Pakistan mourns Abdul Qadeer Khan, ‘the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb’, who died on Sunday at the age of 85 in a hospital in Islamabad from the effects of Covid-19. The nuclear physicist, known outside Pakistan as ‘the world’s largest disseminator of nuclear weapons technology’, was awarded a state funeral in the colossal Faisal Mosque. Flags were flown at half-mast across the country.
AQ Khan was revered and hated. Many thought he was a dangerous thief, but for many Pakistanis he was a hero. His life story could be captured in a thick spy novel that en passant shows the complicated position of Pakistan in the world community.
Prime Minister Imran Khan had nothing but praise for the deceased on Sunday: “Our country loved him because his contribution has been indispensable to make Pakistan a nuclear state”. tweeted he. “This has protected us from an aggressive, much larger, nuclear-armed neighbor. He was a national icon for the Pakistani people.”
Pakistan has felt a constant threat from India since its independence from the British in 1947. When India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, Pakistan also had to develop a nuclear weapon. As then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto put it: “We will eat grass and even starve, but we will have our own nuclear bomb.” Since Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons, the world is watching intently at every confrontation between the two arch-enemies over Kashmir, the state they both claim and over which they have fought several wars.
Also read: Kashmir: the eternal battleground
AQ Khan has studied and worked in Western Europe since the 1960s and joined the Stork Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam in 1972. That lab conducted research for Urenco, a company in Almelo that enriches uranium for nuclear power stations. A Dutch colleague, Frits Veerman, suspected that Khan was stealing centrifuge technology there, but was fired after raising this.
Khan volunteered to develop a Pakistani nuclear bomb to Prime Minister Bhutto in 1975 and was immediately put to work. “In the following years, we obtained all the materials and technology we needed through an underground network, especially in the developed countries of Europe,” wrote the future president Pervez Musharraf in his 2006 statement. autobiography.
The axis of evil
In 1983, the Amsterdam court sentenced Khan in absentia to four years in prison for industrial espionage, but that sentence was later quashed due to a formal error.
In 2003, the US intelligence agency CIA confronted President Musharraf with evidence that Khan had sold nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya. Two of those countries were part of the “axis of evil” according to then-President George W. Bush because they would support terrorists. In those years, Musharraf received billions of dollars to help the US with the “war on terror” it had launched in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Although Khan blamed on television known personMusharraf did not let him prosecute. Instead, he pardoned Khan and had Khan placed under house arrest. Later, Musharraf explain that the moment CIA Director George Tenet confronted him in a New York hotel room was the most embarrassing moment of his presidency. The fact that Khan had clandestinely helped the country with a nuclear bomb was something Musharraf also considered an act of heroism, but he should not have been allowed to sell the technology on.
Khan later retracted his confession and challenged his house arrest in court, which he succeeded in 2009. Frits Veerman, who died last February, received some rehabilitation last year when an investigation by the House for Whistleblowers concluded that he was treated incorrectly when he raised an abuse.
Also read: The center of proliferation
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of October 11, 2021