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US widens view of Pakistan link to North Korean arms
A new classified intelligence report presented to the White House last week detailed for the first time the extent to which Pakistanâs Khan Research Laboratories provided North Korea with all the equipment and technology it needed to produce uranium-based nuclear weapons, the New York Times reports in an article on its Web site Saturday, citing US and Asian officials who have been briefed on its conclusions. The assessment, by the Central Intelligence Agency, confirms the Bush administrationâs fears about the accelerated nature of North Koreaâs secret uranium weapons program, which some intelligence officials believe could produce a weapon as early as sometime next year. The assessment is based in part on Pakistanâs accounts of its interrogations of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the developer of Pakistanâs bomb, who was pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf in January, according to the article.The CIA report concluded that North Korea probably received a package very similar to the kind the Khan network sold to Libya including nuclear fuel, centrifuges and one or more warhead designs for more than $60 million, the Times said. A senior US official described it as âthe complete package,â from raw uranium hexafluoride to the centrifuges to enrich it into nuclear fuel, which could be more easily hidden from inspectors than were North Koreaâs older sites to produce plutonium bombs, the newspaper said. In the CIA report, the Times said, Khanâs transactions with North Korea are traced to the early 1990âs, when Benazir Bhutto was the Pakistani prime minister, and the clandestine relationship between the two countries is portrayed as rapidly accelerating between 1998 and 2002. Posted by: Fred 2004-03-14 |
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