Pakistan's Black Market May Offer Nukes

[candypreet]

http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/international/asia/21nukes.html&OP=58f40d25/j/GvjX4go644rLjLQ3CQ3CTjQ3CFjLQ22jfqrG6qJrf4qJ_jJofJ jLQ22qDpGoQ519rQ5C_

Pakistani's Black Market May Offer Secrets to Build Nuclear Weapons
By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger
The New York Times

Monday 21 March 2005

Nuclear investigators from the United States and other nations now believe that the black market network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan was selling not only technology for enriching nuclear fuel and blueprints for nuclear weapons, but also some of the darkest of the bomb makers' arts: the hard-to-master engineering secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

Their suspicions were initially raised by the discovery of step-by-step instructions, some of which appear to have come from China and Pakistan, among the documents recovered last year from Libya. More recently, investigators have found that the Khan network had offered similar materials to Iran.

The secrets range from how to cast uranium metal into the form needed at the core of a bomb to how to build the explosive lenses that compress the core and start the detonation.

The discoveries have set off a debate in the intelligence community about whether those technological skills made their way to North Korea and Iran. President Bush has vowed he will not tolerate either country's obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Iran was a customer of the Khan network, and while it appears to have turned down the offer of the engineering secrets in 1987, some intelligence officials are concerned that it picked up the technology elsewhere. North Korea, which is believed to have two separate bomb projects under way, also did business with the Khan network, although precisely what it obtained is not clear.

The weeks leading up to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to China this weekend, American officials provided their Chinese counterparts with a stream of new information about North Korea's nuclear program, but it is not clear how much detail they went into about their latest suspicions. The Chinese, for their part, are skeptical of the quality of the American intelligence.

The inability of intelligence officials to track down the whereabouts of the bomb-making instructions underscores the fact that more than a year since Mr. Khan's arrest and pardon by Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, there are still many mysteries about what exactly the Khan network was selling, and to whom.

The United States has not been allowed to interview Dr. Khan, and Ms. Rice raised concerns about cooperation in the nuclear investigation when she met with General Musharraf last week. But American officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency are beginning to extract information from Dr. Khan's chief deputy, Buhari Sayed Abu Tahir, who is in jail in Malaysia. "It's becoming clearer to us that Khan was selling a complete package," said a senior American official involved in the setting of nuclear strategy. "Not a turnkey operation - that would be overstating it - but close to it."

To investigators and other experts, the discovery that Dr. Khan was selling step-by-step directions for making crucial parts of a bomb was startling.

"The real secrets are in the details of the metallurgy, the manufacturing and the engineering," said Siegfried S. Hecker, director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory from 1986 to 1997 and now a senior fellow there.

Intelligence officials in the United States and European diplomats said documents from Libya and Iran showed the Khan network had offered for sale instructions on such tricky manufacturing steps as purifying uranium, casting it into a nuclear core and making the explosives that compress the core and set off a chain reaction. Unlike bomb designs themselves, these manufacturing secrets can take years or even decades for a country to learn on its own.

Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, a private group that tracks nuclear arms, said having the manufacturing instructions was a tremendous leap beyond rudimentary bomb designs. "I can show you the schematic of an automobile that has a engine and a transmission, and go to a book that describes how the pistons work," he said. "But if you actually want to build a car, you need the details and step-by-step procedures for everything from casting the components, to machining them, to assembling them."

Dr. Khan is a metallurgist and an expert at making both centrifuges that enrich uranium and nuclear warheads. Investigators say that in the early 1980's, he obtained the detailed blueprints for a Chinese atomic bomb.

The first public hint that Dr. Khan's network traded in bomb designs and engineering instruction emerged in 1995 after United Nations inspectors in Iraq found a set of documents describing an offer made to Baghdad before the Persian Gulf war of 1991. An internal Iraqi memorandum, dated June 10, 1990, told of an unidentified middleman saying that Dr. Khan could help Iraq "establish a project to enrich uranium and manufacture a nuclear weapon" and that he was "prepared to give us project designs for a nuclear bomb."

