You can hardly blame a Pakistani nationalist for wanting his country to possess nuclear weapons, especially after neighboring India successfully tested its first bomb in 1974. Just three years earlier, India had crushed Pakistan in a war that saw Pakistan’s eastern province gain its independence as Bangladesh. “My objective in making the atomic bomb,” Abdul Qadeer Khan once said in an interview, “was that Pakistan becomes safe.”
But the 85-year-old Khan, a metallurgist-turned-nuclear engineer who died last week of the coronavirus, was more than the self-proclaimed “father of the Pakistani bomb.” He was also the godfather of a clandestine global network of industrial/scientific spies and smugglers, along with Islamist activists, who variously sold and supplied nuclear weapons technology and materials to rogue states such as Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. Former CIA Director George Tenet was not far from the mark when he described Khan in his memoirs as “at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden.”
Khan had begun life not as a nuclear entrepreneur but as a metallurgical engineer whose academic training and early work in Europe was in building and perfecting centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear power. The son of a schoolteacher father and religious-minded mother, he had been born in Bhopal in British India in 1936 but migrated to Pakistan with his family in 1952 and, after earning a degree in physics at the University of Karachi, moved on to graduate study in Germany and Belgium in the 1960s. He earned a doctorate at the Catholic University of Louvain and was working on nuclear technology in the Netherlands when Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 India-Pakistan war prompted him to enlist in his country’s furtive program to develop a hydrogen bomb.
His initial efforts were deceptively simple: He copied the advanced centrifuge designs he had helped to develop in the Netherlands and sneaked them home to Pakistan where, over time and with the tacit cooperation of Pakistan’s armed forces, Khan built a clandestine network of (mostly) European businessmen who supplied crucial components and advanced technology.
Khan also benefited from the ambiguous nature, then as now, of Islamabad’s relations with Washington. The existence of a nuclear weapons program in Pakistan was always an open secret: As early as the late 1970s, the CIA was keeping track of the Khan network and, as U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Arthur Hummel later recalled, “We had monitored their acquisition of … materials from around the world and did quite a bit to stop their obtaining some of them. … They were chugging ahead at a site that we knew about — which they flatly denied that they were doing. … We had no choice but to disbelieve them.”
At the same time, Pakistan was a strategic ally during the Soviet invasion and occupation of neighboring Afghanistan. Throughout the late 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations certified that Pakistan was not producing nuclear weapons, as required by Congress. But when the Soviet Union abandoned Afghanistan in 1989, the certifications ceased. By that time, Khan was something of a proliferation celebrity: The well-publicized head of Pakistan’s nuclear laboratory, a frequent flyer to Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, and Tripoli, mastermind of a network of scientists and manufacturers exporting weapons technology.
In 1998, Pakistan successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. But it was 9/11 that finally forced Washington to take direct action against A.Q. Khan. Osama bin Laden’s attack dramatized fears of nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands, and in 2003, when a joint U.S.-British intelligence mission revealed that Khan had delivered bomb designs to Libya’s dictator Moammar Gadhafi, Tenet advised Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf that Khan had betrayed his country by selling “your nation’s most sensitive secrets … to the highest bidders.”
So, Khan was removed from his post and, comfortably unrepentant, spent the balance of his life as a national hero in nominal disgrace. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted that he was “deeply saddened” by news of his death.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
