Who
did build
Pakistan's nuclear bomb?
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
June 21, 2006
LONDON - Whenever I introduced
Munir Khan to a friend I would say light-heartedly "and
this is the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb" just to
enjoy the pleasure of watching the reaction. Kahn himself
would give a self-depreciatory smile. As Hans Blix, the
former director of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the world's nuclear policeman, put it to me, Khan
was "a cheerful soul".
The world has been told over and
over again that the father of the Pakistani bomb was A.Q.
Khan, the metallurgist, who in fact ran only one part of
the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission whose chairman was
Munir Khan. More correctly we have recently been told
that Qadeer Khan secretly set up an international network
to supply the likes of North Korea, Libya and Iran with
blueprints and materials for the manufacture of their own
nuclear weapons. This was done for his private
profit.
Kahn and Kahn. Too many got the two
men muddled. And this worked in Qadeer's favor. He was a
man who had no compunction about claiming every bit of
credit for himself and who loved to woo gullible
journalists and parliamentarians who adored his tales of
achievement. No wonder when he was finally exposed as a
nuclear racketeer President Pervez Musharraf couldn't
have him arrested. He had become a popular icon in
Pakistan, untouchable.
A long and well-researched article
that has just appeared in the Pakistani "Defence
Journal", written by M.A.Chaudri, has usefully drawn back
the curtain on the precise roles of these two men. Both
foreigners and Pakistanis, he writes, "have failed to
understand the underlying efforts under Munir Khan and
his team of world class nuclear scientists and engineers.
They developed and led the entire nuclear weapons
programme including uranium mining for the bomb itself,
and all related nuclear facilities, training institutions
and technologies and the development of the complete
nuclear fuel cycle and the still largely unknown
plutonium programme."
Munir was a friend of Zulifikar
Bhutto and the two of them tried unsuccessfully to
persuade President Ayub Khan to build a bomb. But when
Bhutto became president in 1971 he made his famous remark
"we shall eat grass if necessary but build the atomic
bomb" and Munir was given the green light.
Munir had been on the staff of the
International Atomic Energy Agency since 1958, head of
the reactor engineering division. He developed vast
international contacts and was rich in managerial and
scientific experience. It was he who pushed for the
refinement of domestic uranium and persuaded the French
to train his scientists in enrichment know-how. Munir
later recruited Qadeer who, as is well known, brought to
Pakistan the drawings of centrifuge designs he had
purloined from the Dutch company he had been working for.
But to develop these designs to enable the successful
enriching of uranium was a complicated and complex
process and depended on the expertise Munir had put
together in Pakistan.
All along the pathologically
ambitious Qadeer was working to undermine Munir.
According to Chaudhri he paid Pakistani journalists to
accuse Munir of being unpatriotic and being a member of
the outlawed Qadiani sect. (Earlier the Nobel prize
winning physicist, Abdus Salem, had been driven out of
Pakistan by a similar campaign.)
After the coup by General Zia and
the hanging of Bhutto, Munir's grip was loosened. Zia,
seeing Munir as a friend of Bhutto, allowed Qadeer to
build up his image. Qadeer was willing, as Munir was not,
to trumpet the idea of an "Islamic bomb". Munir,
self-effacing to a fault, later confessed that he should
have fought off Qadeer's grab for fame. Nevertheless,
Munir still held the reigns when in 1983 Pakistan reached
an historic milestone - the bomb was ready and secretly a
"cold test" was held. (A cold test is the actual
detonation of a complete bomb but instead of enriched
uranium in the middle of the bomb natural uranium is
substituted.) So only nine years after India's "peaceful
nuclear explosion", but 15 years before it came into the
open with a full nuclear test, Pakistan had its
bomb.
Munir retired from the chairmanship
of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission seven years
before Pakistan went public with the bomb. He died in
1999 and in his later years he tried to persuade
successive presidents that Qadeer was selling Pakistan's
know-how for profit. But by then Qadeer was simply too
powerful to move against.
Munir was no saint. He was actually
chairman of the board of the International Atomic Energy
Agency from 1986 to 87. Supposedly the chairman of the
world's policing authority, back home he was engaged in
subverting it. Presumably earlier, when he had been an
important staff member, he was building up the contacts
and knowledge he later milked to build the bomb at
home.
The world was duped many times over
by the intrigues of Pakistan's nuclear scientists and the
politicians who sponsored them.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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