The Iraqis never took up the proposal, which they judged a scam or a sting operation. Western experts also questioned its authenticity.

But the apparent validity of the offer became clear in late 2003 when Libya showed investigators blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb that it got from the Khan network. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that the documents included information on both nuclear design and fabrication, calling it of "utmost concern."

The Libya disclosure touched off a global hunt for more Khan documents. Officials in the United States and Europe said the trail recently led to Dubai, where Mr. Tahir, the Sri Lankan businessman who was Dr. Khan's deputy, ran a front company, SMB Computers. They said reliable network sources had told of seeing bomb documents there that contained step-by-step instructions on how to fabricate components for nuclear arms. Intense searches in Dubai, they added, had so far failed to turn up the documents.

The latest development in the hunt came March 1 with the disclosure of the network's 1987 offer to Iran of centrifuge machines and materials, as well as "uranium reconversion and casting capabilities," according to an I.A.E.A. report.

While investigators have determined that Tehran paid precious hard currency to the Khan network for nuclear equipment, it appears to have turned down the offer of the engineering secrets necessary to build the core of a nuclear weapon.

European and American officials said they considered the 1987 transaction some of the best evidence that Iran sought, starting at least 18 years ago, to assemble the technologies needed to build a nuclear arsenal.

"It adds a piece to the puzzle that makes the whole thing more incriminating," a European official said. "But is this a smoking gun? No. Does this make people more suspicious? Yes."

[SmokedYourDSM]

uhm, this is old news.
like 1980's news....
but thanks for the heads up....

:mad_07: :mad_07: :mad_07:

[candypreet]

Pak upgrading its nukes, UN disturbed

Saturday, April 09, 2005,Vienna: Western diplomats familiar with an investigation of the nuclear black market by the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said this news was disturbing.
While Pakistan appeared to be shopping for its own needs, the existence of some nuclear black market channels meant there were still ways for rogue states or terrorist groups to acquire technology that could be used in atomic weapons, they said.

"General procurement efforts (by Pakistan) are going on. It is a determined effort," a diplomat from a member of the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

"This was discussed at an NSG meeting in Vienna last week," he said, adding that those involved in the discussion agreed to try to keep the issue secret to avoid upsetting Pakistan.

Nuclear experts said these channels involved new middlemen who had not played a role in earlier deals which came to light last year.

"These are not the same people. They're new, which is worrying," said one Western diplomat.

http://indiamonitor.com/news/readNews.jsp?ni=6793

[zapcomix]

We need a good looksee in Lebanon...

[candypreet]

Published on Sunday, April 11, 2004 by the Toronto Star
Pakistan's Dirty Nuclear Secret
by Sandro Contenta

VIENNA—When Libya ratted out the biggest global network in nuclear smuggling, among the thousands of black market items it turned over to U.N. inspectors were the blueprints for a nuclear warhead.


Libyan officials handed over the stack of documents in the very same way they had received them — stuffed into two shopping bags from "Good Look" tailors in Islamabad.

The U.N. inspectors were flabbergasted: the designs were for a bomb that could, if "properly" unleashed, devastate a city.

The plans had arrived in Libya more than two years ago through a nuclear proliferation racket that spanned at least nine countries on three continents. The full extent of the racket remains unknown.

To dismantle it, authorities are now feverishly working to track down the middlemen, scientists and companies that comprise the network.

But the most pressing concern is the deadly design itself. How many times were the blueprints and instruction manuals photocopied as they travelled the smuggling route to Tripoli? And to how many other countries — or extremist groups — were they sold? Those questions fuel nightmarish scenarios.

"Stopping nuclear proliferation is a race against time," says a Vienna-based diplomat.

