national motives came into conflict as soon as Khan was lured into lucrative clandestine dealings. In spite of his position as a nationally revered figure, Khan still harboured further personal ambition. His problem was that the secretive nature of the Pakistani nuclear programme meant his achievements had to be kept hidden from the rest of the world.
Khan aspired to defy the West, which had portrayed him as a villain and convicted him of stealing centrifuge designs (in the Netherlands). Khan felt his capabilities had been insulted. He may also have felt a genuine sense of injustice and a victim of hypocrisy given the high number of Western industrialists who were more than ready to do business with him. He had to prove he could deliver, and outwit the West and its hurdles. Combined with this was Khan’s personal anger and Pakistan’s sense of having been victimised owing to India’s nuclear test (France, Germany and Canada reneged on contracts for nuclear facilities under intense US pressure after India’s 1974 test, as noted in chapter one). Khan reportedly told his interrogators that he believed that ‘the emergence of more nuclear states would ease Western attention on Pakistan’, an explanation that rings true.
Khan said that he believed he was ‘helping the Muslim cause’, but this is a less credible explanation since the recipients of his assistance included North Korea, a non-Muslim country. In fact, Khan was not quite spreading the Islamic bomb, but acting for those states that defied the West in their nuclear pursuits, and more generally, in their foreign policies. Explaining his actions through this religious dimension obscures the financial motivation that appears to have been behind his dealings with Iran. He may also have felt the need for revenge against Zia, who in 1987 had rebuked him (page 94). The Iran case can be explained by simple market mechanisms: there was a long-standing demand from Tehran, and there was now an available supply of discarded P-1 centrifuges. This provided an opportunity to expand the business of the network, giving profits to all collaborators, who included his business partners as well as those within KRL and some government officials who might have facilitated or overlooked the deal. The offer to Iraq in 1990 shows that there was no consistent political strategy behind the network’s exports: it did not make sense to sell simultaneously to Saddam Hussein and to his arch-enemies in Tehran. Khan used the No-dong deal with North Korea to retain his value in competition with his PAEC rivals. As for Khan’s motive for Libya – it seems that he simply wanted to make money and to satisfy his ego. He felt hurt that his authority had been called into question, and that he had been removed from KRL, and thus wanted to prove that he could deliver a nuclear capability anywhere in the world through the network, for which the Libya deal was an opportunity to ‘go global’, expanding from its original Pakistani roots. In sum, a constellation of different motivations explains the various deals made by the Khan network, varying in importance over time and according to circumstances: ego, profit, nationalism and Islamic identity.

Conclusions
For most of the deals it is hard to separate A.Q. Khan the individual from the global network he led. But neither were Khan and the network synonymous. Although Khan was the deal-maker, the network often appeared to act autonomously, driven as much by his foreign business partners as by his own ambitions. By the time of the Libya deal, the network was a ‘globalised supply chain’. Production capabilities became widespread – with computer-controlled lathes, components could be made almost anywhere – and knowledge became diffuse.
The network’s ability to satisfy its customers stems from its origins as a national procurement enterprise. It was the experience gained from working for the Pakistani programme that made the network so efficient when it turned to exports. The story is more complex, however, than a mere ‘reversal of the flow’. Pakistan continued to import components for its own programme, in a manner that was largely insulated from the Khan network’s exports. Also, Khan’s foreign-based partners were not involved to the same degree in all cases: they appear not to have been involved in the North Korea case at all, except, for some perhaps, as direct component suppliers. By contrast, Khan’s Swiss and Dubai-based partners were apparently the first to be involved in both the Iran and Libya cases.

Khan cannot be characterised strictly as either a government representative or a businessman acting independently. He was in fact both, in varying degrees according to the circumstances. The state’s complicity in his proliferation ranged along a spectrum. At one end, his procurement for Pakistan’s nuclear programme was state authorised, supported and funded, although he had great autonomy in making his own purchases. Khan’s purported discussions with the Saudis were almost surely state authorised. At the other end of the spectrum, the Khan network’s sales to Libya of centrifuge equipment produced in Malaysia, Turkey, Europe and South Africa and transshipped in Dubai were almost exclusively a private business transaction beyond state control. The same is likely to be true of his purported exploratory business trips to other countries in Africa. The offer to Iraq also appears to have been a private venture by the network, although the dearth of evidence makes it hard to draw conclusions.

The Pakistani government should have known what key officials, such as Khan, were up to in an area so fundamental to Pakistan’s national security and international reputation, and it is logical to assume that the intelligence apparatus was aware of more than Pakistan has ever let on. While knowledge of a transaction denotes complicity, however, it does not necessarily imply authorisation. With Iran, North Korea and Libya, Khan operated in the context of on-going government-to-government cooperation in weapons programmes and exchanges that either involved nuclear technology (in the case of Iran), nuclear delivery systems (in the case of North Korea), or nuclear materials (in the case of Libya).

In downplaying the damage caused by Khan’s onward proliferation, Pakistani officials stress that the centrifuge equipment he sold to Iran was used and deficient, as was probably true of the equipment he transferred to North Korea, and, in the case of Libya, that it was incomplete. None of these countries succeeded in constructing a nuclear weapon from the technology they obtained from the Khan network, although how close they got to a bomb as a result of the transfers is a matter of some debate. The nuclear device the North Koreans tested in October 2006 was based not on HEU but on the plutonium they had separated from the spent fuel rods from their research reactors. How much progress they made in their Khan-assisted centrifuge-procurement programme is simply unknown. There is no evidence that North Korea has any ability to produce HEU; but neither was there any evidence that it could produce UF6 before it emerged as the most likely source of the UF6 that Libya obtained from Khan. Iran has made the most widely documented progress in centrifuge technology with Khan’s help, but as of the beginning of 2007, it was at least two or three years away from being able to produce enough HEU for one nuclear weapon. Libya produced no enriched uranium from the equipment it imported, and, assuming it would have received more help and the missing UF6 and centrifuge parts, it was at least three or four years away from being able to produce a weapon when Gadhafi renounced the programme in December 2003. Even then Libya would have needed a suitable delivery vehicle.

The Khan network was not a nuclear weapons ‘Wal-Mart’, since its contributions to proliferation concerned only – so far as is known today – centrifuge technology and, in one instance at least, a weapon design. However, Khan’s nuclear sales had other deleterious results. The transfer of enrichment technology to North Korea precipitated the breakdown of the US–North Korea Agreed Framework and Pyongyang’s resumption of its plutonium programme and weapons test, with as-yet unknown ripple effects. Khan’s nuclear assistance to Iran led to a further breakdown in the global non-proliferation regime and an international crisis over a budding uranium enrichment capability that many fear could escalate to armed conflict. If Gadhafi had not made his wise choice in 2003, Libya could possibly be in possession of an atomic bomb by now, a development that would probably have set one or more of its neighbours on a similar path. These scenarios, alarming as they are, only encompass the known elements of Khan’s black market dealings. By freely selling enrichment equipment and putting the designs on computer disks, Khan significantly lowered the technical barriers to nuclear weapons development. Who else might have access to the nuclear technology he and his network proliferated remains a haunting question.

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British Court Ruling Affects Who Counts as a Jew

Last week, Mia and Luisitapuzzled over whether or not labels are useful in defining who we are. This week, I'd like to ask whether our identity is determined fundamentally by what we do or by our blood.

Yeah, I know. That's heady, metaphysical stuff for snowy days late in December. But it's a question directly raised in a landmark decision by Britain's Supreme Court, which ruled last Wednesday that it was illegal for a state-funded Jewish school to base its admissions policy on whether or not the applicant's mother was Jewish.

The ruling concerns the highly sought after Jewish Free School in Northwest London. A boy referred to only as M was denied admission there because -- although he came from an observant Jewish family -- his mother (a convert) was not recognized as Jewish by the chief rabbi affiliated with this school. Jews have long been defined by a matrilineal test. And although it is often sufficient for the mother to convert to Judaism to count as a Jew, some more traditional movements within the religion do not always acknowledge the validity of conversions by more liberal movements.

On the face of it, this is a simple discrimination case. Because there is no separation of church and state in Britain, the government funds a certain number of so-called "faith schools" (whether Church of England, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, etc.). These schools are allowed to give priority to applicants who share the faith of the school.

But in this case, M's father sued the school, claiming that its policy amounted to racial discrimination. In June, the Court of Appeal ruled in his favor. The school appealed that decision, but the Supreme Court sided with the Court of Appeal in a 5-4 decision last week. Going forward, children who apply to one of the U.K.'s 50 Jewish schools will now have to take religious practice tests to ensure the schools are not discriminating against children on ethnic grounds.

The decision has split the Jewish community right down the middle. On one side, critics argue that even if the government was trying to settle an educational matter, the ruling ends up bearing on a fundamentally religious one. As an orthodox rabbi wrote last week in The Guardian: "Judaism is a state of being, it is an existential definition acquired at birth or through the visible sacrifice and commitment of conversion. It is not conferred on the basis of ticking boxes on a form. Nor for that matter does the inability to tick such boxes, due to lack of practice, mean that a born Jew is to lose his or her Jewishness." Simply put, Jews do not need secular jurists to tell them who is Jewish.

On the other hand, there are those who view the Supreme Court ruling as having saved the Jewish community from itself. For these more liberal currents within the religion, the ruling represents -- as another rabbi put it -- "a victory for common sense over discrimination. It was always indefensible that a Jewish school should refuse Jewish education to a Jewish child." In other words, the fact that this boy came from a family that believed in and practiced Judaism ought to be enough.

Which brings us back to identity: is it what you do -- or who you are -- that matters?

I can see both sides of this issue. Seen purely through the lens of legal discrimination, the ruling seems like a no-brainer to me. Of course you'd want to require the schools to be more inclusive. Can you imagine if taxpayer-financed schools started saying that they wouldn't admit blacks, or Latinos . . . or Caucasians? But I also appreciate why the Orthodox community in the U.K. sees this ruling as de-facto interference in how they go about defining their religion, which is -- and should be -- a private matter.

Which is why I'm glad that -- for the moment at least -- I can comfortably avoid this issue entirely. I'm a recovering Catholic married to a Jew with two children who proudly call themselves Jewish and have no concept that they are anything but. To the extent that I'm thinking about joining anything, I'm currently eying the lesbian and gay synagogue here in London (despite being neither lesbian, gay nor Jewish) precisely because it explicitly welcomes patrilineal Jews. In short, I'm so far out of the mainstream right now that none of this affects my lifestyle at all.

But if that changed -- and I decided to convert, or simply to step up our commitment to the religion, as we may do -- I'd hate to think that we'd be discriminated against simply because once upon a time I used to recite the Hail, Mary instead of The Shema.

And then this will all matter a great deal.

In the meantime, I'm happy to remain -- as one author put it -- more Jew-ish than Jewish.

Heaven and Nature

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: December 20, 2009

It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

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Susan Etheridge for The New York Times

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now.. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of themonotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment..) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality..

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas storyhas it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Nuclear black markets: other countries and networks

http://www.iiss.org/EasysiteWeb/getresource.axd?AssetID=2255&type=full&servicetype=Inline&customSizeId=0

Pakistan has not been the only country to utilise the private sector and exploit loopholes in export control regimes in order to further a nuclear programme. The black and grey markets in nuclear technology and expertise have existed for decades. However, they became more significant following India’s ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ in 1974, after which supplier nations began to impose more rigorous controls on nuclear commerce.
Previously, the transfer of nuclear materials that was essential to most would-be nuclear weapons states had generally taken place in the form of state-to-state transactions or espionage, or in the context of technology and material diverted from an overtly civilian nuclear programme. Tighter controls on state-to-state technology transfers over the past four decades have resulted in the emergence of the private sector as an additional source of nuclear technology and expertise for proliferant states. Such activity has been notable in the nuclear weapons programmes of Iraq and Iran – both of which, like Pakistan, developed extensive procurement networks to obtain technology from the private sector. To a lesser extent India, North Korea, Libya, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Syria and Israel are also alleged to have been involved in the nuclear black market. The following case studies give some illustration of the phenomenon outside of the Khan network, whose black market activities are discussed elsewhere. However, this chapter cannot claim to be an exhaustive account of the clandestine private-sector trade to date in nuclear technology and expertise. Given the trade’s murky nature, it is highly likely that a large proportion of this activity remains, and will remain, unknown.

