Security

New Intrigue Surrounds Pak's Nuke Smuggling Ring

Everything you thought you knew about Pakistan’s nuclear-smuggling ring is wrong. At least, that’s what the accused ringleader and an English journalist would have you believe. On Friday, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, recanted his confession that he had supplied nuke parts and know-how to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. In his […]

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Everything you thought you knew about Pakistan's nuclear-smuggling ring is wrong. At least, that's what the accused ringleader and an English journalist would have you believe.

On Friday, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, recanted his confession that he had supplied nuke parts and know-how to North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

*In his first western media interview since 2004, Khan said the confession had been forced upon him by President Pervez Musharraf. "It was not of my own free will. It was handed into my hand," he told the
Guardian. *

Pakistani editorials and clerics are now calling for Khan's release from custody. But how, exactly, this explains away the brochures pimping Khan's nuclear equipment and expertise is a little beyond me. "U.S. government specialists aren't buying Khan's new tune," either, Nukes & Spooks says.

In an e-mailed response, one U.S. official said simply: "We haven't changed our assessment that A.Q. Khan was a major--and very dangerous--proliferator. He sold sensitive nuclear equipment and know-how to some genuinely bad actors."

Ever-so-conveniently, documents which Khan claims "would have gone a long way in proving my
innocence" were shredded by Swiss authorities, under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Copies may be floating around the black market, however.) No, I don't get it, either.

And just to make matters more complicated, a new book by London-based journalist Shyam Bhatia claims that Pakistan's slain former Prime Minister, Benzair Bhutto, smuggled "critical nuclear data" into North Korea, in exchange for missile technology.

*"Before leaving Islamabad she shopped for an overcoat with the 'deepest possible pockets' into which she transferred CDs containing the scientific data about uranium enrichment that the North
Koreans wanted," Bhatia writes. "She implied with a glint in her eye that she had acted as a two-way courier, bringing North Korea's missile information on CDs back with her on the return journey."

Bhatia said Bhutto did not tell him how many CDs she carried or who she gave them to in Pyongyang. His repeated efforts to persuade her to go on the record about the story were not successful.*

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and
International Security, a research organization on nuclear weapons programs, tells the Washington Post that the assertion "'makes sense,' because there were signs of "funny procurements" in the late
1980s by North Korea that suggested a nascent effort to assemble a uranium enrichment project."

*Pakistan -- and, in particular, a nuclear smuggling ring run by
Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was instrumental in developing a Pakistani nuclear bomb -- has long been suspected as a source of expertise for North Korea, but such high-level government involvement always has been denied. *

And just in case you needed a reminder what a volatile place this home of nuclear smuggling is: a suicide attack on the Danish embassy in Pakistan has left at least eight people dead.

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