The plot of this real-life thriller unfolds on a global stage where most members of a small nuclear elite consider their weapons vital for national security, yet expect everyone else to feel safe without them.

With disarmament ruled out by the eight or nine countries that have nuclear weapons, getting them has become the goal of a growing number that don't.

The smugglers in this ring also took strategic advantage of U.S. governments turning a blind eye to nuclear proliferation from an ally — Pakistan — and an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that failed to investigate troubling early warning signs.

The racket's mastermind was scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb. It was Khan who put together a smuggling network suspected of operating for at least 15 years. In a televised confession Feb. 4, Khan admitted selling nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Paris-based expert Bruno Tretrais says: "I would not be surprised if at least one other country was involved, like Syria, Egypt or Algeria."

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei describes Khan's network as a nuclear Wal-Mart, providing one-stop shopping in technology, know-how, and uranium hexafluoride, the gas that is processed to enrich uranium for bomb making.

At times, Khan shipped nuclear technology directly from Pakistan. But often he used middlemen and suppliers from at least a dozen companies in Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Dubai, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Germany and Switzerland. It's unclear how many of the firms actually knew they were involved in the illegal ring because some of the equipment they made could be used for both nuclear and non-nuclear purposes.

Hard evidence about Khan's activities finally began to emerge last year after Iran caved in to international pressure and showed its nuclear facilities and black market equipment to IAEA inspectors.

By late December, as part of a bargain with the U.S. and Britain to end Tripoli's international isolation, Libya directly fingered Khan. And much of the technology Libya turned over was identical to equipment IAEA inspectors had seen in Iran. Libya also named some of Khan's middlemen and suppliers as the source of more than $100 million (U.S.) in nuclear bomb-making technology that had been smuggled into Tripoli since 1998. That technology included designs for an early model nuclear bomb that could be dropped from a plane or launched by missile.

Libya told IAEA inspectors it had received the designs free, as a kind of bonus for being a good customer. But Western diplomats remain skeptical. According to one unconfirmed report, they cost Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi $20 million.

And although an IAEA report in November said it had found no evidence of nuclear weapons being produced in Iran, last week ElBaradei travelled to Tehran to ask officials there whether they had received the same blueprints as Libya.

Iran's ruling Shiite Muslim clerics insist their program is exclusively designed to generate much needed power from the country's nuclear reactors, despite being an oil-rich nation. They blame the U.S.-led trade embargo for forcing them to buy Khan's black market goods, beginning in the late 1980s. They have since mastered the complex "centrifuge" technology used to enrich uranium, but insist they have never pushed it to the 90 per cent level necessary to produce nuclear weapons.

But what has heightened the IAEA's suspicions is a massive uranium enrichment facility the government secretly began building in the desert south of Tehran that is big enough to power several nuclear reactors.

IAEA inspectors want to know why Iran built the facility before building the reactors — especially since Russia had already agreed to provide it with enriched uranium.

"The only logical conclusion is that the uranium will be for another purpose — nuclear weapons," a Western diplomat says.

Unless these vexing questions are resolved, some observers fear the U.S. or Israel may blast the facility sky high in a replay of the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear facility by Israeli warplanes in 1981. In his confession, Khan chalked up his smuggling activities to "errors in judgment" and a desire to divert Western pressure from Pakistan's nuclear program by spreading the problem around, especially to Muslim countries.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf insists Khan acted without the knowledge of top security or government officials. Most experts consider that claim laughable.

Musharraf immediately pardoned the 67-year-old scientist, calling him a hero for his services to the country, and let him keep the fortune he amassed from smuggling. He also prevented Khan from being interviewed by IAEA inspectors or U.S. officials.

U.S. President George W. Bush accepted Musharraf's handling of the matter in return for information about the type of technology smuggled, as well as assurances that Khan would be put out of business, says Gary Samore, who advised Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, on non-proliferation issues.