Iraq
While Iraq never succeeded in building nuclear weapons, it did make extensive efforts to do so up to 1991. Thanks to UN and IAEA inspections both before and after the 2003 invasion, the world has a good understanding of how Iraq obtained nuclear technology and material from foreign suppliers. Not all of the details about the companies involved are available in open sources. A November 2005 UNMOVIC report describing Iraq’s procurement programme includes a sanitised annex of procurement activity and refers to an extensive compendium that has not been released. Similarly, Iraq’s ‘Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declaration’ of December 2002 contained an annex detailing its nuclear-related procurement. This annex is not publicly available and was edited by US officials before being passed to the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council. However, a German newspaper claimed to have seen a copy of the uncensored document. This apparently listed dozens of Western companies which had supplied Iraq’s WMD programmes prior to 1991.

Like most would-be proliferators, Iraq had sought nuclear technology in large-scale transfers from other countries. However, Israel’s raid on a French-supplied reactor at Osirak in 1981 prompted a tactical change by the Iraqis. Rather than give priority to a plutonium bomb, which would require reactors exposed both to international scrutiny and possibly to another attack, they decided to develop a covert uranium enrichment capability while falsely professing to remain in compliance with the NPT. In fact, Iraq never completely discounted the plutonium route to a bomb, but by 1991 had made no practical progress towards developing a suitable plutonium-producing reactor. In January 1982 an Office of Studies and Development was established in the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) to examine the practicalities of uranium enrichment. Iraq’s approach, according to Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, the former head of the nuclear weapons programme, was to ‘let Israel believe it destroyed our nuclear capacity, accept the sympathy being offered for this aggression and proceed in secret with the programme’. Several elaborate procurement networks were established to import substantial quantities of nuclear components without arousing international suspicion. David Kay, a former weapons inspector who went on to become the first leader of the Iraq Survey Group, estimated in the 1990s that Iraq may have spent $10 billion on procurements for its secret nuclear programme, which employed around 20,000 people.

The Iraqi nuclear programme had numerous procurement channels. The Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialisation (MIMI), headed by Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, was charged with Iraq’s extensive military re-armament as the war with Iran (1980–88) came to a close. Following the transfer during 1987–88 of various departments from the IAEC to MIMI, Kamil became ultimately responsible for the Iraqi nuclear programme. Its procurement effort was assisted by the Iraqi diplomatic and intelligence services, which helped to establish the various networks that would supply Iraq with technology for both conventional and unconventional weapons. By 1988, Kamil was in charge of both MIMI and the Al-Amn al-Khas (Special Security Organisation, or SSO). Other Iraqi intelligence services (such as the Mukhabarat, or General Intelligence) were deeply involved in the procurement campaign. Iraqi intelligence officers and officials, such as Ali Mutalib Ali (commercial attaché in Bonn), assisted Iraqi-controlled European companies in their negotiations and suggested which suppliers might be more creative in their product descriptions, so that they might obtain export licences. The Iraqi security services were used to transfer funds to suppliers or middlemen. Lists of equipment required by the nuclear programme were transmitted in Iraqi diplomatic bags, and then on to front companies that could connect the Iraqis with potential suppliers. The procurement efforts of the intelligence services were not always closely coordinated with those of MIMI.

Dual-use goods and subcomponents
The Iraqi programme relied heavily on dual-use technology and components with false end-user statements, purchased from the European and American private sectors. The Iraqis soon realised that it was often easier to procure the subcomponents and equipment to construct major components themselves than to obtain tightly controlled units on suppliers’ trigger lists. Iraq was skilful at accumulating multiple components from different suppliers and successfully integrating them into a more sophisticated system. This allowed Iraq to exploit loopholes in export controls. For example, computer-numerically controlled machine tools, which could not be legally exported from the US when they were combined with laser alignment systems, were delivered to Western Europe or Iraq, only to be conjoined with these laser systems when they had reached their destination. Most subcomponents of Iraqi gas centrifuges were acquired from abroad and assembled on Iraqi soil. Dual-use subcomponents carried far less risk of discovery, and it was easier to obtain a false export licence for them. One reason Iraq decided to pursue the electromagnetic separation route to uranium enrichment (regarded as technically obsolete) was because the main pieces of equipment and software required were not on suppliers’ nuclear export control lists. This made their procurement less troublesome than attempting to acquire intact, state-of-the-art units.

Front companies and middlemen
To obtain sensitive items without openly violating export controls, and to prevent the true destination and purpose of nuclear imports from becoming generally known, front companies were established to act as false end users. These companies were set up both in Iraq and across Europe. As characterised by a US Congressman who discussed it in a public session, a CIA report of 1989 stated that ‘Baghdad uses aggressive covert techniques to acquire technology. The nuclear network – controlled by MIMI – uses Iraqi public sector enterprises, front companies, foreign agents and even civilian organizations to procure technology.’ MIMI controlled private firms such as the Al-Arabi Trading Company and the state-owned Nassr General Establishment. Both were nominally civilian organisations and directed numerous other front companies throughout Europe and the United States. Many of the companies which supplied Iraq with nuclear-related goods were also involved in procurement of other unconventional weapons. Some sections of the nuclear programme controlled various front companies directly. For instance, the gas centrifuge programme, known as the ‘Engineering Design Centre’ and based at Rashdiya, controlled and staffed the ‘Industrial Projects Company’ (IPC), one of the numerous companies or state-owned establishments used as channels to procure centrifuge technology. The Al-Arabi Trading Company answered to the ‘Technical Corps for Special Projects’, which in turn answered to MIMI. Al-Arabi was led by Dr Safa Al Habobi (formerly of the SSO and later appointed Iraqi oil minister), who also represented Nassr General Establishment. One of Al-Arabi’s subsidiaries was Euromac, staffed by two brothers, Hussein and Kassim Abbas. In March 1990 five people were arrested in London for attempting to export, through an affiliate of Euromac, military-grade capacitors of the type used to trigger nuclear weapons. One of those arrested was Omar Latif, an official at Iraqi Airways, but also apparently the head of Iraq’s intelligence network in Britain.

Al-Arabi controlled UK holding companies such as the Technology Engineering Group (TEG) and the Technology Development Group (TDG). These in turn controlled numerous other firms throughout the UK and the United States, and helped to arrange large orders for the nuclear programme. TEG had originally been known as Meed International when it was established by Iraqi expatriate businessman Anees Mansour Wadi and British middleman Roy Ricks. In late 1987, TEG purchased goods worth around £1.25 million for the gaseous diffusion and centrifuge programmes, and shipped these to the Nassr General Establishment. TDG established TMG Engineering, which then acquired TI Machine Tools, later renamed Matrix Churchill Ltd. TMG also controlled Matrix Churchill Corporation, a distribution agent for Matrix Churchill in the United States. Although Matrix Churchill became one of Britain’s more successful manufacturers of machine tools, it was controlled by Iraq and formed an important part of its nuclear procurement apparatus. It built small, precision-tooled components for Iraq’s prototype centrifuges in its UK factory, and obtained items from other suppliers that were then redirected to Iraq. The Matrix Churchill group, in addition to its role in the Iraqi nuclear programme, was deeply involved in the procurement of technology for other unconventional weapons and military projects, and in the development of Iraq’s military-industrial infrastructure.

After the Gulf War, an attempted prosecution of three Matrix Churchill executives collapsed when it was shown that British intelligence services had been aware of the military end use of many of Matrix Churchill’s exports, as they had regularly received information from two of its employees. Despite this, the British government had allowed (and even encouraged) most of these exports to proceed for a variety of reasons, including a fear of losing valuable business to other European companies or the Soviet Union, a desire to learn more about Iraq’s rearmament, and a failure to appreciate how far some of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programmes had advanced. The ‘Scott Report’, which investigated the handling of the Matrix Churchill prosecution and government knowledge of the sale of arms to Iraq before the Gulf War, was highly damaging to the reputation of the Conservative government when it was eventually released in 1996.

A subsidiary of Matrix Churchill secretly purchased 18% of the Swiss firm SMB Schmiedemeccanica S.A., which made high-precision forgings. In 1990, SMB was contacted by IPC, one of the centrifuge programme’s front companies. IPC ordered 1,000 forgings, apparently for an automobile-parts manufacturing complex in Iraq. In fact, these forgings were intended to manufacture the end caps and baffles required to construct centrifuges. IPC also negotiated with Interatom, a subsidiary of Siemens AG, in an attempt to secure a centrifuge workshop and centrifuge-related training at the Al Furat facility. The first stage of a three-part contract was approved by the German export control authority, but the arrangement was terminated in 1990 after the connection between IPC and the Iraqi centrifuge programme became apparent. If completed, this workshop (Building B01) at Al Furat would probably have been used to manufacture pipework for cascades, and to assemble and test centrifuges. The IAEA estimated that, if it had become fully operational, the Al Furat facility might have been able to produce up to 5,000 centrifuges per annum.

Special financial arrangements
Iraq established a special relationship with a US branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in Atlanta, Georgia, which provided Iraq with credit on extremely favourable terms. The Atlanta branch was able to borrow large amounts of money thanks to the excellent credit rating of its parent institution, which was owned by the Italian government. BNL had first extended credit to Iraq so that it could purchase American agricultural products; as such, about $900m of credit to Iraq’s state-owned banks was guaranteed by a division of the US Department of Agriculture. BNL’s headquarters in Rome did not authorise the illicit activities of the Atlanta branch, although a judge presiding over an ensuing trial argued that this lack of oversight indicated severe mismanagement. Although some of the loans from BNL were used for civilian purchases, the bank also provided letters of credit to the Western suppliers of Iraq’s nuclear programme and other military projects. One of Atlanta BNL’s officials, Christopher Drogoul, was the son of Pierre Drogoul, a former consultant to Babil International. Babil International was a French subsidiary of the Al-Arabi network, and was owned by Safa Al Habobi. The Atlanta branch of BNL was raided by US officials in August 1989. In 1993, Christopher Drogoul was sentenced to 37 months’ imprisonment. Since the US government had encouraged economic aid to Iraq, the judge felt that Drogoul merited a lighter sentence than was usual in such cases.

Following the Gulf War, numerous media commentators alleged that the George H.W. Bush administration had connived with BNL to help Iraq purchase arms, that the Justice Department had obstructed the investigation into the bank, and that it had incorrectly treated its owner, the Italian government, as a victim, rather than a culprit in the fraud perpetrated by the Atlanta branch. This scandal was dubbed ‘Iraqgate’. A subsequent report by the Justice Department, released in 1995, exonerated the Bush administration of having illegally armed Iraq, denied that the Justice Department’s previous investigations had been ‘subverted for political purposes’, and argued that any allegations that BNL officials in Rome had been aware of the unauthorised loans were unproven.

Redirection and re-export
Consignments were often sent to third countries for transport to their final destination. For example, two shipments of maraging steel, produced by the Austrian firm Boehler Edelstahl, were exported from Antwerp to Dubai, then sent overland to Iraq via Saudi Arabia. After the United Nations imposed an embargo on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the Iraqi centrifuge programme arranged with several European suppliers for deliveries to be sent to the Mitramas company in Singapore. The plan was for this equipment to be re-exported to Jordan, and then on to Iraq, although most of these items were intercepted in Jordan. The use of ‘free-trade hubs’ such as Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong is a common feature of procurement networks, as it makes it harder to identify the end user of restricted items.

Multiple purchases and ‘tradecraft’
Iraq would often place numerous orders for a desired item; each individual order would be smaller than the quantity that would trigger export controls. It calculated, usually correctly, that even if one of these orders were prohibited, there would not be a determined investigation by Western states that would uncover the other procurement channels for the same item.

The Iraqis also went to great lengths, using traditional ‘tradecraft’, to disguise their procurement. Examples include removing names of suppliers and banking transfer agents from invoices; removing names and destinations from wooden shipping crates; and the use of false identities by scientists when they travelled abroad.

Purchasing foreign companies and expertise
The Iraqis invested heavily in or partly purchased European companies which then directly produced components or machinery required for the nuclear programme. One example was Matrix Churchill. Another was Al-Arabi’s secret purchase in 1987 of 50% of the German firm H+H Metalform GmbH, which specialised in the production of vertical flow-forming machines. These are extremely useful in the construction of metal cylinders with precise specifications, and thus can be used in the manufacture of both ballistic missiles and gas centrifuges. It is suspected that, in 1984, Dietrich Hinze, later the co-founder of H+H Metalform, supplied machines that would be used in the Brazilian centrifuge programme. As with Matrix Churchill, the rash of new contracts from Iraq after 1987 transformed the once-struggling H+H Metalform into a flourishing organisation. The resulting profits no doubt encouraged company executives to enter false end-use statements on export-licence applications. H+H Metalform contributed to Iraq’s ballistic missile development, as well as providing equipment and technical advice to its nuclear programme. In addition, the Iraqis were able to acquire technology, expertise and assistance from companies, engineers and scientists located for them by contacts at H+H Metalform, ‘who provided dozens of connections to high-tech firms who cooperated because of their long relationship with [H+H Metalform] and the ample funds that [Iraq] could provide’.

