Pakistan's radioactive dirty laundry is getting aired at last. Traditional approaches to non-proliferation don't work when expertise and materials can be shared easily through back-channels, or with the complicity of irresponsible governments.
The founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, A.Q. Khan, has signed a detailed confession admitting that over the past 15 years he provided Iran, North Korea and Libya the designs and technology to produce the fuel for nuclear weapons, according to a senior Pakistani official and three Pakistani journalists who attended a special government briefing here Sunday night.Posted by Alan at February 2, 2004 12:34 AMIn a 2 1/2-hour presentation to 20 Pakistani journalists, a senior government official gave an exhaustive and startling account of how Khan, a national hero, made millions of dollars selling secret technology to three countries that have been striving to produce their own nuclear arsenals.
Two of them, Iran and North Korea, were among those designated by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil."
If the Pakistani government account is correct, Khan's admission amounts to one of the most complex and successful efforts to evade international controls to stop nuclear proliferation. The account provided by Pakistan on Sunday night came after years in which the government strongly denied that the government or scientists at the Khan Research Laboratories had sold critical technology to other nations.
Officials detailed how Khan presided over a network that smuggled nuclear hardware on chartered planes, shared secret designs for the centrifuges that produce the enriched uranium necessary to develop a nuclear weapon, and gave personal briefings to Iranian, Libyan and North Korean scientists in covert meetings abroad.