Bush feared that pressing the matter further would weaken Musharraf domestically and reduce his commitment to hunting down Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda loyalists, believed to be hiding along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

While Bush was prepared to launch a war against Iraq on a claim that its alleged weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of terrorists, he appears to have taken a more tolerant and patient approach with a ring that makes the possibility of a nuclear nightmare all the more real.

There's no hard evidence yet that Al Qaeda-linked groups shopped at Khan's network. But in 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists reportedly met bin Laden twice in Afghanistan.

In October that year, Pakistani authorities detained a group of scientists, including a once senior member of its nuclear program, on suspicion of passing on nuclear secrets to Afghanistan's Taliban government, hosts to bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror network until the Taliban was ousted by U.S. forces.

Later, bin Laden told a Pakistani journalist Al Qaeda actually had nuclear weapons, a claim most experts doubt.

Nuclear weapons are made from either highly enriched uranium, or processed plutonium, both extremely complex procedures requiring precise scientific skills.

Al Qaeda has tried to buy fissile material for a bomb on the black market. It made several failed attempts to buy enriched uranium in the mid-1990s in Africa, Europe and Russia.

"If Al Qaeda were to build nuclear weapons, it would likely build relatively crude, massive nuclear explosives, deliverable by ships, trucks, or private planes," writes David Albright, a former IAEA inspector who is now head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

Al Qaeda's nuclear quest has also refocused attention on the hundreds of tonnes of nuclear bomb material kept in insecure facilities in the former Soviet Union, mainly Russia.

A declassified CIA report two years ago stated that an unknown amount of Russia's fissile material had been stolen over the past decade.

Since 1993, the IAEA has documented 18 cases of trafficking in the kind of enriched uranium or plutonium needed for nuclear bombs. But the quantities involved have not been enough to produce a nuclear weapon.

They could produce a so-called "dirty bomb," a makeshift process in which radioactive materials are attached to conventional explosives and dispersed by the blast. But the bigger the blast, the more the radioactive material disperses, and, surprisingly, the less deadly it becomes.

Whatever the scientific calculation, anxiety over Khan's smuggling ring is high and rising. He initially set up his clandestine operations to serve Pakistan's nuclear ambitions. The country launched its quest for nuclear weapons after 1974, when rival India conducted its first atomic test using plutonium processed from Canada's Candu reactor technology.

Khan was then working in the Netherlands at Urenco, a European nuclear power consortium. He returned to Pakistan before a Dutch court convicted him of stealing company blueprints for centrifuges.

The U.S. was aware Pakistan was illegally bringing in equipment for its nuclear program by at least 1983, according to a recently declassified state department document. But Washington turned a blind eye throughout the decade, deciding it was more important to keep Pakistan as an ally in the battle against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, says Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In 1989, when the Soviets left Afghanistan, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan. At about the same time, Khan's network began exporting nuclear technology to Iran, partly to finance Pakistan's nuclear drive.

To gain favour and the financial backing of oil-rich Arab countries, Khan stressed the strategic importance of an Islamic state acquiring a nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia was a key backer, in part by providing oil at cut-rate prices.

Most experts believe Pakistan — which is not a signatory of the U.N.'s non-proliferation treaty — had enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons sometime between 1989 and 1994.

The IAEA had both the mandate and the power to investigate suspicions about a black market. But the agency had by then settled on a practice that made it an auditing agency verifying only those nuclear sites that countries declared, says Vilmos Cserveny, director of its policy co-ordination office.

In 1995, IAEA inspectors came across Khan's name when dismantling Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They discovered a memo written by a member of Iraq's intelligence service saying Khan had offered to help Iraq build nuclear weapons. The memo was dated Oct. 6, 1990 — when Saddam Hussein's army had occupied Kuwait and a U.S. coalition was building up forces to drive it back.

A related document said the "upfront" cost of assistance in enriching uranium and manufacturing nuclear weapons would be $5 million.

