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T
HE
W
RATH OF
K
HAN
 
 How A. Q. Khan made Pakistan a nuclear power—and showed that the spread of atomic weapons can't be stopped 
BY
W
ILLIAM
L
ANGEWIESCHE
 
.....The Atlantic; November.2005
 
Rawalpindi is a city of two million residents on thenorthern plains of the Punjab, in Pakistan. It is a teemingplace, choked with smoke and overcrowded with people justbarely getting by. A large number of them live hand tomouth on the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a year.Much of their drinking water comes from a lake in thepeaceful countryside north of town. The lake is surroundedby tree-lined pastures and patches of sparse forest. Thenavy of Pakistan has a sailing club there, on a promontorywith a cinder-block shack, a dock, and one small sloop inthe water - a Laser 16 with dirty sails, which sees littleuse. Though fishermen and picnickers sometimes appear inthe afternoons or evenings, the lakefront on both sides ofthe promontory is pristine and undeveloped. The emptinessis by design: though the land around the lake is privatelyowned, zoning laws strictly forbid construction there, inorder to protect Rawalpindi's citizens from thecontamination that would otherwise result. This seems onlyright. If Pakistan can do nothing else for its people, itcan at least prevent the rich from draining their sewageinto the water of the poor.But Pakistan is a country corrupted to its core, and someyears ago a large weekend house was built in blatantdisregard of the law, about a mile from the navy's sailingclub, clearly in sight on the lake's far shore. Whenordinary people build illegal houses in Pakistan, thegovernment's response is unambiguous and swift: backed bysoldiers or the police, bulldozers come in and knock thestructures down. But the builder of this house was noneother than Dr. Abdul Quadeer Khan, the metallurgist whoafter a stint in Europe had returned to Pakistan in themid-1970s with stolen designs, and over the years hadprovided the country—single-handedly, it was widelybelieved—with an arsenal of nuclear weapons. Though heworked in the realm of state secrets, Khan had becomesomething of a demigod in Pakistan, with a public
 
 
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reputation second only to that of the nation's founder,Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and he had developed an ego to match.He was the head of a government facility named after him —the Khan Research Laboratories, or KRL — which had masteredthe difficult process of producing highly enriched uranium,the fissionable material necessary for Pakistan's weapons,and was also involved in the design of the warheads and themissiles to deliver them. The enemy was India, where Khan,like most Pakistanis of his generation, had been born, andagainst which Pakistan has fought four losing wars sinceits birth, in 1947. India had the bomb, and now Pakistandid too. A. Q. Khan was seen to have assured the nation'ssurvival, and indeed he probably has—up until the moment,someday in a conceivable future, when a nuclear exchangeactually occurs.In any case, by the time he built the house on the lake, hebelieved wholeheartedly in his own greatness. In his middleage he had become a fleshy, banquet-fed man, unused tocriticism and outrageously self-satisfied. Accompanied byhis security detail, he would go around Pakistan acceptingawards and words of praise, passing out pictures ofhimself, and holding forth on diverse subjects—science,education, health, history, world politics, poetry, and(his favorite) the magnitude of his achievements. As befitssuch a benefactor, he would also give out money, of whichhe seemed to have an unlimited supply, despite the factthat he was a government official with a governmentofficial's salary and no other obvious means of wealth; hebought houses for his friends, funded scholarships, set uphis own private charity, made large donations to mosques,and bestowed grants on Pakistani schools and institutions,many of which duly named themselves or their buildingsafter him. To understand Khan correctly—which to somedegree is to understand the spread of nuclear arsenalsbeyond the traditional great powers—it is necessary torecognize that his largesse was not merely a matter ofself-aggrandizement. He has been portrayed in the West as atwisted character, an evil scientist, a purveyor of death.He had certainly lost perspective on himself. But the truthis that he was a good husband and father and friend, and hegave large gifts because in essence he was an openheartedand charitable man.As to why, therefore, he insisted on building a weekendhouse that drained into Rawalpindi's drinking water, theanswer is indeed twisted, though in a standard Pakistani
 
 
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way: the attraction was not in the setting on the lake(there are prettier lakes nearby) but, rather, in the opendefiance of the law—an opportunity for the display ofpersonal power. In a country whose courts have been madecaptive, and whose most fundamental laws have beensystematically ignored by corrupt civilian governments andsuccessive military regimes, once wealth has been achievedthere can be no more gratifying display of success thansuch a brazen act of illegality. Khan's house on the lakeserved as a barely coded message, and one that wasuniversally understood by Pakistanis at the time. It was apublic brag. People did not disapprove of Khan for what hehad done. Even in Rawalpindi they tended rather to admirehim for it. It remained illegal to build on the lake, andas a result, by twisted logic, the restricted propertythere became some of the most sought after in the region.A. Q. Khan had pioneered the ground. Within a few yearsother houses had been built near his, perhaps a dozen inall, and each for the same reason—because of theextraordinary influence it took to get away with such apublic crime. Some of the builders were generals. Some wereKhan's associates from the secret laboratory. All of themderived additional glory from their proximity to thebeloved Khan.Then for Khan, in January of 2004, the good life camecrashing down. He was sixty-eight at the time. U.S. agentshad intercepted a German ship named the
BBC China
carryingparts for a Libyan nuclear-weapons-production program, andLibya, in subsequently renouncing its nuclear ambitions,had named Pakistan, and particularly the Khan ResearchLaboratories, as the supplier of what was to be a completestore-bought nuclear-weapons program. The price tag wassaid to be $100 million. At about the same time, it wasrevealed that the Pakistani-run network had providedinformation and nuclear-weapons components to Iran andNorth Korea, and had begun negotiations with a fourthcountry, perhaps Syria or Saudi Arabia. The currentdictator of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, denied anypersonal knowledge or governmental involvement, and withhis masters in Washington, D.C., looking sternly on,accused Khan of running a rogue operation, outside the law.It was theater of the diplomatic kind. But Musharraf was anunconvincing actor. In the context of Pakistan he might aswell have expressed surprise that Khan had built a house onthe shores of a drinking-water supply.
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IamAround

Bragon the Bat, you are illiterate and have absolutely no idea about decorum...so, keep away from people like me with an inherent sense of propriety and evolution...you are not an idiot but an unqualified imbecile...having said this, I will still answer your comment - downloading SOMETIMES does not work not because I allow it or not but because the system at Scribd is configured in a way that does

reply01 / 01 / 2010
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