The most notorious of these engineers was Karl-Heinz Schaab, who probably bears more responsibility for the spread of centrifuge enrichment technology than anyone outside the Khan network. Schaab was a former employee of MAN Technologie AG, an important partner in Urenco’s development of centrifuge technologies. In 1989, Schaab sold Iraq classified blueprints of an experimental version of an advanced Urenco 3m-long supercritical centrifuge (TC-11) that his friend Bruno Stemmler had allegedly stolen from their former employer. Schaab also sold the Iraqis dual-use technology and numerous centrifuge components, including 38 carbon-fibre centrifuge rotors, and provided relevant equipment and on-site technical support once the components had arrived in Iraq. Schaab and his wife (the co-owner of their company Rosch) were convicted in 1993 of exporting these carbon centrifuge rotors to Iraq without a licence; Schaab received a fine (DM20,000) and a suspended prison sentence. Although Schaab’s wife had been apprehended in Austria in 1992, German authorities sought Schaab in Brazil, where it was suspected that he was associating with other ex-MAN personnel in projects involving carbon-fibre composite materials. Schaab was charged with treason after his full contribution to the Iraqi centrifuge programme (including the sale of the TC-11 designs) was revealed, and he again fled to Brazil in 1996. Schaab later agreed to return to Germany. It has been suggested that he provided technical assistance for Brazil’s gas centrifuges, although this has not been confirmed. In 1999, Schaab was convicted of treason, fined DM80,000 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. However, due to time already served and his cooperation with the authorities, he was freed immediately. Other scientists, such as Stemmler and Walter Busse (another ex-employee of MAN and, like Stemmler, deceased), also sold technical documents and their nuclear expertise to the Iraqis. For example, Stemmler sold photographs and drawings relating to the classified Zippe-type gas centrifuge (such as G-1 and G-2 designs) in 1988, allowing Iraq to shift its resources away from the less efficient oil-bearing Beams-type centrifuges. Stemmler also gave the Iraqis various centrifuge components, some of which they were able to reverse-engineer. The technology, materials and know-how supplied by Schaab, Stemmler and Busse provided the Iraqi centrifuge programme with a significant boost.
Germany’s reputation for technical excellence, combined with its slack export controls, help to explain why it produced a substantial proportion of Iraq’s nuclear imports. Weak German export laws, and their lax enforcement, allowed for the easy falsification of end-use statements and the delivery of dual-use items. (For the involvement of German companies in Pakistan’s nuclear imports, see chapter one.) Schaab and his collaborators, despite their later excuses, were probably aware that their export of nuclear technologies was illegal or, at the very least, violated the spirit of the law. It is harder to prove the illegal intentions of many of the other firms that exported dual-use equipment to Iraq, although their suspicions must have been raised. As the IAEA put it in 1991, ‘much of the equipment [exported] … is multi-purpose in the sense of being useful in a number of manufacturing processes. However, the application-specific fixtures remove most doubt as to the intended uses. Some of the companies … must have known (or could reasonably have inferred) the intended uses.’ Yet it is impossible to prove that all of Iraq’s suppliers exported items whose use they knew to be prohibited.

Links to the Khan network
It is now known that the Khan network approached Iraq in 1990 with an offer to supply enrichment technology and project designs. However, this offer was declined (see chapter three).

During its procurement campaign, Iraq dealt with various individuals or entities also involved with Khan or the Pakistani programme. For instance, Friedrich Tinner, patriarch of a family that would play a vital role in the Khan network’s later operations, supplied nuclear-related items to both Iraq and Pakistan. After leaving his post as export director at Vakuum-Apparate-Technik (VAT), he established his own firm, CETEC (later renamed PhiTec). It was reported that CETEC had attempted to send fluoride-resistant valves suitable for use with centrifuges to Iraq, although these items were intercepted in Jordan. The Swiss authorities later investigated Tinner, but did not charge him. Similarly, Iraq obtained 100 tonnes of maraging steel in 1989 through Mazhar Malik, a Pakistani middleman based in London. It is possible, although unconfirmed, that this was the same intermediary mentioned in the 1990 offer by the Khan network. However, the 1990 offer notwithstanding, the fact that suppliers to the Pakistani and Iraqi nuclear programmes overlapped is less an indication that the Khan network ‘supplied’ Iraq, than an illustration that the nodes comprising procurement and proliferation networks often work independently, sometimes at cross purposes. Certain firms and individuals have, wittingly or unwittingly, supplied several national nuclear programmes.

Reforms to export controls after the Gulf War
Iraq’s exploitation of weak export controls eventually prompted various measures at both national and international levels to hinder future procurement efforts. The German government, in particular, greatly strengthened its export control policies and enforcement procedures. For example, each company had to introduce an internal compliance system and nominate a senior ‘export-responsible executive’ who would be held personally accountable for any illegal actions by the firm. The penalties for foreign trade violations were increased. The creation of the Federal Exports Office in 1992 led to more export control officials and a longer and more rigorous approval process for exported items. In response to Iraq’s targeting of items not covered by the Nuclear Suppliers Group trigger list, the nuclear exporters established additional guidelines on dual-use items (see page 10). The Wassenaar Arrangement, established in 1995 as an informal agreement of 33 states (now increased to 40), was intended to control transfers of sensitive dual-use goods and technologies in a post-Cold War era and was, to a great extent, a reaction to Iraq’s vast effort to procure both conventional and unconventional weapons.

Iraq’s extensive procurement network prospered thanks to a combination of the ineffective enforcement of already weak export controls, particularly those concerning dual-use goods; the greed and naivety of numerous businessmen, engineers and scientists; and an elaborate infrastructure of deception involving front companies, indirect delivery routes and coordinated purchasing patterns, all designed to confound easy discovery of the true purpose of the procurements. Yet the Iraqi import network never mimicked A.Q. Khan’s by morphing into an onward proliferation network and exporting technology. Its goal was to produce a nuclear capability for Saddam alone; there is no evidence to suggest that Iraqis attempted to sell material to other states or groups. The network involved non-state actors, but the main player remained the Iraqi state itself. Despite the recommendations of certain members of Iraqi intelligence on how to deal with increased import restrictions after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, nuclear goods were never directly obtained from less-developed countries. Although items were delivered to Iraq via a multitude of intermediate states, the vast majority of Saddam’s nuclear infrastructure was manufactured in Western Europe or the United States, or assembled from components originating in those countries. In contrast, the Khan network would exploit complacency about the ability of less industrially developed states to produce the components necessary for a nuclear weapons programme.

Iran
Iran has attempted to secure technical assistance from numerous other governments, most recently from China and Russia. It has also widely engaged the private sector. As with Iraq and Pakistan, Iran uses embassy officials, middlemen, false end-user certificates and front companies to obtain equipment and technologies essential for its nuclear programme. Some of these front companies and middlemen also seek technology relevant to conventional weapons and ballistic missiles, while others have been established specifically to obtain nuclear components. In addition, Iran’s nuclear programme received significant assistance from the Khan network, some undetected elements of which may still be in business with Tehran. Indeed, Iran probably received Khan’s address book of supplier contacts.

Iran’s procurement efforts have no doubt benefited from the country’s close proximity to the United Arab Emirates, a common destination for illicit items and eventually the hub of the Khan network. Iran has been the largest recipient of the UAE’s non-oil re-exports for much of the past decade, and slightly less than a quarter of the UAE’s population is comprised of Iranian citizens or people of Iranian origin. Iranian officials have expressed confidence that sanctions or strengthened export controls would not prevent the progress of its nuclear programme because, as one said, ‘you can get anything you need from Dubai’. This is clearly an exaggeration, but the UAE’s relatively lax export controls will no doubt prove tempting to Iran if the international community continues to target its nuclear-related imports.

Iran’s nuclear research programme began in the 1950s, and its procurement of technology from foreign firms predated the Islamic Revolution. For example, in 1978 a US company, headed by a scientist who had previously worked on classified laser enrichment work, reportedly shipped four lasers to Iran. These lasers may have aided Iranian engineers in their experiments to develop laser isotope-separation technologies, although the scientist later argued that the specifications of the lasers were unsuitable for uranium enrichment. The change of regime in 1979 temporarily halted nuclear research but, by the mid 1980s, Iran’s quest for foreign technology had restarted.

In 1985, Iran acquired ‘flow-forming’ machines from the German firm Leifeld, the former employer of both directors of H+H Metalform; equipment of this type is currently used in Iran’s centrifuge-manufacturing complex. The Japanese manufacturing company Mitutoyo is alleged to have supplied the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Defence, among other Iranian entities, with nuclear-related measuring devices between 1984 and 1992, mainly via an Iranian front company based in Japan. It is unclear whether Mitutoyo’s involvement with Iran in these deals was connected with the company’s alleged involvement with the Khan network. In August 1991, US authorities arrested Reza Amiri and Mohammed Danesh for selling Iran an oscilloscope they had purchased from Tektronix. The US government also alleged that in the same period of 1989–90 they had sold Iran logic analysers and pulse generators. These items may be used for ballistic-missile development, but can also be used to monitor tests of nuclear weapons.

Despite reforms made to Western countries’ export controls following the Gulf War,
Iran continued to target companies in Europe and the United States. In 1991, the German firm Leybold may have sold a vacuum arc furnace to an official at the Iranian embassy in Bonn, Said Kareem Ali Sonhani. It was revealed in 1995 that Peyton Humphries, a CIA agent based in Germany who had been accused in the local media of conducting industrial espionage against German firms, had actually been investigating connections between Iranian procurement agents and German companies supplying dual-use goods potentially useful in unconventional weapons programmes. In 1996, a shipment of 55kg of maraging steel from the United States to the National Iranian Steel Company was seized by customs officials in the United Kingdom.

Like Iraq, Iran has explored the possibility of purchasing foreign companies to potentially serve its procurement needs. Reports from the 1990s indicate that Iranian nationals attempted to purchase small German firms to circumvent German export controls and transfer technology to Iran. Iranian officials signed a letter of intent in 1996 pledging their interest in the purchase of the German machine-tool manufacturer Sket Magdeburg. This was reminiscent of Iraq’s acquisition of Matrix Churchill, which then helped it to produce components and find suppliers for its nuclear programme.

German customs investigators raided the home of businesswoman Eva-Marie Hack in November 2002. Hack had ordered 44 high-voltage Behlke switches (which can be used to detonate a nuclear weapon) on behalf of Eddie Johansson. Johansson, whose original name was Hojat Nagash Souratgar, had been born in Iran but later acquired Swedish citizenship. The intended recipient of the switches was possibly Zaeim Electronic Industries of Tehran. Johansson had apparently contacted Hack through another German, Harold Hemming. Johansson’s brother transferred approximately $70,000 from an account at the Dubai branch of Bank Saderat Iran to a Swiss bank account kept by Hemming. Hemming then transferred these funds to Hack, who used some of this amount as a down-payment for the Behlke switches. (In September 2006, the US Treasury denied Bank Saderat all access to the US financial system on the grounds that it had been used to transfer tens of millions of dollars to terrorist organisations). Johansson left Germany soon after the raid on Hack’s house. He had previously attempted to acquire Behlke switches from an American firm, Eurotek Inc. USA, claiming that he represented a Taiwanese firm. But when questioned more specifically about the intended end use of the switches, Johansson broke off contact.

Iran has admitted to the IAEA that a private contractor made inquiries with a European intermediary about the procurement of 4,000 magnets suitable for use in a P-2 centrifuge (the designs, and possibly prototypes of which had been provided by the Khan network in the 1990s). Iran has claimed that in fact this European intermediary provided no magnets, but that a limited number of such magnets were successfully imported from other suppliers in 2002. The IAEA is still investigating other possible attempts by Iran to acquire magnets relevant to P-2 development.