The IAEA inspectors halted their investigation after Pakistan denied making the offer described in the memo and Iraqi officials described it as a hoax.

But throughout the 1990s, Khan also made several trips to North Korea — trips that would have required Pakistani government approval. During those years, Pakistan obtained intermediate-range ballistic missiles from North Korea, likely in exchange for nuclear technology.

Most experts believe North Korea built one or two nuclear weapons by 1994 with Pakistan's help. Last year, North Korea abruptly pulled out of the non-proliferation treaty, which had made it subject to international inspections.

Pakistan tested some of its North Korean missiles in May, 1998, and declared itself a nuclear weapons state.

Interestingly, the biggest blow to Khan's network came last October when a German-owned ship destined for Libya was seized in the Mediterranean. Its containers, which the manifest said were full of "used machine parts", were instead packed with equipment for sophisticated centrifuges. Bush claims the seizure was a result of U.S. and British intelligence. But by then, Gadhafi was negotiating his return to relative respectability with London and Washington, and some diplomats believe he decided to sacrifice the ship's cargo as a goodwill gesture.

Bush is calling on the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution requiring all states to criminalize proliferation and enact strict export controls. But experts say countries are not likely to sit idly by while the U.S. and others continue to develop their nuclear arsenals.

"As long as you keep developing new weapons like U.S. bunker busters or mini nukes, this will always make other countries react," Cserveny says.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

[candypreet]

:) :) bump

[candypreet]

still no comments

[candypreet]

bumpity bump

[candypreet]

A campaign of bloodshed

Prashanth Parameswaran, Cavalier Daily Opinion Columnist

THE UNITED STATES has fought unjust wars and practiced immoral acts formed under the guise of a "war on terror." But most of all, the campaign has wreaked havoc in regions such as South Asia and damaged all possible chances for peace and prosperity. The Bush administration's armed support for the despotic Nepalese monarchy and the autocratic Sri Lankan government has resulted in bloody, anti-democratic campaigns of slaughter in the two nations. In addition, its use of incentives for India and Pakistan has undermined future cooperation between the two rivals and affirmed U.S. support for regimes which blatantly flout global non-proliferation regulations.

U.S. military support for the power-hungry Nepalese monarchy has killed 13,000 in the last decade. It has armed and trained King Gyanendra's Royal Nepalese Army, which regularly resorts to detention, torture and extrajudicial killings of citizens and hundreds of political leaders. Although the United States suspended "lethal aid" after Gyanendra sacked the government and assumed direct power in 2005, it still provides bullet proof vests and jeeps to assist in this mass murder, according to Amnesty International. This has all been done in the name of preventing the opposing Maoist rebels to take over the government. However, this "anti-terror campaign" has allowed Gyanendra to abolish a constitutional monarchy and brutally crackdown on political parties and civilians. This blind dedication to rooting out terrorists is undermining the Nepalese political process. Just this week, opposition protests resulted in three civilian deaths in the hands of royalist forces.

The United States has also allied with the Sri Lankan government in helping it unleash its own campaign of rape and murder against its Tamil population. U.S. military cooperation includes the training of brutal Sri Lankan security forces as well as the approval of United States made military equipment from third parties such as U.S. engined Israeli Kfir jets. This violates the U.S. Leahy Law which "prohibits the training of any foreign military personnel known to have committed human rights abuses." While it is true that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or "Tamil Tigers," are the most successful and violent terrorist group in the world, the United States has banned the LTTE but has neither condemned the government's equally gross human rights violations nor halted military assistance. For instance, when tsunami aid was to be delivered to Sri Lanka recently, the United States did not protest the government's inhumane bypass of aid to affected Tamil areas.

While terrorist groups do not deserve aid, there is no reason to bypass the entire Tamil population, a majority of whom do not even condone the radical Tigers. The U.S. government's siding with the government also gives it no incentive to cooperate in the recent international negotiations with the Tigers which have reached their lowest point in years. The United States should act responsibly and facilitate a political compromise between the government and the LTTE instead of letting its obsession with terrorism result in a near-breakdown of civil war.

