Khan's Black Market Seen as Offering Deepest Secrets of Building Bomb

New York Times:
Pakistani's Nuclear Black Market Seen as Offering Deepest Secrets of Building Bomb
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: March 21, 2005


Nuclear investigators from the United States and other nations now believe that the black market network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan was selling not only technology for enriching nuclear fuel and blueprints for nuclear weapons, but also some of the darkest of the bomb makers' arts: the hard-to-master engineering secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

Their suspicions were initially raised by the discovery of step-by-step instructions, some of which appear to have come from China and Pakistan, among the documents recovered last year from Libya. More recently, investigators have found that the Khan network had offered similar materials to Iran.

The secrets range from how to cast uranium metal into the form needed at the core of a bomb to how to build the explosive lenses that compress the core and start the detonation.

The discoveries have set off a debate in the intelligence community about whether those technological skills made their way to North Korea and Iran. President Bush has vowed he will not tolerate either country's obtaining a nuclear weapon....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/international/asia/21nukes.html

From the new World Media Watch up now at http://www.zianet.com/insightanalytical


4//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong Mar 19, 2005

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GC19Df03.html



US NOT FINISHED WITH PAKISTAN YET

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The United States is exerting maximum pressure on Pakistan to provide a detailed and "authentic" list of all of its nuclear cooperation with Iran over the years.

Contacts in the highest echelon of Pakistan's strategic quarters tell Asia Times Online that during her visit to Islamabad on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appraised Pakistan of the latest - and strong - US demands.

Many in the Bush administration believe that Iran's nuclear energy program is a smokescreen for developing nuclear weapons. Tehran has agreed with the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it will temporarily suspend its uranium enrichment program.

Last week, Pakistan publicly admitted that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the mastermind of the country's nuclear program, had given centrifuges - rather than just blueprints - to Iran as part of a package of materials that could be used to make a nuclear bomb, but only in "his personal capacity". Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium.

Now the US wants hard evidence of this and all of Pakistan's other dealings so that it can build its case against Iran. This will include full scrutiny of Pakistan's nuclear program, especially from the late 1980s until the early 1990s, when Pakistan developed the nuclear device, which it eventually tested in 1998.

Importantly, and to the consternation of Pakistan, the US demand includes direct access and interrogation of Pakistan's former chief of army staff, General Aslam Beg, who has on many occasions openly endorsed nuclear cooperation with Iran, former president Ghulam Ishaq Khan (August 17, 1988 until July 18, 1993) and Dr Khan.

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filthy neo-con paws all over this.

From the transfer of this technology?

Follow the money. It will lead there. Eventually.