It has been reported that Iran has persistently attempted to secure technical know-how by finding contacts among suppliers, consultants or subcontractors for the centrifuge programmes run either by Russia’s Minatom or Europe’s Urenco. In January 2003, a 53-year-old German businessman – identified only as ‘Helmut R.’ – apparently brokered a deal to supply an unnamed state with 24 manipulators, used for separating plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods. It is suspected that his customer was Iran; he was the target of a fake bomb threat in July 2003, warning him to discontinue his cooperation with the Iranians. German intelligence services reportedly suspect Israel’s involvement in this incident. In January 2006, the head of Belgium’s State Security Police resigned after allegations that, despite multiple warnings from the CIA, his agency did not inform Belgian customs of the imminent export by Engineering Pressure Systems International of a hot isostatic press to Iran Aircraft Industries of Tehran in 2004. This equipment can be used to manufacture missile engines, but also nuclear weapons.

Also in 2006, German police announced that they had discovered a clandestine network supplying dual-use equipment, apparently to the Iranian nuclear reactor being constructed at Bushehr. The network involved at least six firms, some of which may have believed that they were only exporting goods to Russia. From 2003–04 goods worth about $3m were sent overland to Russia, then transported across the Caspian Sea. It is uncertain if these dual-use items were truly procured for Bushehr, as most necessary materials for this project are supplied legitimately by Russia. It is, therefore, possible that these items were really destined for another facility, such as the heavy water reactor at Arak.

Although China ended its official nuclear assistance to Iran in the late 1990s, US intelligence agencies reported in 2003 and 2004 that Chinese firms may have continued to supply the Iranian nuclear programme, in some cases without the knowledge of their government.

It is strongly suspected that Iran has used its universities as fronts to obtain sensitive technologies for its nuclear programme. Sharif University of Technology in Tehran plays a significant role in both Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes. It has several facilities including a R&D centre called the Physics Research Center (PHRC) at Lavisan-Shian, a suspected Iranian military front organisation. Individuals at the PHRC have attempted to acquire equipment or conduct research on enrichment processes since at least the early 1990s. Italian intelligence services have claimed that in 1991 Sharif University ordered centrifuge components from the Austrian firm Treibacher, which had previously made ring magnets used in Iraq’s centrifuge programme before the Gulf War. In the same year, Sharif also ordered ring magnets from the German company Thyssen, but the bid was rejected. Leybold negotiated the sale of vacuum pumps to a university in Tehran (probably Sharif), although these may not have been delivered. Several British firms sent Sharif consignments of fluorine gas, which can be used in the manufacture of UF6, the feedstock for gas centrifuges. Another German firm, Carl Schenck of Darmstadt, initially sold Sharif a balancing machine, before cancelling the rest of the order. In 1993, the Swiss companies AGIE and Charmilles Technologies sold Sharif electronic-discharge machinery. This can be used to produce nuclear fuel, but can also be used in the manufacture of gas centrifuges.

Amirkabir University of Technology is another Iranian college allegedly used as a front to acquire nuclear technology. The university, founded in 1958, offers doctorates in nuclear science and technology and conducts research in theoretical and high-energy physics. University representatives reportedly attempted to purchase neutron-shielding equipment from the US firm Reactor Experiments. The equipment could have been used in a plutonium reprocessing R&D programme which Iran revealed to the IAEA in 2003. Although the university was not successful in acquiring such equipment, it has attempted to obtain other dual-use equipment or technology. In 2003, the Australian government prohibited GBC Scientific Equipment from delivering a mass spectrometer (used to evaluate the enrichment of uranium) to Amirkabir. GBC had previously exported a spectrometer to the Center for Agriculture and Medicine at Karaj in 2002. Iran admitted to the IAEA that the spectrometer had been used to provide isotope-enrichment measurements, in violation of export conditions. It also admitted that centrifuge rotors had been tested at Amirkabir. The German government placed Amirkabir on a ‘warning list’ to exporters in 2002. Engineering research at the university has been partially funded by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). In 2005 the US government designated the AEOI as being involved in nuclear proliferation and imposed a freeze on its assets in the United States. The Iranians have proven that universities are useful both as fronts for procuring nuclear-related materials and as testbeds for research that could one day be used for military purposes.

Today, Iran remains the most active customer in the international nuclear black market. It has sought dual-use goods from some of the same people and firms previously linked to Khan, but has also turned to new technology brokers. According to one 2006 report, ‘German, EU and US officials say that Iran has built an equivalent, if not larger, network than Khan’s to supply prohibited goods for its nuclear … programme’. Although exporting countries have heightened their vigilance, Iran still tries to evade export controls by repeatedly changing front companies and financing arrangements. Iran continues to seek nuclear technology in Western Europe and nuclear know-how from the former Soviet Union. It has been suggested that Iran has secretly continued experiments into laser enrichment, using hired Russian expertise. An investigation by the Turkish Customs Directorate released in May 2006 claimed that an Istanbul trading firm served as the hub of a network which procured dual-use equipment manufactured in Europe, including by subsidiaries of US companies, for Iran’s nuclear programme. In late 2004 C. Surendar and Y.S.R. Prasad, both former directors of the state-run Nuclear Power Corporation of India, were sanctioned under the US–Iran Nonproliferation Act for allegedly having sold nuclear technology to Iran. However, the proscriptions against Surendar were rescinded in 2005. Despite the protests of the Indian government, the sanctions against Prasad remained until their expiry in September 2006. India continues to argue that both of these scientists were only involved in IAEA-approved projects in Iran. In 2005, Der Spiegel claimed that an Iranian front company, Partoris, had recently attempted to purchase tritium targets from EADS Sodern. These can be used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction. EADS Sodern was unaware of these items’ intended destination, as the relevant enquiries had been made by a South Korean firm, Kyung-Do Enterprises, which had had previous dealings with Partoris and was suspected to be ready to re-export the goods to Iran. In response to continued Iranian black market activity, the United States has stepped up its identification and isolation of those entities that it believes are supporting Iranian proliferation. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson declared in September 2006, ‘these are not front companies that say ”Nuclear Acquisition Corp.” or ”Weapons Production Corp.” … These are mundane-sounding companies that do many legitimate activities, but in addition, do some of these untoward and illicit activities.’
India

Compared with Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, India’s large industrial base gave its nuclear programme a far greater degree of self-sufficiency, and hence less need for an extensive procurement network. Nevertheless, there are examples of Indian attempts to obtain sensitive items from abroad on the open market.
By the early 1980s, India’s nuclear effort faced difficulties due to shortages of heavy water for its reactors. These were resolved after Alfred Hempel, a German ‘nuclear entrepreneur’ and former Nazi who died in 1989, organised illicit imports from China, Norway and the USSR. It is believed that these totalled over 250 tonnes, although estimates vary. These consignments of heavy water allowed the Madras I nuclear plant to operate without the safeguards which would have been imposed if India had imported the heavy water overtly. Although some believe that the Chinese, in particular, ‘could have been under no illusions’ about where the heavy water was bound, it is possible that Hempel, as a middleman, successfully deceived the suppliers as to the heavy water’s final destination. Hempel’s business contacts in China were severed when a Chinese government official discovered that his country’s heavy water had been sold to India, its strategic rival. Hempel controlled a group of companies including Alfred Hempel GmbH, Orda AG and Rohstoff-Einfuehr GmbH. His methods included transporting his product through multiple states in an attempt to conceal its true customer. For example, in 1983 he diverted around 15 tonnes of Norwegian heavy water, originally intended for West Germany, via Switzerland (where it was combined with about six tonnes of Soviet heavy water) and Dubai, finally arriving in India. He also established front companies as far afield as Liberia (Velsona Ltd and Beryl Corps.) to conceal the origin of his shipments. Hempel often sent heavy water in consignments of just under 1,000kg; at the time, no notification was required for transfers below 1,000kg to non-NPT states. There have also been reports that in the early 1980s Hempel was involved in the transfer from China of heavy water, low-enriched uranium (LEU) and yellowcake to Argentina, and LEU to South Africa. It seems likely that the Chinese state was aware of these consignments’ final destinations.

In 1984, the West German firm Degussa AG re-exported two batches of American beryllium, totalling 95kg, to India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) without the consent of US officials. This violated US law. Such an export would almost certainly not have been granted a licence if it had originated directly from the United States, especially since the end-use statement provided by India was considered by American experts to be inadequate. In June 2004, an American electronics firm, Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation, was fined and sentenced to a (suspended) denial of export privileges for exporting, between 1998 and 2000, nuclear pulse generators to the Indian Department of Atomic Energy and the Nuclear Power Corporation without the required licences. In addition to his activities as a middleman for Pakistan (see chapter one), Asher Karni (an Israeli businessman based in South Africa) has also been accused of acting on behalf of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre of India. In 2002, Karni agreed to approach US firms for various items, including manometers, accelerometers and regulators, as it was hoped that these would be easier to obtain if their destination appeared to be South Africa. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, India received flow meter units designed for use with UF6 from Gerhard Wisser. His firm, Krisch Engineering, may also have arranged for the delivery to India of sensitive goods such as vacuum-measuring equipment and feed and withdrawal equipment for cascades. Wisser, a German citizen living in South Africa, would later play an important role in the Khan network (see chapter three).

A 2006 report by the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington detailed clandestine attempts by elements of the Indian Department of Atomic Energy to purchase sensitive direct nuclear-use and dual-use items from abroad, with the suppliers often ignorant of their products’ final customer. These attempts were made on behalf of the Indian DAE by Indian and off-shore trading companies. India apparently has a secret enrichment plant near Mysore, codenamed the ‘Rare Materials Project’ (RMP). Indian Rare Earths Ltd of Mumbai (IRE) has procured sensitive materials and technology for RMP since the 1980s, often by placing lists of desired items in Indian newspapers to invite bids from potential suppliers or trading companies. IRE does not reveal to the foreign suppliers it contacts that the end user of these products is an unsafeguarded uranium enrichment facility. IRE has attempted to obtain numerous items, including flow-formed maraging steel tubes, maraging steel discs, and subcomponents of vacuum pumping systems, all of which are essential for centrifuge construction. The report also states that an Indian trading company seeking items advertised by IRE used an off-shore partner to obtain the items without revealing their ultimate destination. India has dismissed the report as ‘baseless’. A more recent report by the same authors alleged that BARC personnel travelled extensively in Europe to arrange the procurement of equipment for RMP from German, French and Swiss firms. Such procurement included a flow-forming machine from Leifeld. India also shopped for vacuum pumps, vacuum furnaces, valves, welding equipment, a mass spectrometer and numerous other pieces of equipment and subcomponents. India may also have obtained information about centrifuges and the design of cascades from these European suppliers.

The same report from 2007 indicated that India plans to add at least 3,000 additional centrifuges to the 2–3,000 already operating at the ‘Rare Materials Project’. Although India’s technological self-reliance is growing, it is probable that it will continue to depend on at least some level of disguised imports of dual-use goods for its nuclear weapons programme.

North Korea
North Korea’s links with the black market in nuclear technology extend well beyond its dealings with the Khan network (see chapter three). A report by German intelligence suggested that it acquired a small annealing furnace (used to treat maraging steel rotors) from Leybold in 1987, which possibly had been re-exported by entities in East Germany. The same report indicated that Leybold technicians had been observed in North Korea in 1989, and a company official was in the country in 1990. There have been suggestions that firms in Japan and Europe sold North Korea materials and equipment related to a gas centrifuge programme during
1988–89.

It is likely that North Korea targeted Russia for nuclear technology and expertise in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. It has been alleged that Russian companies sold North Korea high-strength maraging steel, but whether this was intended for its missile or nuclear programme is unclear. In March 1994, five North Koreans were expelled from Moscow for ‘showing too much interest in nuclear components’. Around the same time, three employees of the North Korean embassy were arrested for attempting to acquire unspecified weapons. In addition, the head of Russia’s Counterintelligence Service announced in June of that year that three North Koreans had been detained not far from the DPRK’s border on suspicion of trying to procure nuclear weapons components.

In November 2002, the CIA provided an unclassified assessment to Congress which stated that, since the previous year, North Korea had begun to seek ‘centrifuge-related materials in large quantities’ and had also ‘obtained equipment suitable for use in uranium feed and withdrawal systems.’ Since then, the confidence of US intelligence about the existence of an ongoing enrichment programme has decreased to a ‘moderate’ level in comparison with ‘high’ confidence about the procurement effort. However, there is no question about North Korea’s past procurement activity.