The United States has also compromised global nonproliferation records in its dealings with India and Pakistan. For starters, the same year the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market network was discovered to be run out of Pakistan, the United States designated Pakistan the prestigious "major non-NATO ally" status -- a token for its counterterrorism cooperation. In doing so, the United States has placed counterterrorism cooperation of one nation over wider global nonproliferation. The civilian nuclear deal with India is no better, considering that gas centrifuges for India's nuclear program originated from the same AQ Khan network.

The United States has also thwarted possible peace endeavors between the two powers due to its terrorism agenda. The possible pipeline between India, Pakistan and Iran, which would greatly enhance cooperation between the two regional powers, is despised by Washington thanks to Iran's terrorist background. Washington has tried to lure the two nations away from the pipeline by making them compete for U.S. incentives like the nuclear deal, thereby facilitating antagonism. This, according to the Financial Times, is the worst possible moment to do so since bilateral cooperation is unusually high and the Kashmir issue is the closest to being resolved. Once again blinded by terrorism, the United States is refusing to support a pipeline which symbolizes potential cooperation between two nuclear powers which have fought three wars.

No one denies that terrorism is a major issue, and one that needs to be tackled urgently. But arming rogue regimes with gross human rights records and preventing the resolution of key regional disputes is certainly not right way to go about it. If the United States continues to pursue a one-track mind approach to combating terrorism, South Asia will descend into a land of civil war and nuclear destruction.

Prashanth Parameswaran's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at pparameswaran@cavalierdaily.com.

[candypreet]

The shady side of nuclear
Not nearly enough attention is being paid to the well-organized underground network of suppliers who have made illicit nuclear build-up possible.

Commentary by Sara Kuepfer for ISN Security Watch (23/08/06)


Following Tehran’s announcement that it intends to proceed with its nuclear enrichment activities, world attention has again focused on Iran and the question of how to prevent Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from acquiring nuclear weapons. Surprisingly, much less attention is being paid, both by world leaders and the media, to black market nuclear supplies who make illicit nuclear build-up possible.

Some believe that Iran would not be as dangerous a threat to its enemies today had it not been for an international smuggling network led by the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, a hero to the Pakistanis.

In fact, the earliest document indicating contact between Khan’s network and Iran dates back to 1987. In the mid-1980s, some Pakistanis were said to have had ideological motivations to help Iran with its nuclear ambitions. As investigative journalist Steven Coll explained in an interview with Blake Eskin of the US magazine The New Yorker this month: “Some Pakistani generals apparently believed that it was in Pakistan’s interest to form an alliance with the revolutionary government of Iran, in strategic defiance of the United States and its European allies, even though some of the Iranian ideology was not compatible with Pakistan’s approach to Islam or even to regional politics.”

Still, what Pakistani nuclear scientists actually provided Iran with in terms of nuclear technology remains a mystery for investigators with the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Money has always been a prime motivator as well - perhaps even more so for Khan’s suppliers of nuclear technology in the West.

Although the Khan network was exposed in the spring of 2004, with Khan himself placed under house arrest in Pakistan, it is likely that its remnants continue to operate. Khan’s network spanned the globe, involving dozens of countries, companies, salesmen, secret bank accounts and production plants. Untangling this shady and complex network is difficult, and only a handful of participants have been apprehended so far. And it seems likely that US president George W Bush's claim that "we put them [Khan's network] out of business" should not be accepted with any amount of certainty.

The first criminal trial of an alleged key figure in the Khan network took place this spring in Mannheim, Germany. However, the trial was suspended partly due to the unwillingness of key witnesses abroad to testify. The defendant, German engineer Gotthard Lerch, had worked for the German engineering firm Leybold-Heraeus GmbH, a company that manufactured components for uranium enrichment plants. Lerch left Leybold-Heraeus in 1985 to set up his own engineering company, allegedly taking with him blueprints of nuclear enrichment components from his former employer. Coll says German prosecutors believe he made as much as US$20 million on illicit nuclear dealings with Libya alone.

