A.Q. Khan on Pakistan-China nuclear links

This is cross-posted from Rajesh Rajagopalan's blog, The Real World. Actually, this has been in the draft folder for some time. Apologies for the late post.


The Washington Post has an important story about A.Q. Khan, the nuclear blackmarketeer, and his dealings with China. But what is most critical is not what A.Q. Khan and the Pakistanis did, but what China did, and their motivations. As Hans Kristensen notes in the article, this is the only known case where a nuclear weapon state has transferred HEU to a non nuclear-weapon state for the explicit purpose of building nuclear weapons.

A.Q.Khan claims that the quid pro quo was the centrifuge technology for uranium enrichment that A.Q.Khan had stolen earlier from the URENCO facility in the Netherlands.

In 1994, Seymour Hersh had written about another deal: why the US bought at face value the absurd Pakistani government claim that the A.Q. Khan episode was a 'rogue operation' not sanctioned by the Pakistani government. Hersh had then reported that the deal was that in return for accepting the nonsensical story about A.Q. Khan, Pakistan would help the US in capturing Osama bin Laden. That sure worked out well.