Following the collapse of the Agreed Framework in late 2002, it was reported that North Korean agents had managed to purchase around 20 tonnes of tributyl phosphate (TBP) from China. TBP is a chemical which has numerous commercial applications, but was probably used to separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
In May 2004, German businessman Hans Werner Truppel was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for attempting to supply North Korea with 214 aluminium tubes intended for its gas centrifuge programme. The tubes were approximately the same size as the aluminium casing required for one of the Urenco centrifuge designs stolen by Pakistan during the 1970s. There is no indication that Truppel was connected to the A.Q. Khan network other than as a potential supplier. It is more likely that North Korea used specifications, and possibly a suppliers list, provided by Khan and did its shopping independently. Truppel’s firm Optronic had been approached several years earlier by a North Korean businessman who claimed to work for an import–export company called Nam Chon Gang. Truppel legitimately sold this firm various items such as vacuum pumps and angle grinders. In 2002 the North Korean firm, claiming to represent the Chinese Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, asked Truppel to obtain the aluminium piping. The German Trade Ministry denied Truppel permission to export the pipes, but he did so anyway. Prosecutors alleged that, after the initial shipment of some 22 tonnes, Truppel had planned to transport another 200 tonnes of tubes to North Korea. This quantity of aluminium could have been used to construct between 3,500 and 4,000 centrifuges. The cargo ship carrying the first consignment was diverted nine days after departing Hamburg in April 2003, and the contraband was removed.

It has also been reported that, in the same month, the Japanese company Meishin shipped frequency converters to Thailand, to be forwarded to North Korea. Devices of this kind can be used to stabilise the flow of electric current to centrifuges. Meishin was affiliated with the pro-DPRK ‘General Association of Korean Residents’ (known as ‘Chongryon’ or ‘Chosen Soren’). Reports in February 2007 indicated that the Japanese government suspects this residents’ group of being involved in the DPRK’s nuclear programme, and was attempting to restrict its activities. According to a US intelligence report, a North Korean front organisation, the Daesong Yushin Trading Company, had made previous attempts to purchase such converters from a Japanese firm in the late 1990s. In 2002 Meishin had attempted to deliver the frequency converters directly from Japan, but failed to obtain appropriate documentation. Instead, it tried to bypass export controls by shipping them to a Thai communications company, Loxley Pacific. From there, they would have been delivered to the Daesong General Trading Company, the state-owned trading company controlled by the Korean Workers’ Party. Instead, the frequency converters were seized by customs at Hong Kong and returned to Japan. This incident illustrates the evolving techniques used by procurement networks when their original attempts are thwarted: from direct orders by front companies in the destination state; to the use of front companies in the target state; to the redirection of the goods to a third country, which later re-exports them. Countries chosen as such intermediary stages often lack the will or the ability to enforce strict export controls. Redirection failed Meishin in April 2003.

To a great extent the North Korean regime depends on the hard currency that it earns through various illicit activities, conservatively estimated to be some $500m per annum. Much of this illicit activity is coordinated through a network of banks, diplomats and front companies working under the direction of Bureau 39, the clandestine branch of the Korean Workers’ Party, which is dedicated to earning hard currency. The Korean Workers’ Party controls the Daesong Group which, as described above, has been implicated in various cases of suspected North Korean nuclear procurement. One of Bureau 39’s offshoots, the Golden Star Bank in Vienna, was identified in a 2003 report by the Austrian Interior Ministry as having participated in intelligence-gathering, ‘money-laundering, the distribution of forged currency and illegal trade with radioactive substances’. US intelligence officials apparently believe that North Korean front companies continue to act freely in China. Although the Six-Party Talks produced an agreement in February 2007 in which North Korea promised to disable its nuclear-weapons-related facilities, the potential overlap between the DPRK’s criminal and proliferation activities (related both to its nuclear and missile programmes) suggests that it would be able to draw upon a large and experienced transnational criminal network if it chose to continue its nuclear procurement efforts.

Libya
Libya suffered from a dearth of qualified technicians and, therefore, relied heavily on foreign expertise and technology in its attempts to initiate a nuclear programme. From the early 1970s onwards, Libya sought nuclear technology from numerous states, including China, the Soviet Union, France and India. Its attempts extended to requesting a weapon ‘off the shelf’ from both China and the Soviet Union. However, Libya also purchased expertise and technology from private actors, even prior to its involvement with the Khan network (see chapter three).

Numerous Egyptian nuclear scientists worked in Libya during the 1970s, following the collapse of formal inter-state nuclear cooperation agreed upon by Colonel Muammar Gadhafi and President Gamel Abdel Nasser. One such scientist was Dr Eizzat Abdel Aziz, later the head of the Egyptian nuclear research centre at Inchas. During his six years in Libya he acted as Gadhafi’s chief nuclear adviser and participated in negotiations with the Soviet and French governments, before returning to Egypt in 1980.

Credible reports suggest that Libya seriously pursued opportunities to obtain nuclear weapons from private individuals. One such case involved the former CIA employee Edwin Wilson and his Belgian associate Armand Donnay. Through Wilson, who had previously supplied Libya with 20 tonnes of C4 plastic explosive, Donnay met with senior Libyan officials in 1981. His proposal, along with a subsequent revised version, was amateurish and grandiose. It included the sale of a research reactor and other elements of a nuclear infrastructure; the supply of highly enriched uranium and plutonium; and a nuclear-warhead production facility which would manufacture dozens of strategic warheads and several hundred tactical weapons. Understandably, the Libyans rejected Donnay’s proposal due to its incompleteness and implausibility. Wilson later passed on Donnay’s documentation to the United States in an attempt to mitigate other charges against him. The CIA correctly dismissed the documents as a hoax perpetuated against Libya, and Wilson was eventually convicted of gun-running and the illegal export of explosives.

Experimental work involving centrifuges was secretly carried out at the Tajura Nuclear Research Centre from 1982 to 1992, led by a German flight engineer (allegedly Emil Stachli) who apparently brought his own centrifuge design. Libya also procured various components during this decade, including a specialised furnace from Japan in 1985, vacuum pumps from Europe, and two mass spectrometers from what the IAEA termed a ‘foreign expert’ – probably Stachli. Libya denied to the IAEA that it had been able to produce an operating centrifuge by 1992, although some report that a single centrifuge was running at one point during these clandestine experiments. In any case, no UF6 was introduced and no uranium was enriched. It was also reported in early 1992 that Libya had unsuccessfully attempted to recruit two Russian nuclear scientists to work at Tajura. After Libya’s decision to renounce its nuclear programme in 2003, a small number of unfinished maraging steel tubes were discovered. These were of the same diameter as those used in the L-2 model centrifuges later delivered by the Khan network (see chapter three). Libya informed the IAEA that these tubes were supplied in the early 1980s, and that there was no information on their origin. The IAEA has examined these tubes in an attempt to discover from where Libya obtained them.

Although a planned nuclear agreement with Belgium that would have provided a UF4 plant and other technical assistance to Libya’s nuclear facilities collapsed in early 1985, mainly due to American pressure, Libya did successfully acquire a pilot uranium-conversion plant from a Japanese firm in 1984. However, when the modules began to arrive in 1986 they lacked assembly or operating instructions, and were not unpacked for over a decade.

Despite Libya’s desire to obtain a nuclear capability, the results of its research were unimpressive, and it did not have a significant or coherent procurement effort until its dealings with the Khan network in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Other national programmes
Certain countries that have pursued nuclear weapons programmes, such as Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa and Israel, have been less flagrant in their use of clandestine private-sector trade, as have states such as Syria that have sparked concerns about nuclear proliferation. Some cases involving these countries are discussed below.

Argentina
Although Argentina never produced nuclear weapons, for many years it maintained a secret military nuclear programme that benefited from covert private-sector assistance. In 1950, President Juan Peron employed a former Nazi nuclear scientist, Ronald Richter, sparking rumours of an Argentinian weapons programme. However, Richter had been dismissed by 1952.

Argentina enjoyed significant technical transfers from other states (such as West Germany and Canada), but its military programme accelerated in the late 1970s. The construction of a uranium enrichment plant at Pilcaniyeu, using gaseous diffusion, was kept secret for five years. When Argentina refused to place the facility under IAEA safeguards after its existence was revealed in 1983, suspicions were raised about where Argentina had obtained the technology. It was subsequently revealed that the Swiss company Sulzer Brothers had supplied the plant’s electric generators and its entire cooling system. It is possible that Sulzer Brothers was aware that its products were being used for the construction of a secret uranium enrichment plant and chose to remain silent. The company later claimed that Argentina had deceived it as to the facility’s true purpose. In addition, Sulzer Brothers provided Argentina with a ‘turn-key’ heavy-water plant. The plant began operation in 1994, with an annual output of some 200 tonnes. Following the return of democratic government in December 1983, the nuclear programme was placed under civilian control. Argentina acceded to the NPT in 1995.

Brazil
Brazil’s early nuclear ambitions were driven primarily by rivalry with Argentina, and also by a desire to establish itself as a world power. In 1953 Admiral Alvaro Alberto, the first president of Brazil’s National Research Council, travelled to West Germany and met several scientists who had worked on the Nazi atomic-bomb project, including Paul Harteck and Wilhelm Groth. During these meetings, the Germans agreed to the shipment of centrifuges and supporting equipment to Brazil. In 1956, after previous attempts to ship the materials had been thwarted by the CIA and the British occupying authorities, the Germans were finally able to deliver three Groth-type centrifuges to the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Brazil received technical assistance and transfers from the United States towards its civilian nuclear research from the 1940s onwards. However, in the late 1970s Brazil established a clandestine ‘Parallel Programme’ – codenamed Solimões and funded by the military – to develop an indigenous nuclear weapons capacity. The eventual failure of a 1975 nuclear-transfer agreement with Germany apparently intensified this programme. In 1981 Brazil successfully constructed its first centrifuge, and had enriched uranium to 20% by 1986, publicly announcing this achievement in September 1987. Brazil renounced its weapons programme following its transition to civilian government during the late 1980s, and joined the NPT in 1998.

Brazil’s reluctance to allow the IAEA unrestricted access to its enrichment facility at Resende has raised suspicions that full inspections may reveal past illicit purchases of centrifuge designs. The Brazilian explanation that it wishes to protect commercial secrets (such as a unique magnetic suspension bearing system) seems unconvincing, given how well centrifuge technology is understood. However, there is no evidence that the Khan network sold any centrifuges or components to Brazil.

German and US intelligence services reportedly believe that some of the German scientists and firms that aided the Iraqi programme also supplied technology (such as the G-2 centrifuge design) and engineering expertise to Brazil. These engineers included ex-MAN Technologie employees Karl-Heinz Schaab, Bruno Stemmler and Walter Busse. Dietrich Hinze, later of H+H Metalform, sold a vertical flow-forming machine to Brazil in early 1984, which was subsequently used by the centrifuge programme. The centrifuges installed at Resende are based on carbon-fibre rotor assemblies, as opposed to the maraging steel used in the G-2. Schaab was skilled at working with carbon-fibre composite materials, and supplied the Iraqi nuclear programme with, among other things, 38 carbon-fibre centrifuge rotors. As already mentioned, he spent some years in Brazil during the 1990s, after being accused of transferring technology to Iraq. It should be noted that Brazil had already begun to use carbon-fibre centrifuges before Schaab’s time there. Brazil has denied that the design modification to its centrifuges received any assistance from either German experts or the Khan network between the mid-1980s and 2000, and claims that the design of its centrifuges’ magnetic bearings is completely indigenous. It has been reported that the collection of TC-11 blueprints that Schaab sold to Iraq was missing the drawings of its bottom bearing design.

In early 2006, the IAEA reached an agreement with Brazil that would allow inspectors to meet their verification goals without having to see the actual centrifuges.

