Rogue Nuke Ways

The world’s first ‘Islamic bomb’ as Pakistan glorifies it, and the only one till date in the Islamic world, is turning out to be more and more spooky for none but the very owner. The father of that grandiose project, whose only function was to counter ‘Hindu’ India’s nuclear stride, seems determined to give an ironic twist to the murky saga through his journalistic contact Simon Henderson. AQ Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme and under house arrest since past few years on charges of abetting nuclear proliferation to Iran, North Korea and Libya, in a December 2003 letter to his wife Henny, now made public by Henderson, refers to the Pakistani establishment (read Army-ISI) as ‘‘bastards’’ and says that they ‘‘first used us and are now playing dirty games with us’’. Things would have been very different had Henny disclosed the contents of the letter six years ago. As Khan writes, the Pakistani establishment ‘‘might try to get rid of me to cover up all the things they got done by me’’. In fact, all these years, the Pakistan Army-ISI matrix has been successful in putting a neat cover about all the nuclear shenanigans committed through AQ Khan — especially by threatening to cause harm to his family when it came to the ISI’s knowledge that Khan had also sent copies of the December 2003 letter to his daughter in London and niece in Amsterdam. In other words, going by the AQ Khan letter, the Pakistani generals, regardless of civilian rule interspersed between military regimes, have used the very founder of their country’s nuclear programme to proliferate nuclear weapons and then worked out a crooked plan to force him to accept all the responsibilities for the illegal nuke spread. However, thanks to Henderson’s revelations, though after two years of receipt of the AQ Khan letter, we now know that Pakistan has helped China in uranium enrichment technology in return for nuclear bomb blueprints, that ‘‘probably with blessings of BB (Benazir Bhutto), General Imtiaz (Benazir’s defence advisor) asked me to give a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians’’, and that ‘‘a now retired general took $3 million through me from North Koreans and asked me to give drawings and machines’’. Pakistan’s nuclear record, of course, cannot be any better, given its desperation, provoked by India’s firm nuclear steps, to acquire the best of nuclear technology and bomb blueprints by effecting a clandestine nuclear trade where all would be beneficiaries in one way or the other.

What steps will the international community now take? It is time for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to prove itself by taking on the Pakistani nuclear monstrosity. The chief architects of the sinister nuclear proliferation structure, based in Pakistan, cannot be allowed to get away with such audacity as to defy all nuclear norms and imperil the world by making nuclear technology and weaponry a market commodity subject to best bargains. On his part, Henderson too should explain why he did not reveal the contents of the AQ Khan letter right after receiving it in 2007 or whether he has only been following Khan’s instructions and the timing of the revelations is Khan’s own choice. But will the real culprit, the ISI bosses — past and present — go scot-free even this time? This will be most defining. THE SENTINEL