Although the German authorities are considering a retrial, the collapse of the proceedings is a setback for international non-proliferation efforts, as the trial could have provided important information on the Khan network. Lerch, who is believed to have been in direct contact with the Iranians since the late 1980s, might have been able to shed light on the progress of Iran’s uranium enrichment program.

In May 2005, authorities in Switzerland arrested Swiss engineer Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco. They were suspected of building and shipping gas centrifuge parts to Libya between 2001 and 2003, and possibly even Iran, intended for their nuclear weapons programs. Formal charges have not been brought against them as prosecutors are having difficulty obtaining pertinent information from the US regarding the case, though Libya has promised to provide additional evidence.

With the nuclear black market spanning the globe, information-sharing among prosecutors and government investigators in the various countries concerned has been slow at best.

Further complicating the disclosure of the smuggling network is Pakistan’s refusal to allow the IAEA and foreign governments to question Khan freely.

Indeed, it is not in Pakistan’s interest to reveal Khan’s sources for obtaining nuclear equipment, as Pakistan still depends on the black market for advancing its own nuclear arsenal. As long as Pakistan continues to find itself in a nuclear arms race with neighboring India, it will have no interest in revealing any information that might hamper its own nuclear procurements. Hence, in early May, Pakistan declared the case against Khan’s smuggling network as officially closed. It is also suspected that Khan, if interrogated, could reveal how Pakistani generals profited from the black market deals – something the generals are not likely to allow to happen.

The buying and selling of nuclear technology is extremely difficult to control in a global system based on the free trade ethos. Leybold-Heraeus GmbH was able to operate so freely in the 1980s because Germany had been promoting an economic policy based on the export of manufactured goods, especially items involving precision engineering, and the country’s export laws have remained very liberal to this day.

Moreover, equipment used in secret nuclear weapon programs is often shipped as disassembled parts - parts that may also be used for peaceful industrial activities that may pass unhampered through export control systems. In fact, the IAEA’s Additional Protocol requires that states only report exports of direct-use nuclear equipment.

Meanwhile, the global non-proliferation regime, with its ultimate goal of ridding the world of all nuclear weapons, has suffered setbacks in recent years, as the haves and have-nots change their views about nuclear weapons.

Iran and North Korea, for instance, are driven by the conviction that acquiring nuclear weapons is the only way to increase their regional power and defend their territories against invasion from Western nuclear powers. In turn, established nuclear powers like the US continue to develop their nuclear arsenals to include new types of perhaps more “usable” tactical nuclear weapons. Naturally, the US insists that only its allies be allowed to have nuclear weapons, while its enemies naturally protest this balance of power.

Peter Griffin, a retired British businessman who worked with Khan for two decades, expressed his own moral reasoning in a conversation with Coll. “I believe that if everybody’s got a big stick that’s more security for the world than only a couple of people having big sticks,” Griffin was quoted as saying in The New Yorker.

Also among the broader public in the West, there seems to be a general sense of apathy and resignation when it comes to the issue of nuclear proliferation. As Coll observed: “The diffusion of nuclear-weapons technology through profit-making trade has attracted remarkably little outrage in America’s political or media culture […] nor has it spawned the sorts of protest about nuclear danger that roiled Europe during the Cold War.”

As Coll put it, “nuclear weapons seem to have regained their legitimacy as instruments of power.”

But the fact remains, nuclear non-proliferation will get nowhere without a major crackdown on the remainders of the Khan network and possible other black market proliferators, who render the politics of nuclear disarmament irrelevant.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sara Kuepfer is an editor for ISN Security Watch in Zurich.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

[emtae]

Of course! No Mohamadan nation can be relied up on have nukes.