Egypt
Egypt’s nuclear programme began in the 1950s. Concerned by Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, Nasser also attempted to develop a corresponding nuclear weapons capability. He even tried to purchase complete weapons from the Soviet Union and China. However, both these states rejected his requests. Egypt has allegedly been offered nuclear weapons-related technology and material by foreign individuals, notably by an unidentified group of Germans in the 1950s. The Egyptians apparently rejected all of these offers from private individuals. Egypt later decided not to acquire nuclear weapons and signed the NPT in 1968, ratifying it in 1981. Egypt’s non-proliferation intentions came under scrutiny in 2004 after revelations of unreported experiments relating to plutonium separation and uranium conversion. But an IAEA investigation concluded that the nuclear experiments were small scale, did not produce fissile material and did not appear to be part of any attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

South Africa
South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme benefited from the country’s advanced economy and national prowess in mining and metallurgy. These advantages, in addition to earlier agreements on technology transfers with the United States, reduced the amount of material, technology and expertise that it was obliged to procure secretly from abroad. In addition, South Africa’s increasing political isolation due to the apartheid regime encouraged technological self-sufficiency. Approximately 5,000 people were employed to manufacture components at the Valindaba and Pelindaba sites. South African technicians demonstrated ingenuity in their use of simple machines to produce complicated products for the weaponisation programme. This helped to avoid the scrutiny which would have resulted from the attempted procurement of more sophisticated equipment. Still, South Africa did import machine tools, furnaces, valves and other equipment for its programme, and received support from firms such as Leybold. Much of South Africa’s procurement was intended to supply the civilian aspect of its nuclear programme, as opposed to its military component. Although many of these imports did not violate nuclear-export controls, they did violate the sanctions against the apartheid regime. In the early 1980s, South Africa secretly hired around 25 American reactor operators and technicians to work at the Koeberg nuclear power plant. These specialists were contracted without the required US government authorisation.
When F.W. de Klerk became president in 1989, he ordered the nuclear programme to be halted. In 1991 South Africa became a member of the NPT. In 1993, de Klerk publicly acknowledged South Africa’s six nuclear weapons, and announced that they had been dismantled. However, the Khan network would later use former participants in the South African nuclear programme, drawing on their technical expertise and their experience of procuring technology while avoiding export controls and international sanctions (see chapter three).

Israel
Like South Africa, Israel obtained much of its nuclear technology through large-scale state transfers and cooperative agreements. Indeed, South Africa and Israel cooperated extensively in the nuclear field. It has been widely speculated, but never proven, that they jointly tested an atomic device in the Indian Ocean in 1979. Israel has a strong technological base, and obtained material for its bomb by reprocessing plutonium from its facility at Dimona. Israel had sufficient quantities of plutonium for one or two bombs shortly before the Six Day War in 1967, and consequently avoided many of the restrictions on state-to-state nuclear trade imposed in the 1970s.
Known examples of Israeli clandestine commerce are therefore rare. Richard K. Smyth was indicted in 1985 and sentenced in 2002 for the illegal export from the US to Israel of 800 electronic switches used in nuclear detonations. But Israel has generally relied less on purchases from private suppliers than on the diversion of material from a nominally civilian programme. In addition, there are numerous allegations of Israeli nuclear espionage, such as the reported diversion in 1968 of 200 tonnes of Belgian UO2 from the Scheersberg, a West German freighter sailing to Genoa from Antwerp (often referred to as the ‘Plumbat Operation’, after the labelling of the drums containing the UO2); and the reported diversion in the mid-1960s of about 100kg of HEU from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation’s uranium fabrication plant in Pennsylvania.

Syria
Although Syria is not known to have an active nuclear weapons programme, some incidents have prompted alarm over its ambitions. In 1984, Italian prosecutors filed an indictment which included the charge that, two years previously, an Italian arms-smuggling ring had attempted to sell Syria three complete nuclear weapons. However, one of the key individuals involved claimed that, although Syrian officials had expressed interest, the weapons never existed and were merely a scam devised by the United States. Both the United States and Sweden expressed concern when they discovered that the Swedish company MEAB Metallextraktion AB had built a fertiliser-production facility in Homs that could be used to recover uranium from the phosphoric acid produced by a nearby fertiliser plant. Despite MEAB’s declaration that the plant could not form part of a nuclear programme, suspicions were raised by the involvement of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. The Syrian Atomic Energy Commission was apparently included in a 2003 MI5 list of entities that had sought to procure nuclear-related technology for questionable end uses.

There has also been much speculation regarding Syria’s association with the Khan network. A.Q. Khan himself visited Syria several times and met Syrian officials (see chapter three). Syria signed the NPT in 1968 and ratified it the following year.

Conclusions
At least two countries mentioned in this chapter – Iran and India – remain active customers in the nuclear black market, although India to a much lesser degree than Iran. Like Pakistan, Iran in particular has used procurement networks to supply its nuclear programmes via the private sector, and will probably continue its efforts for the foreseeable future. North Korea, although possibly willing to forgo further nuclear weapons development for the time being, has an international network experienced in clandestine procurement and smuggling, which would be well suited for any future nuclear procurement activity.

Although this chapter has focused on the emergence of state procurement networks and their exploitation of the private sector in nuclear technology, it does not argue that older methods of technology transfer (such as inter-state cooperation, diversion and espionage) are extinct. These techniques persist to the present day, and are likely to be explored by any future would-be proliferator, in addition to engaging the private sector.

Pakistan’s nuclear oversight reforms

Chapter five

A.Q. Khan’s proliferation activities were not the only source of international concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets. In October 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the standard of security requirements for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons became a matter of grave concern to the US. Early that month, Washington learned that two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashirudin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, had been meeting with al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan as recently as mid-August. Majid was a nuclear fuels expert at the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH), from which he retired in 2000. Mahmood, until he resigned in 1999, was director for nuclear power at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and the self-professed chief designer and director of Pakistan’s Khushab atomic reactor. Mahmood had also been a pioneer in setting up Pakistan’s uranium enrichment programme (see page 18) before A.Q. Khan took it over. Upon leaving PAEC (having been demoted for supporting militant Islamic groups and opposing Pakistan arms control policy), Mahmood founded the Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN, a loose translation of which is ‘Islamic revival’) charity relief agency, which he used as a front to help the Taliban. UTN included a number of Pakistan’s radicalised elite, including engineers, physicists, chemists, military officers and ISI members. In several meetings with Osama bin Laden, his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda members, Mahmood and Majid discussed nuclear weapons technology.

According to the head of Libyan intelligence Musa Kousa, UTN also approached Libya to offer help in ‘building a nuclear bomb’. Mahmood made clear in public speeches his view that Pakistan’s nuclear capability was the property of the global Muslim community. Shortly after receiving intelligence information from the US, the ISI arrested Mahmood and Majid on 23 October 2001 on suspicion of a ‘violation of the code of conduct’ (stipulating that retired scientists should not work for foreign organisations) and called in several other members of the UTN for questioning. In late January 2002, the scientists were released from detention (although placed under house arrest) on the grounds that a trial would cause embarrassment for the government and risk the disclosure of nuclear secrets. Mahmood and Majid were not weapons experts, and by themselves could not have provided al-Qaeda with the ability to build a nuclear weapon. They would have had knowledge useful for making radioactive bombs, but whether they discussed such so-called ‘dirty bombs’ with al-Qaeda is unknown. Mahmood, who failed several polygraph tests, said he explained to bin Laden the difficulty of setting up a uranium-enrichment plant, whereupon bin Laden asked, ‘what if you already have the enriched uranium?’ When senior US officials read the debriefing, they became convinced that the US needed to do what it could to help Pakistan keep its nuclear assets from falling into terrorist hands.

Command and control

In fact, Pakistan had been taking steps to strengthen nuclear controls since May 1998, when the nuclear tests fundamentally altered the nation’s external and internal security environment. Since then, Pakistan’s nuclear control infrastructure has gone through four phases. In the immediate post-test period, broadly from 1998–99, the government began to consider a formal command-and-control system for the first time. In the second phase, General Pervez Musharraf, in his role as chief of army staff, implemented his initial reforms between 1999 and 2001. This phase was facilitated by the absence of any further need to keep the nuclear programme strictly clandestine. The compartmentalisation that had contributed to the lack of oversight also made it easier to reorganise the military bureaucracy. Revelations about A.Q. Khan’s onward proliferation galvanised Pakistani authorities to erect a series of accountability and oversight measures, some of which were already under way. The officials responsible for KRL security, who had previously enjoyed unquestioned authority and been paid by Khan himself, were now required to report to the military, not just to the head of their own organisation. The permissive environment that Khan and his associates had enjoyed also began to change, and for the first time they were asked to account for their financial dealings and foreign travel plans. Although he was alerted by these very same security officials, Khan’s growing recklessness finally led to his dismissal. The attacks of 11 September fundamentally changed Pakistan’s security relationships, launching a third phase (2001–03) in Pakistan’s new security structure. Musharraf, now as president, further consolidated nuclear oversight and control. In response to US pressure a fourth phase began at the end of 2003 with the exposure and unravelling of Khan’s network, prompted by Iran’s acknowledgement that August of the foreign origin of its centrifuge equipment and Libya’s shocking announcement about its nuclear and chemical weapons programmes in December. Khan’s house arrest and confession followed, along with the new export control legislation.

Early arrangements

The exact shape of the Pakistani nuclear policy-making organisation prior to the 1998 tests is unclear. One Pakistani report states that Z.A. Bhutto took direct charge of the nuclear programme after the 1974 Indian test (abolishing the inter-ministerial committee in charge of nuclear issues).

During Zia’s time (July 1977 to 18 August 1988), the office of the president and chief of army staff (COAS) was one and the same as far as nuclear matters were concerned. Upon Zia’s death, the civilian G.I. Khan took over as president and assumed the formal decision-making responsibilities, but brought COAS Beg into the nuclear loop to handle weaponisation aspects. G.I. Khan was still the final authority on all financial and nuclear development matters. In 1993, when the president and prime minister both left simultaneously and there was an interim government, G.I. Khan transferred all responsibilities and relevant documents to COAS Waheed, who lengthened the chain of command, appointing a major-general as Director General of Combat Development to be the nuclear policy contact point. Even then, however, the chief of army staff was not formally considered the authority over all nuclear organisations, especially KRL.

Several authoritative sources have reported that a nuclear decision-making committee has existed since 1975. One source is Mushahid Hussain, a senator close to Musharraf, who stated that from 1975 to 1991 the nuclear programme was supervised by a committee headed by G.I. Khan, who became president in 1988. There is some confusion on the nature of this committee: it may be a reference to the three-person body created in 1976 to oversee KRL and possibly PAEC activities; or alternatively to the ‘troika’ which after 1988 oversaw the nuclear programme. The latter included the president (G.I. Khan), the chief of army staff (Beg), and the prime minister (B. Bhutto). Another source is General Beg, who has stated that there was a ‘National Nuclear Command Authority’ from 1975, headed by the ‘chief executive’. This was clearly the predecessor to the National Command Authority, which Pakistan says was created only in 2000 (see below). According to Beg, the predecessor body included a ‘Nuclear Command Committee’ which took the main decisions; this committee comprised six individuals, including the prime minister, the president, and the chief of army staff. Others have referred to the nuclear committee as an ad hoc body with varying membership, created by Zia in 1977. In any case, by as late as 1990, Pakistan’s ‘nuclear club’ was limited to six or seven people. The committee was always nominally headed by the president, but was in practice chaired by the chief of army staff (who, in the cases of Zia and later Musharraf, were identical).

Hussain has stated that the committee that existed since 1975 later ‘evolved into a broader body, conceived and planned since 1991’. The date 1991 indicates that the reorganisation of the NNCA may have been decided by G.I. Khan and Beg. In 1993, after G.I. Khan’s resignation, the role of the president became weaker (an evolution later sanctioned by the 1997 constitutional amendment), and G.I. Khan’s successors were probably not directly involved in all key nuclear decisions. Prime ministers had only a limited knowledge of nuclear matters and were only involved in some policy decisions through the Defence Committee of the Cabinet. It was in this body that, for instance, the decision to test was taken in 1998.

Although nuclear decision-making arrangements until 1999 changed over time, depending on the structure of power, they were always under the control of a very small number of individuals. From 1975 until 1988, nuclear decision-making was under the tight control of one man (Bhutto, Zia); from 1988 until 1993, it was shared between the president and the chief of army staff; from 1993 until 1999, the latter became the central figure, while prime ministers were involved in a limited way.

The 1999–2001 reforms

Pakistan’s nuclear command-and-control apparatus was completely restructured between 1999 and 2001. As the first army chief to assume power after Pakistan had become an overt nuclear weapons state, Musharraf had both the motivation and the means to carry this out. One of his first acts was to order a reorganisation of the military bureaucracy within the army’s General Headquarters (GHQ). Specifically, he ordered the creation of a Strategic Plans Division (SPD), which commenced activity in December 1998, although not formally under that name until the next spring. The Sharif government had previously tasked the army to prepare a new command-and-control arrangement. In April 1999, Musharraf submitted a written plan, under study since the nuclear test the previous year, for a national command authority, with SPD as the secretariat, to take charge of operational, financial and security controls over all strategic organisations. One of Musharraf’s primary concerns was to establish harmony between Pakistan’s poorly coordinated and competitive nuclear establishments. His plan merged the two existing directorates of the Combat Development Directorate (CD Directorate), along with two new ones – the Operations and Plans Directorate and the Command and Control and Intelligence Directorate – into the now officially designated Strategic Plans Division within GHQ. Sharif approved the plan with minor modifications.

