New Evidence Suggests the Leader of the World’s Largest Known Nuclear Black Market Was Selling Weapon Designs as well as Technology

By JEFF EMANUEL
June 20, 2008

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program,” ran Pakistan’s uranium centrifuge enrichment program in the 1980s and ‘90s. He was also ringleader of the largest nuclear black market that has been discovered to date -- an operation so large that its full scope is still not entirely known.

Reportedly among the terabytes of files seized from members of the smuggling ring, which took years to sift through, was a “detailed design for an advanced but small nuclear warhead.” Former United Nations arms inspector David Albright said the design “goes far beyond the schematics and information about nuclear weapons available on the Internet.”

“It's a very different category of information, and it's very dangerous,” Albright said in a Monday interview. “There are no other designs out there. There is very little information of this quality out there outside of the nuclear weapons states.”

Khan has denied selling an advanced weapons design in recent comments to media; however, a senior IAEA official was anonymously quoted by the Associate Press as saying that the watchdog organization “had knowledge of the existence of a sophisticated nuclear weapons design being peddled electronically by the black-market ring as far back as 2005.”

A Black Market more Widespread than Ever Imagined

The idea that rogue individuals could obtain nuclear technology, radioactive material, and the technological know-how necessary to assemble and employ weapons of mass destruction has long been on the radar screen of the public, particularly since 9/11. However, estimates of just how widespread such a network could actually become before being discovered and penetrated proved, with the 2004 cracking of Khan’s proliferation network, to be far more conservative than reality.

In 2003, while investigating Iran and Libya’s divergent proliferation intentions, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stumbled onto Khan’s illegal network (three years after the U.S. had learned of it and begun to penetrate its operations) and, like the sweater thread that, when pulled, begins the great unraveling, further and further revelations came to light regarding the nuclear black market as more digging was done into its workings.

Perhaps the biggest intelligence coup for authorities trying to track Khan’s proliferation activities came as the direct result of a policy known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, or PSI. Developed by John Bolton (then the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security) and implemented by the Bush administration in May 2003, the PSI is an initiative that “seeks to coordinate governmental nonproliferation activities around the world in the face of advanced communications technologies and expanding global trade that have facilitated the smuggling of WMD.”

A Coup for the Bush Administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative

Established under the authority of UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (a “Section VII resolution,” meaning that it is supposedly legally binding upon all UN member-nations), which currently “obliges member states to take action to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, particularly by nonstate actors, through strengthened border controls, better export controls, and other domestic laws,” the PSI consists of a Statement of Principles adopted by more than 70 nations for the purpose of preventing the proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, these nations “are encouraged, not required, to commit to a, to strengthen and enforce their own nonproliferation laws, and to participate in training activities and actual interdiction operations.”

The primary tool used by PSI-supporting nations to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is shipment interdiction, often conducted by boarding (or forcing into friendly port) ships suspected of carrying WMD materials – a tactic that proved very effective in the unraveling of the Khan network.

In October 2003, a German-owned ship bound for Libya (and interestingly named “The China”), believed by U.S. and British intelligence to be carrying illegal cargo, was forced into Italian port and inspected – a legal activity, as all four of the involved nations, including the one under whose flag the suspect ship was sailing, were PSI supporters.

In the hold, authorities found uranium-enrichment gas-centrifuge components that Khan was sending to Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan regime. This seizure “helped unravel the Khan network and was a major factor in negotiating the forfeiture of Libya's WMD programs.”

“The Wal-Mart of Private Proliferation”

Further investigation revealed the breathtaking scope of an illegal nuclear trafficking network which IAEA director general Mohammed El-Baradei called “the Wal-Mart of private proliferation.”

“When you see things being designed in one country, manufactured in two or three others, shipped to a fourth, redirected to a fifth, that means there’s lots of offices all over the world,” El-Baradei said. “The sophistication of the process, frankly, has exceeded my expectations.”

The Khan network was eventually revealed to have provided “blueprints, technical design data, specifications, components, machinery, enrichment equipment, models, and notes on…centrifuges,” as well as uranium hexafluoride (the gas that the centrifuge process can transform into enriched uranium for nuclear bombs) and, occasionally, completed centrifuges through transit points and middlemen in nearly thirty countries, including Dubai, Germany, Malaysia, South Africa, Turkey, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Among the states and organizations revealed to have received nuclear technology and equipment from Khan are Libya, North Korea, and Iran, which has consistently denied an intent to manufacture nuclear weapons while declaring on an almost weekly basis their objective of wiping the tiny nearby state of Israel “off the map.” Further, many experts still suspect that al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan obtained similar assistance before the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Further, according to new reports, Khan may also have provided rogue states or individual actors with “electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon.”

As mentioned above, how much or how little the Pakistani government actually knew of Khan’s actions is still a subject of debate. In 2004, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf “forced Khan to issue a vague confession” of his proliferation activities – which he asserted were carried out with no governmental sanction or knowledge – before placing him under “loose house arrest,” but refused to allow UN or U.S. officials to question him (protection that exists to this day). Khan “has since renounced that confession in Pakistani and Western media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan greater embarrassment.” A recently-released book claiming that former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment to North Korea (and smuggled missile information back) while on a 1993 state visit has helped reignite speculation that Khan was at least partly acting under the auspices of the Pakistani government in his proliferation activities.

No Single Solution

Just as there is no single profile of a proliferating nation or organization, there is no single solution to the problem that is nuclear proliferation. Rings like that run by A.Q. Khan have been able to thrive in the past due to the combination of loopholes in export control regimes and a wealth of clients who were willing to defy the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that supposedly governs the spread and use of nuclear technology.

In order to curb proliferation, at the very least, these loopholes must be closed, and demand-side issues must be addressed, with the ultimate goal not only of making nuclear materiel unavailable to potential proliferators, but also of convincing those nations and organizations which would be potential buyers in the nuclear weapons market that their best interests lie elsewhere. Above all, those nations which actively pursue such technology – or who harbor groups that do so – should not be appeased or ignored; rather, they should be assured that, should they proceed down their current exceedingly dangerous path, the proverbial stick with which they are swatted will be of far greater consequence than the benefit they would gain from ignoring the international nonproliferation regime and continuing to work toward nuclear weapons acquisition.

The possible shopping of an advanced weapon design by a state (or rogue) actor to regimes like those in Tehran, Pyongyang, and pre-2001 Kandahar is chilling – especially given the aggressive rhetoric constantly emanating from the respective leaders of those capitals – and nations like the U.S. who are in a position to lead on the issue of counterterrorism and nonproliferation should be spurred into further action by the continued revelations of the Khan network’s scope.

Jeff Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a columnist, a combat journalist, a Director Emeritus of conservative weblog RedState.com, and a former leadership fellow with the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security. His writings can be seen at www.JeffEmanuel.net.