Osama bin Laden may wish he had met Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. But even if he had, and used his millions to buy bomb plans, the al-Qaeda chief would have had great difficulty obtaining weapons materials. Experts say that it is highly unlikely that bin Laden and his shadowy, scattered network has got anywhere close to acquiring the technology for a nuclear weapon, but they prefer not to rule out the possibility.
Bin Laden’s most likely source is top Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan who appeared on state television on Wednesday to make a dramatic personal apology for leaking atomic secrets, the latest twist in a proliferation scandal stretching from Libya to Iran and North Korea. "One can only speculate because of the absence of hard evidence, but from what we know these nuclear plans have been handed over only to nation states," said security expert Andrew Tan of Singapore’s Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. Experts said that there was no evidence that Khan or any of the scientists at his Khan Research Laboratory or at Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission had passed nuclear secrets to al-Qaeda. "Even if they did, it is not sure that al-Qaeda would have the infrastructure to develop nuclear weapons based on the information and technology it had received," said Tan. "What has happened is disturbing and one of the greatest fears has been of a nuclear state passing what it knows around — particularly to terrorists."
Two Pakistani nuclear scientists who worked on Pakistan’s highly secret uranium enrichment programme were detained in October 2001 on suspicion of sharing information with bin Laden, but were released two months later. Both were reported to have met bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar during trips to Afghanistan while working for Ummah Reconstruction, a charity agency that developed flour mills and agricultural projects in Afghanistan. Information would be insufficient for al-Qaeda. "The more significant question is whether al-Qaeda can get hold of highly enriched uranium," said counter-terror expert Clive Williams of the Australian National University in Canberra. Possession of even 15 kg (33 lbs) of that fissile material would enable al-Qaeda to build a relatively unsophisticated bomb in a safe house and blow it up, causing destruction in a large city on the scale of the Hiroshima bomb, Williams said. The difficulty for al-Qaeda would be to obtain uranium, with Russia and Ukraine the most likely sources via black marketers. "If the price were right you’d have to assume they would do it," said Williams, but added that any seller would be aware that the price might not be worth the international retaliation. |