After Musharraf seized chief executive power in October 1999, he created a National Security Council (NSC), a reform that Nawaz Sharif had previously refused COAS General Jehangir Karamat. The NSC for the first time formalised the role of the military in Pakistan’s policymaking machinery, serving as ‘a forum for consultation on strategic matters pertaining to the sovereignty, the integrity and security of the State’. It is convened and chaired by the president, and comprises all the main civilian and military leaders – a total of 13 members. But the NSC as such is not involved in nuclear decision-making; given that its members include the leader of the opposition in the national assembly and the elected chief ministers of all four provinces, it is not a forum in which particularly sensitive strategic matters can be discussed.

In February 2000, the NSC announced a consolidation of nuclear command-and-control structures, which for the first time brought KRL under de jure military control (in order, inter alia, to prevent potential freelance nuclear-related activities) and established full accountability for all nuclear laboratories. The command-and-control structure, sometimes referred to as the Strategic Command Organisation, is comprised of three tiers: a National Command Authority (NCA); the Strategic Plans Division, and the strategic force commands of the three military services. In November 2000, all organisations participating in the nuclear and missile programmes were put under the control of the NCA. Two months later a new body, the National Engineering and Scientific Commission (NESCOM), was created on top of the National Development Complex (NDC) and other strategic programmes organisations, under the leadership of a key PAEC official, Samar Mubarakmand, as NESCOM chairman. The nuclear and conventional programmes of institutions such as the NDC were separated. A new division of labour was instituted: PAEC became solely responsible for mining and reprocessing, KRL for enrichment, and NDC for all weaponisation issues. The new organisation became fully operational in 2001.

National Command Authority

The NCA is composed of the top civilian and military officials, and is meant to make all major decisions regarding nuclear policy, procurement, planning and use. It is chaired by the president, with the prime minister as vice chairman (when first established these positions were not filled and it was chaired by Musharraf in his role as chief executive until he assumed the title of president in June 2001).

The NCA is the highest decision-making authority in the country and was reportedly designed to ensure that in time of crisis all of Pakistan’s leaders would have a complete picture of the military situation, encompassing both conventional operations and nuclear planning. On paper, civilians have a major share of responsibility in the NCA, an authority Prime Minister Jamali exercised at a 31 January 2004 NCA meeting in which he argued against a trial for A.Q. Khan on political grounds. In practice, the military would probably prevail on nuclear decision-making during wartime or a military crisis. According to a respected Pakistani strategist, ‘the final authority to launch a nuclear strike is dependent upon consensus within the NCA, with the chairman casting the final vote’.

The NCA consists of the Employment Control Committee (ECC) and the Development Control Committee (DCC), both chaired by the president. The foreign minister is deputy chairman of the ECC, the body which defines nuclear strategy, including the deployment and employment of strategic forces, and would decide on nuclear use. The committee includes key ministers as well as the respective military chiefs. The ECC reviews presentations on strategic threat perceptions, monitors the progress of weapons development, and decides on responses to emerging threats. It also establishes guidelines for effective command-and-control practices to safeguard against the accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is deputy chairman of the DCC, the body responsible for weapons development and oversight which includes the nation’s military and scientific, but not its political, leadership. The DCC exercises technical, financial and administrative control over all strategic organisations, including national laboratories and research and development organisations associated with the development and modernisation of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Functioning through the SPD, the DCC oversees the systematic progress of weapon systems to fulfil the force goals set by the committee.

Strategic Plans Division

The SPD, which has evolved into a true ‘nuclear enclave’, is the key to Pakistan’s nuclear management. It was the evolution of SPD that led to the establishment of systematic control over the varying strategic organisations and gave strategic direction to the nuclear programme. The SPD functions under the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and reports to the president and the prime minister directly. Headed by an army three-star general (a reflection of the army’s dominant position in the hierarchy), it acts on behalf of the NCA and assists the president and prime minister in exercising control over the strategic organisations. Pakistan lacked an entity dedicated to the oversight of these organisations while its nuclear programme remained covert. Previously, they were directly controlled only by the office of the president or prime minister; this was a key factor contributing to the loss of control over A.Q. Khan.

SPD organisation: In addition to functioning as the secretariat to the National Command Authority, the 50-officer-strong SPD also performs the role of developing nuclear policy, an arms-control agency and a nuclear-security watchdog. Observers generally agree that the SPD, headed by Lt-Gen. Khalid Kidwai, has taken firm control of Pakistani nuclear organisation and policy. With the SPD, the military for the first time had an organisation that could develop organisational competency and authority over the sizeable nuclear programme.

An immediate problem faced by SPD investigators in 1999 was the professional risk associated with confronting a man of A.Q. Khan’s stature. SPD therefore turned its attention to formulating standard operating procedures for the regulation of, and a code of conduct for, strategic organisations. Firstly, SPD created operational procedures for scientific organisations concerning contact with the media and for obtaining clearance for any publication activity. Secondly, clearances now became necessary for all travel abroad by members of the relevant scientific organisations. Finally, reporting on all financial expenditures became a requirement. These three requirements placed pressure on A.Q Khan, who clashed with SPD over travel, media appearances and the unauthorised sale of conventional military equipment to foreign governments.

Strategic force commands

At the third tier, separate strategic force commands were created in each of the services: the Army Strategic Force Command; the Air Force Strategic Command; and the Naval Strategic Force Command. The three services retain training, technical and administrative control over their respective forces, but operational control is under the jurisdiction of the NCA, which provides military direction through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, which is housed in the National Command Centre.

Nuclear security

A.Q. Khan’s revelations accelerated the changes to the SPD’s command-and-control infrastructure that had been ongoing since 1999. One of the greatest flaws in the system was the lack of any formal oversight of the strategic organisations. Security arrangements since the inception of the nuclear programme were designed to protect it from outside interference, espionage and physical threats, including sabotage. There was no formal reporting channel within the security apparatus to account for imports and exports, personal travel and other details which may have revealed suspicious activity. In addition, material protection, control and accounting procedures were rudimentary. Nuclear security and safety were always considered highly classified national secrets, while the process of ensuring safety and security requires access to and inspections of facilities, as well as nuclear material accounting. By implication, this would reveal locations, capacities and overall stockpiles. This was a serious defect in the system, which SPD has had to grapple with since its formation.

Since the 1999–2001 reforms, three levels of nuclear security are said to exist. The first is the laboratories’ own procedures. The second, and probably the most important, is the SPD, which controls between 8,000 and 10,000 personnel overall. The SPD has a special unit that is in charge of nuclear security; this group – reportedly 1,000 strong – is endowed with its own intelligence capability, and led by a two-star general. It has adopted a concept of ‘perimeter multilayered security’. This organisation coordinates with all intelligence agencies about any external military or espionage threat to Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure.

The ISI, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, forms the third, ‘outer ring’ of security. It operates in conjunction with the security division, reporting directly to Musharraf. Before these reforms, there was no formal role for the ISI in nuclear matters. The Director General of the ISI is only an invited, not a full, member of the Pakistani National Command Authority. The security operations of all major organisations are coordinated by four separate security directorates that report directly to the Director General of the Security Division, who in turn reports to the head of the SPD, and finally to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. This committee is the highest level of joint military integration; it also houses the National Military Command Centre and is the focal point of integrated intelligence and the nuclear command authority.

In addition, the security division has a Technical Directorate headed by a brigadier-general. This directorate examines a wide range of possible technical upgrades including, inter alia, infrared and motion sensors, locks, video cameras and communication devices. The directorate has worked closely with other countries, including the US, in purchasing necessary equipment.

Personnel reliability

The SPD asserts that it has established a system that requires approval, reporting and monitoring of travel for all scientific personnel and especially those that possess sensitive information or expertise. This body now scrutinises all prospective visits abroad by such personnel, including visits to IAEA functions in Vienna, which require specific travel clearances. Retired scientists are retained within the country in post-retirement positions to preclude potential recruitment by foreign entities, but also to allow the nation to continued to benefit from their expertise. Revelations that the two senior retired Pakistan nuclear scientists had discussed nuclear weapons with Osama bin Laden made Islamabad realise that it had to keep a close watch not just over scientists and officials currently serving in sensitive posts, but also those who had retired. SPD claims to have improved the Personnel Reliability Programme (PRP) for all scientists and officials working on sensitive projects and has introduced a Human Reliability Programme for all military personnel involved with the nuclear forces. The PRP maintains separate reliability programmes for civilians and defence personnel. The data relating to defence personnel are essentially the responsibility of the parent service, whose security clearance and service records are given to the PRP Directorate, which then scrutinises each individual before assigning strategic roles.

This is a new experience for Pakistan, although concerned Pakistani officials had been interested in establishing such a programme since early 2001. In the United States, ‘personnel reliability’ includes those measures that ensure that all people responsible for handling or guarding nuclear materials or weapons are reliable, trustworthy, psychologically stable and sober. Over the past five years, the SPD has reportedly screened all relevant personnel, granted levels of security clearances and determined the requisite degree of access for those handling sensitive nuclear materials. As described in a report by Italian experts, ’key people are screened and controlled by four agencies (the ISI, Military Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau, and the SPD). Every aspect of each person’s life is reportedly controlled (sic), including families and relatives. Such screenings are repeated every two years.’ According to the SPD, the Counter-Intelligence Directorate in the Security Division has established Counter Intelligence Teams that conduct security checks and reports on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis. The security directorates within each strategic organisation and strategic force command also produce weekly, monthly and quarterly reports for the division, reporting all security- and intelligence-related events.

The operations of the Security Division remain classified, so it is not clear whether the PRP Directorate carries out psychological testing on civilians and scientists. All military officers undergo these tests at the beginning of their service. It is also not known whether the PRP Directorate has any polygraph systems, nor whether those carrying out reliability clearance are themselves trained as security personnel. The exact criteria for security clearances are not publicly disclosed. However, it is known that anyone with religious extremist proclivities or any other extremist tendencies is kept away from policymaking and operational involvement in sensitive areas.

Pakistan has faced two fundamental challenges in establishing its personnel reliability requirements. Firstly, religious extremism is increasing in Pakistani society as a whole. Therefore, the reliability programme must distinguish between those who are merely pious and those with tendencies towards religious extremism. Secondly, because Pakistan’s nuclear management system does not have sophisticated technology, it must rely more upon the rationality and loyalty of individuals who are thoroughly screened before assuming sensitive nuclear responsibilities. Generally, a middle course balancing a reliance on personnel and on technology is practised to exercise assertive control over strategic assets. There is some uncertainty about the exact nature of the authorisation procedures to prevent unauthorised or inadvertent launch. Several sources refer to a system of two separate codes; one of them would be civilian and the other military, amounting to a ‘dual-key’ system. However, other authoritative accounts mention a three-man rule. In particular, the code to arm a weapon is reportedly divided among three persons. It is possible that a two-man rule is adopted for movement of warheads and a three-man rule is adopted for employment authorisation. According to Pakistani planners, the number of persons involved varies ‘for technical reasons’: three at some points of the chain of command; two at other points.

Pakistan is not explicit about its arrangements for weapons security, but it has developed physical safety mechanisms and firewalls both in the weapon systems themselves and in the chain of command. No single individual can operate a weapon system, nor can one individual issue the command for nuclear weapons use. The evolution of the NCA command-and-control system ensures that unauthorised use never takes place, yet the weapon can be operationally ready on short notice. Pakistan does not keep its nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. The nuclear weapons are small in number and probably kept in a disassembled form; their components are reportedly stored separately. Fissile materials are likely to be stored near installations such as Kahuta or Khushab, close to Rawalpindi.

Naturally enough, there is considerable uncertainty about the location of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and about procedures for their actual use. After 11 September 2001, Pakistan ordered the country’s nuclear arsenal redeployed to at least six secret new locations, according to one account. Dummy locations are also reportedly employed to minimise the risks of destruction or capture. SPD head Lt-Gen. Khalid Kidwai told visiting researchers in late 2001 that ‘no delegation of authority concerning nuclear weapons is planned’. According to another source, Pakistani officials say that the SPD has drawn up contingency delegation procedures – in the event, for instance, of the president’s death in wartime – but these will not be publicised. It is possible that the prime minister, as the vice chairman of the NCA, would then become its chairman; however, this presumably would not alter the presumed pre-eminence of the military in any decision to use nuclear weapons. Operational control plans remain a national security secret, as was the case with the United States during the Cold War.

