Excerpts from AQ Khan's Letter

About China: "We put up a centrifuge plant at Hanzhong (250 km southwest of Xian). The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us 50 kg of enriched uranium, gave us 10 tons of UF6 (natural) and 5 tons of UF6 (3%)."

About Iran: "Probably with the blessings of BB [Benazir Bhutto, who became prime minister in 1988] and [a now-retired general]… General Imtiaz [Benazir’s defence adviser, now dead] asked… me to give a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians…The names and addresses of suppliers were also given to the Iranians."

About North Korea: "[A now-retired general] took $3 million through me from the N. Koreans and asked me to give some drawings and machines."

Investigation: Nuclear scandal - Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan by Simon Henderson

September 20, 2009

AQ Khan should be sentenced for life

Abdul Qadeer Khan has a special place in the pantheon of international outlaws. In 2004, he confessed that over a 15-year period he provided some of the world’s most nefarious and dangerous governments — Iran, North Korea and Libya — with the designs and technology to produce the fuel for nuclear weapons.

The Pakistani metallurgist deserved to be imprisoned for life. But he caught a scandalous break. As the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, he is a national hero. And despite the tearful, televised confession in which Mr. Khan insisted that he alone was guilty, it is widely believed that Pakistan’s powerful military, including Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was then president and is a former army chief of staff, was complicit in this exceedingly vile trade.

No Freedom for Mr. Khan, The New York Times, page A16
September 6, 2009

Energy Research in Pakistan

"Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman of my department has calculated the speed of heaven: He maintains it is receding from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book, which says that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time-dilation factor of 1,000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein's theory of special relativity.

A more public example: One of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan's energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. He relied on the Islamic belief that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy."

Islamic failure by Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy

February 2002