Posted on 04/11/2004 7:35:28 PM PDT by knighthawk
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.
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