In every nuclear weapons state there is a natural tension between protecting the nuclear arsenal against a first strike and ensuring against unauthorised use. Many outside observers believe that in Pakistan this difficulty is exacerbated by the politicisation of the army and that the deep sense of grievance among the officer corps over Kashmir increases the probability that weapons will be used if firing authority is delegated beyond the top leadership.

Security and safety of nuclear assets

Pakistan is cautious about any international cooperation that could compromise its weapon designs, secret locations and command-and-control structures; this includes cooperation with the United States. As the US–Pakistan security relationship assumed new dimensions after 11 September 2001, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told Musharraf that the United States was prepared to assist Pakistan in improving its nuclear safety and security, given America’s previous experience in this field. Musharraf assured Powell that Pakistan’s strategic assets were completely secure. Nevertheless, Pakistan sent a team to the United States to assess the offer. The Pakistani team found that the US offer was rudimentary and the hardware being discussed was available within Pakistan or on the open market. However, Pakistan agreed to receive US transfers on three conditions. Firstly, it would not allow any intrusions it perceived as unwarranted. Secondly, Pakistan would select technologies it viewed as compatible with its national interests. Finally, the SPD would be the signatory authority for the end-user certifications required by Washington. In other words, Pakistan did not want the exact location or details of the technology’s final destination to be revealed. Since then, there have been several training courses for officers, technicians and engineers at various US labs where they have been instructed on nuclear safety and security issues.

The exposure of A.Q. Khan’s onward proliferation made clear the need to overhaul the elementary nature of the existing material control and accounting procedures in Pakistan’s nuclear laboratories. The SPD selected and sent personnel to the United States and elsewhere for training, and learned sophisticated and scientifically foolproof methods of accounting. It is unclear how much assistance the United States provided, because both sides keep such procedures classified. Currently, Pakistan is judged to have in place a strict system of tallying sensitive material production, accounting and nuclear waste management. The SPD also organises both regular and surprise inspections. Furthermore, and although not publicly disclosed, Pakistan apparently has an emergency-response team for enhanced safety and security analogous to the US Nuclear Emergency Search Team. This team includes a Special Service Group, whose job would be to instantly respond to a theft or forceful sabotage of a nuclear weapon or its material.

Pakistan keeps its nuclear weapons as disassembled components, which implies that safety is inherent in the system. Even though the various arsenals could be susceptible to natural or artificial disasters, Pakistan is most probably considering developing ‘enhanced nuclear detonation safety’ in order to make its arsenal safer and more secure. It also appears to be interested in developing indigenous technologies using permissive action links (PALs) and environmental sensing devices (ESDs). (PALs block arming systems unless the proper code is entered. ESDs block arming systems unless a prescribed environmental profile is achieved. For instance, a warhead mounted on a ballistic missile would have to experience the severe acceleration of launch before it could detonate.) In these two technologies, Pakistan is unlikely to seek assistance from outside powers. Keeping the weapons in a disassembled form, along with the use of authorisation codes, reduces the risk of capture or unauthorised use. Although Pakistan’s equivalent is not as sophisticated as US PALs, it is deemed reliable enough to preclude unauthorised arming or launching of its nuclear weapons.

International concerns have also been raised about the possibility of theft and sabotage during the transportation of sensitive nuclear materials. Effective measures to guard against such losses became an international obligation under UN Security Council Resolution 1540, passed in April 2004 (see pages 141–3). Under the new SPD arrangements, specialist vehicles and tamper-proof containers are provided to all laboratories for the transits of materials, while military personnel escort each of the containers.

Export controls

Pakistan’s steps to strengthen control over its nuclear infrastructure included legislative measures. Before 2004, Pakistan purportedly enforced prohibitions through Statutory Regulatory Orders and various government ordinances. These administrative steps were designed in principle to prevent the export of sensitive materials, and they indicated the authority whose approval was required for any dual-use item or material to be exported. This, however, was no substitute for proper export control legislation that allowed for legal penalties. In any case, there is no private sector involvement in the nuclear field and the state controls over 99% of all sensitive materials normally on the international nuclear trigger lists.

Embarrassed by the revelations about A.Q. Khan, and wanting to be in compliance with the UNSCR 1540 requirement for all countries to enact export controls conforming to international standards, the Foreign Ministry and SPD accelerated work to prepare and push through parliament a relatively thorough export control law. The new law, entitled ’Export Control on Goods, Technologies, Material and Equipment Related to Nuclear and Biological Weapons and their Delivery Systems Act, 2004’, entered into force on 23 September 2004. The law controls any material, equipment and services that could contribute to the design, development, production, stockpiling, maintenance or use of nuclear and biological weapons and their delivery systems. The new law does not include chemical weapons, apparently on the grounds that they already were controlled as a result of Pakistan’s ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The national control list was initially adopted from the lists kept by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Australia Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime, as well as European Union guidelines. Pakistan hopes to be consulted when those lists are updated so that it can keep its national list in conformity. The law also includes a catch-all clause requiring exporters to notify authorities of any suspicions that a proposed export is intended for use in a nuclear weapon, biological weapon, or missile. The Export Control Act covers re-export, transshipment and transit of all sensitive goods and technologies. The latter is defined to include any documents, including blueprints and plans, as well as on-the-job training, expert advice and services – all of which fall into the category of intangible technology. However, the law does not necessarily provide the government with the legal means to control the transfer of such knowledge through all intangible means, which might include e-mail and internet sites.

The jurisdiction of the act extends to all Pakistani citizens at home or abroad, persons in the service of Pakistan and foreign nationals in Pakistan. It does not appear to apply to the state entities in charge of Pakistan’s sensitive technologies, but Pakistani government spokesmen insist it would apply to any person acting on behalf of the state. The act has a punitive provision of up to 14 years’ imprisonment but is not retroactive and therefore not applicable to A.Q. Khan and his criminal associates. The law has not yet been applied in practice. In sum, the legal edifice is ample, but implementation, as always, will be the limiting factor in the effectiveness of these laws. Such implementation has yet to be seen. An inter-agency process for reviewing export licence applications is only at an early stage. Pakistan has taken pains to explain the new law in international forums, but as of the end of 2006 has not allowed any independent assessment of its export control system.

International cooperation

Although Pakistan, like India, remains outside the NPT, it has contributed in other ways to international efforts to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. It is a party to the Biological Weapons Convention (signed in 1974), the Chemical Weapons Convention (1997) and the Outer Space Treaty (1968). Pakistan promptly responded to the reporting requirement of UNSCR 1540 by providing an 11-page report in October 2004 about national measures to implement the resolution and a 125-page follow-up matrix of national compliance in September 2005. Pakistan joined the US-sponsored Container Security Initiative (CSI) in March 2006, signing the CSI declaration of principles, and was selected as a model state by the US Customs and Border Protection agency for the Pilot Programme of the CSI. Pakistan says it supports the spirit of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and since 2005 it has attended three PSI exercises as an observer, although it is wary about signing up to the notion of interdicting the cargo of other states.

Nuclear Regulatory Authority

Among the nuclear oversight steps the country has taken, Pakistani officials also count the establishment in 2001 of the autonomous Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority to ensure the safety of civilian nuclear facilities and prevent accidental radiation exposure, including from sources in medical, agricultural and industrial use. A predecessor body, the Nuclear Regulatory Board, had functioned under the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, but PAEC is now independent. Pakistani officials express pride that, of the 827 confirmed incidents worldwide of illicit trafficking in nuclear (radioactive) materials compiled by the IAEA from 1993 to 2005, none are attributed to Pakistan. As explained in chapter six, however, the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database only includes incidents reported or confirmed by governments, so it is not a wholly accurate picture, given that governments unwilling to draw attention to smuggling incidents will not be inclined to report everything. (Pakistan signed an Illicit Trafficking Database agreement with the IAEA in 2005 to share data on seizures.) A wider search of all open-source data about nuclear material trafficking reveals just one case – but a very significant one – in which Pakistan was involved in the UF₆ transfer to Libya in 2000–01. The data reveal only two actual seizures of nuclear material in Pakistan. In Peshawar in 1998, police confiscated 8–10kg of uranium of unconfirmed grade from two Afghan nationals, reportedly brought from Kazakhstan; while in 1997 an international narcotics and arms trafficker was arrested in Rawalpindi with 2kg of heroin and samples of uranium. Other reports have claimed that enriched uranium from the former Soviet republics was offered for sale in Peshawar, although no HEU was confiscated. There were also a few incidents reported in Afghanistan, India and Bangladesh in which nuclear material confiscated from smugglers was purportedly bound for Pakistan (see chapter six).

Conclusions

A robust command-and-control system is now in place to protect Pakistan’s nuclear assets from diversion, theft and accidental misuse. For the most part, these measures have been transparent and appear to have worked well. Indeed, Pakistan’s openness in explaining its command-and-control structure goes beyond the practice adopted by most other nuclear-capable states. A.Q. Khan and his known cohorts are out of business and KRL is now confined exclusively to enrichment work. Responsibility for nuclear weapons is now clearly in the hands of the National Command Authority and its constituent bodies. General Kidwai and the Strategic Plans Division he commands have gained national and international respect for their professionalism and competency. These steps go a long way toward overcoming the international opprobrium and label of irresponsibility that Pakistan earned thanks to the Khan saga.

There are still too many unanswered questions about the role Pakistani technology played in aiding nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea, however, for other countries to conclude that Pakistan has done all it can to account for Khan’s transgressions. International conclusions about whether the Khan case is truly closed will depend on the world seeing a sustained record of responsible nuclear stewardship that transcends the current leadership. Musharraf and Kidwai are lauded for their efforts to protect Pakistan’s nuclear technology, and probably rightly so, although each has given assurances in the past that have later been gainsaid. When they leave office, will their successors be as capable? In Pakistan’s personality-dominated political system, patronage systems have always overridden weak institutions and the rule of law. The organisational changes since 1999 are designed to institutionalise a system of oversight, and Pakistani authorities are confident about it surviving a leadership change. The outside world may be more inclined to wait and see, and to press for further transparency and the imposition of real penalties for any transgression of the new regulations.

The outside world’s conclusions will also depend on Pakistan’s ongoing struggle against the monumental challenges posed to the nation’s stability by ethnic tension, poverty, high birth rates, lack of adequate education, and the rising influence of Islamic fundamentalism. Pakistan won praise for the steps it took to purge militarist Islamist supporters from ISI ranks, but militant Islamist groups in Pakistan continue to give cause for concern, including the movement of Taliban forces across the border areas in northwest Pakistan. The light punishment meted out to nuclear scientists who met with Osama bin Laden reflect a disturbing pattern reminiscent of the secrecy in which the Pakistani authorities dealt with Khan. In all these cases, secrecy was justified on the grounds that greater transparency would cause embarrassment and risk the disclosure of nuclear secrets. The understandable need to protect national security secrets works against the government’s desire to dispel hints of lingering corruption in the nuclear programme, notwithstanding the multilayered internal security system that Pakistan has implemented.

The most disquieting note, however, comes from unconfirmed reports of Pakistani citizens remaining connected with sales of nuclear- or missile-related goods to countries of proliferation concern. Western intelligence agencies will not disclose details, but say the lid on Pakistan’s strategic technology is not yet airtight. One reason for this slippage is Pakistan’s need to rely on black market procurement for its own nuclear weapons programme. Given that it already has nuclear weapons, stopping Pakistan’s continued procurement is not a top priority for Western governments. However, this procurement is problematic in that it helps sustain black market operations that the Western countries are trying to stamp out.

If Pakistan were to conclude that it already has a sufficient credible nuclear deterrent and if India capped its own fissile material production – perhaps as part of an international treaty or an independent decision flowing from the US–India nuclear cooperation agreement – then Pakistan would have no further reason to continue enriching uranium and producing weapons-usable plutonium. An end to Pakistan’s own enrichment-related foreign procurement and the evasion of foreign export controls that this entails would remove one obstacle blocking Pakistan’s receipt of the same exemption to nuclear supplier rules that the US offered India. In Pakistan’s eyes, the causality and sequencing of this suggestion is actually the reverse. Pakistani officials say they cannot be a partner and a target at the same time. By that, they mean that if they were taken into nuclear partnership with the United States and other nuclear suppliers, they would be better disposed toward greater transparency and would have less need to be left to their own devices regarding their nuclear programme. Yet, despite Pakistan’s reforms, the damage caused by A.Q. Khan makes any nuclear cooperation with Pakistan in the near future politically impossible for any Western country.

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