We, Americans, trust India to play a constuctive role in helping to stem the threat of nuclear Islamofascism

[candypreet]

Of course! No Mohamadan nation can be relied up on have nukes.

We, Americans, trust India to play a constuctive role in helping to stem the threat of nuclear Islamofascism
united we stand, divided we fall

[emtae]

united we stand, divided we fall
indeed!

[candypreet]

News
http://www.pakistanlink.com/Headlines/Sep06/23/08.htm

Saturday, September 23, 2006

US will give nuclear and defence help

WASHINGTON: Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri said on Friday that the US will give military, defence and nuclear aid to Pakistan. The president’s talks with Rumsfeld focused on the provision of F-16 fighter jets and other related defence issues, he said, adding that Musharraf had briefed Rumsfeld on Pakistan’s defence requirements. The US energy minister had told Musharraf that President Bush had directed him to hold talks with Pakistan on alternative means of energy, he said. sana
Courtesy DailyTimes.com.pk

[candypreet]

a bump

[candypreet]

a bump for 2007.....

[candypreet]

Pakistan Says Any U.S. Al-Qaeda Raid Would Harm Ties (Update1)


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aodpeXsZ1GJM&refer=home

[candypreet]

and a bump

[candypreet]

Pakistan opposes US nuke oversight

A PLAN by the US to seek direct "oversight" of Pakistan's powerful nuclear arsenal and the command structure that controls it was heading for rejection last night after it was denounced in Islamabad as "outright interference" in the country's affairs.

The secret plan, disclosed in the Pakistan media, would for the first time see US officials deployed in Islamabad with "direct access" to the National Command Authority that manages Pakistan's nuclear assets.

It is the first time since the country became a nuclear power in 1998 that Washington has sought direct access to the nuclear arsenal.

Last weekend, US President George W. Bush was quoted as saying that if the US suffered another 9/11-type attack, it would most likely have its antecedents in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan.

Washington is believed to be deeply worried that Islamabad's nuclear assets could "fall into the wrong hands" as a result of political turmoil.

The Bush administration is concerned about the Pakistan Government's determination to negotiate with al-Qa'ida and Taliban-linked militants.

Shireen Mazari, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies, said the US move was "perhaps the most dangerous effort at intruding into Pakistan's sensitive areas in the ongoing effort to gain direct access to nuclear-strategic matters".

But US apprehensions gained additional momentum yesterday when first details emerged of planned peace talks.

The national Government in Islamabad and the provincial Government in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, have agreed to constitute two separate tribal councils to start negotiations with Islamic militants.

The constitution of the councils is being backed by Baitullah Mehsud, the main militant leader in Pakistan and the man blamed for the wave of suicide bombings that have hit targets across the country.

Reports yesterday said Mehsud was "optimistic about the outcome of the impending peace talks between the militants and the Government".

Last night, a senior official at the US embassy in Islamabad, Liz Colton, did not reject reports about the plan to gain access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

"We are in touch with all elements of the Pakistan Government all the time. But we do not publish or discuss details of our diplomatic discussions and assignments," she said.

The fracas came as Pakistan's new National Assembly yesterday passed a unanimous resolution demanding a UN investigation into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The political killing was blamed previously by President Pervez Musharraf on Mehsud, who has consistently denied involvement.

"The commission should seek to probe and identify the culprits, perpetrators, organisers and financiers behind this heinous crime and bring them to justice," the resolution said.

Bhutto was assassinated in a gun and suicide bomb attack on December 27 during an election rally in the Pakistani garrison city of Rawalpindi.

After the killing, Mr Musharraf rejected the idea of a UN probe as requested by officials of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, including Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari.

Instead, the murder was probed internally with the help of British police. According to a report by Scotland Yard, Bhutto was killed by the force of a suicide blast and not by gunfire.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23545003-2703,00.html