Nuclear investigators from the United States and other nations now believe that the black market network run by Pakistani scientist  Abdul Qadeer Khan was selling not only technology for enriching nuclear fuel and blueprints for nuclear weapons, but also some of the darkest of the bomb makers' arts: the hard-to-master engineering secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads, reported New York Times. The paper said that the suspicion of nuclear investigators were initially raised by the discovery of step-by-step instructions, some of which appear to have come from China and Pakistan, among the documents recovered last year from Libya. More recently, investigators have found that the Khan network had offered similar materials to Iran.
| "Hey! We're all Islamic nations! And we're all nutz!" |
The secrets range from how to cast uranium metal into the form needed at the core of a bomb to how to build the explosive lenses that compress the core and start the detonation. The discoveries have set off a debate in the intelligence community about whether those technological skills made their way to North Korea and Iran. President Bush has vowed he will not tolerate either country's obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran was a customer of the Khan network, and while it appears to have turned down the offer of the engineering secrets in 1987, some intelligence officials are concerned that it picked up the technology elsewhere. North Korea, which is believed to have two separate bomb projects under way, also did business with the Khan network, although precisely what it obtained is not clear. The inability of intelligence officials to track down the whereabouts of the bomb-making instructions underscores the fact that more than a year since Mr Khan's arrest and pardon by President Gen Pervez Musharraf, there are still many mysteries about what exactly the Khan network was selling, and to whom. The first public hint that Dr Khan's network traded in bomb designs and engineering instruction emerged in 1995 after United Nations inspectors in Iraq found a set of documents describing an offer made to Baghdad before the Persian Gulf war of 1991. |