Abdul Qadeer Khan
‘Father’ of Pakistan’s atomic bomb who sold the blueprints to the most virulently anti-western states
ABDUL QADEER KHAN, who has died of Covid-19 aged 85, was Pakistan’s most decorated citizen, the self-styled “father” of the country’s nuclear bomb – and, in the eyes of many in the West, one of the world’s most dangerous men.
In 2004 he was revealed to have sat at the centre of a conspiracy to arm some of the world’s most radical anti-western states, notably Iran, Libya and North Korea, by selling them the blueprints for Pakistan’s weapon.
He was motivated in part by a visceral hatred of India and its friends in the West (“I want to question the bloody holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the British,” he wrote. “Are these bastards Godappointed guardians of the world?”), but Khan was also paid handsomely for his efforts.
His official salary in 2004 was £14,000 a year. Yet he managed to acquire four houses in Islamabad, a villa on the Caspian Sea, a hotel in Timbuktu, Mali, named after his Dutch wife, Henny, a valuable vintage car collection and a variety of other business interests around the world.
After his activities were exposed by Western intelligence agencies, Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf, who had presented himself as an ally in the war on terror, sacked Khan as his special science and technology adviser and ordered him to be placed under house arrest, a decision that outraged millions of Pakistanis. The US was reported to have threatened Pakistan with isolation and economic sanctions unless action was taken.
Musharraf, no doubt aware of feelings on the street (and probably nervous of what further investigations might reveal), soon gave him a presidential pardon, pledging that he could keep the vast wealth he had accumulated. “We wanted the bomb in the national interest and so you have to ask yourself whether you act against the person who enabled you to get the bomb,” he explained, somewhat disingenuously. Repeated requests by the US government to interrogate Khan were turned down.
Khan continued to be held under house arrest at his grand, Los Angelesstyle residence in Islamabad until 2009.
It was not much of a punishment for a man who played a central role in escalating the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon, but as the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC), headed by Hans Blix, stated in December 2006, Khan could not have acted alone “without the awareness of the Pakistan government”.
Abdul Qadeer Khan was born in Bhopal, British India, on April 1 1936, 11 years before the creation of Pakistan. His father was a retired schoolmaster and a supporter of the Muslim League. The family stayed in Bhopal throughout the communal massacres that accompanied Partition and, according to Khan’s official biographer, young Abdul witnessed trains pulling into the local station carrying the bodies of Muslims killed by Hindu gangs.
When he emigrated to Pakistan in 1952, he brought a deep hatred of India. “Hindus are crooks,” he told his biographer. “They are dreaming of destroying Pakistan.”
Yet Khan did not stay long in his new homeland. After a few years at Karachi University, he moved to Europe to take a degree in Electrical Engineering at Delft University in the Netherlands in 1963, followed by a doctorate in metallurgy at Leuven University in Belgium.
In 1975 he spent three months on secondment with Urenco, an Anglodutch consortium based in Holland that dealt in uranium reprocessing. By chance, Urenco had acquired a new centrifuge which could enrich uranium to weapons-grade level. Khan acquired detailed drawings and blueprints with the help of a Dutch friend who innocently photographed the centrifuge design.
At the end of the year Khan returned to Pakistan with the blueprints, which would form the basis of Pakistan’s covert nuclear programme. (In 1983 a Dutch court would convict Khan of espionage and theft and sentenced him to four years in jail in absentia. The sentence was quashed two years later on a technicality.)
Immediately after his return, the prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, determined to go down in history as the creator of the Islamic bomb, placed Khan in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear programme.
India had tested a device in 1974, so Pakistan’s nuclear programme became a national obsession. Bhutto pledged that Pakistan would acquire a nuclear bomb even if its citizens had to “eat grass”. Khan was given a secret nuclear facility 20 miles south-east of Islamabad – and told to build a bomb.
By the time Bhutto was hanged by General Muhammad Zia ul-haq in 1979, Khan, with Chinese help, had succeeded in enriching uranium. It took until 1998 for Pakistan to test its first nuclear weapon, but after the government of India detonated five atom bombs in May that year, Pakistan responded within the month, conducting six nuclear explosions in the deserts of Balochistan.
Overnight Khan became a national hero, his image appearing on billboards and bumper stickers. Streets, schools, even cricket teams, adopted his name, and it was widely noted that feeding monkeys was his favourite pastime. Khan revelled in the adulation. “Who made the atom bomb? I made it,” he boasted. “Who made the missiles? I made them for you.” As for Pakistan’s enemies: “I made all their policies go to waste. A single person destroyed all of their intended planning for the next 25 years.”
It might well have been impossible to stop Pakistan getting the bomb. What is incontrovertible is the blind eye turned by successive American administrations to the country’s nuclear programme. For Washington deemed Pakistan an essential ally, first after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, then after al-qaeda attacked America in 2001. Non-proliferation goals were sacrificed to more immediate concerns.
Yet from 1988 until the mid-1990s, Khan had been selling centrifuge blueprints to Iran and Libya, together with thousands of component parts. Then, from 1998 until about 2000, he oversaw the transfer of centrifuge technology to North Korea in a deal under which the Pyongyang regime gave Pakistan long-range missiles in return. Documents seized by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq also showed him offering Saddam Hussein a design for a nuclear weapon in 1990. The Iraqi leader, however, suspected a trap and declined.
The US long had Khan in their sights, but did not want to rock the boat too violently. In 2001 Musharraf bowed to US demands for him to be “retired” as head of the Khan Research Laboratories, nerve centre of the nuclear weapons programme, though he was given a position as the president’s special science and technology adviser. But with Pakistan’s continuing role as a major source of financial and logistical support for the Taliban, US patience began to wear thin.
A key moment came in December 2003, during a thawing of relations with Libya, when the country’s leader Colonel Gaddafi handed over his entire inventory of weapons of mass destruction to British and American experts, and disclosed details of his suppliers, which allowed Britain and America to prove that Khan had been running a “nuclear supermarket”.
While Khan was helping Iran and Libya, he was working under the civilian prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. During the period of his dealings with North Korea, Musharraf was chief of staff and then President.
Musharraf later insisted that no one in the military hierarchy knew what was happening, and when his government admitted for the first time that some of its scientists might have sold nuclear technology to Iran they blamed individuals “motivated by personal ambition or greed”.
Khan was initially reported to have told government investigators that he did nothing without the knowledge of Pakistan’s military chiefs, including Musharraf. He subsequently appeared on television, however, and made a public confession, in which he apologised to the nation and absolved the regime of involvement, giving as his only excuse “an error of judgment”.
He withdrew the confession in 2008 and in the same year the US imposed sanctions against Khan, 12 of his associates and three companies linked to his nuclear proliferation network amid concern that parts of the network was still active.
Khan was freed from house arrest by court order in 2009 and remained defiant to the end. Referring to the US and its western allies, he asked his fellow Muslims: “Are they happy with our God? Are they happy with our Prophet? Are they happy with our leaders? Never, so why should we bother what they say about us?”
Khan was the recipient of at least six honorary doctorates, 45 gold medals, three gold crowns and was twice awarded the Nishan-i-imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest civilian award.
In fact, though Khan was a practising Muslim he was no fundamentalist. In 1964 he married Hendrina Reterink, a British national born to Dutch expatriate parents in South Africa and brought up in Northern Rhodesia before moving to the Netherlands. Neither she nor their two daughters, who also survive him, wore the hijab.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, born April 1 1936, died October 10 2021