Man behind nation’s atomic push signs out
PM EULOGISES ABDUL QADEER KHAN AS A ‘NATIONAL ICON’
Abdul Qadeer Khan, a controversial figure known as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, died yesterday after a lengthy illness, the interior minister said. He was 85.
AQ Khan launched the country on the path to becoming a nuclear weapons power in the early 1970s. interior minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad said he died in a hospital Islamabad. He didn’t elaborate.
He was mired in controversy that began even before he returned to Pakistan from the Netherlands in the 1970s, where he had worked at a nuclear research facility. He was later accused of stealing the centrifuge uranium enrichment technology from the Netherlands facility.
Political initiative
AQ Khan offered to launch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme in 1974 after India conducted its first “peaceful nuclear explosion.” He reached out to then-PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto offering technology for Pakistan’s own nuclear weapons programme. Coming in the wake of the reverse in the 1971 war with India, Bhutto embraced the offer. He famously said: “We [Pakistanis] will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will have our own [nuclear bomb].’’
Just months after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Washington slapped Pakistan with crippling sanctions ending all aid to the country, including military and humanitarian.
AQ Khan was accused by the US of trading nuclear secrets to Iran and to North Korea in the 1990s. At home in Pakistan, he was heralded as a hero and the father of the nuclear bomb.
He was rejected by military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf after 2001, when details of his alleged sales of nuclear secrets came under renewed scrutiny.
In recent years, he mostly lived out of the public eye but tributes from fellow scientists and politicians began to pour in soon after his death.
Prime Minister Imran Khan called him a “national icon,” whose efforts “provided us security against an aggressive much larger nuclear neighbour”. Fellow scientist Dr Samar Mubarakmand said he was a national treasure who defied Western attempts to stifle Pakistan’s nuclear programme.