February 12, 2004
DEMOCRATIC PRIORITIES:
A Tale of Nuclear Proliferation: How Pakistani Built His Network (WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID E. SANGER and RAYMOND BONNER. 2/12/04, NY Times)
[W]what has become clear in recent days is that Dr. Khan, a Pakistani national hero who began his rise 30 years ago by importing nuclear equipment to secretly build his country's atom bomb, gradually transformed himself into the largest and most sophisticated exporter in the nuclear black market."It was an astounding transformation when you think about it, something we've never seen before," said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence. "First, he exploits a fragmented market and develops a quite advanced nuclear arsenal. Then he throws the switch, reverses the flow and figures out how to sell the whole kit, right down to the bomb designs, to some of the world's worst governments."
The story of that transformation emerges from recent interviews on three continents — from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; from the streets of Dubai, where many of the deals were cut, to Washington and Vienna, where intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency struggled to understand and defuse the threat.
Taken together, they show how Dr. Khan assembled a far-reaching organization of scientists, engineers and business executives who operated on murky boundaries between the legal and the illegal, sometimes underground but often in plain view, unencumbered by international agreements that prohibit trafficking in nuclear technology.
Dr. Khan started in the mid-1980's, according to nuclear proliferation experts, by ordering twice the number of parts the Pakistani nuclear program needed, and then selling the excess to other countries, notably Iran.
Later, his network acquired another customer: North Korea, which was desperate for a more surreptitious way to build nuclear weapons after the United States had frozen the North's huge plutonium-production facilities in Yongbyon.
And in the end he moved on to Libya, his ultimate undoing, selling entire kits, from centrifuges to enrich uranium, to crude weapons designs. Investigators found the weapons blueprints wrapped in bags from an Islamabad dry cleaner.
As a result of the intelligence failure in Iraq, we removed a genocidal tyrant who'd developed and used WMD. As a result of the Pakistan intelligence failure, hostile regimes in Iran, North Korea, and Libya secured nuclear weapons technology and technical assistance. As a result of the former the world is a safer and better place, but there are calls for firings and a blue-ribbon panel to examine what went "wrong". As a result of the latter the world is less safe, our allies endangered, and the response from the Democrats is....
Thus does partisan politics take precedence over national security.
MORE:
Bush Proposes Strict Limits on Black Market Sale of Equipment to Make Nuclear Fuel: President Bush on Wednesday proposed a seven-point plan to make it far more difficult to sell nuclear equipment on the black market. (DAVID E. SANGER, 2/12/04, NY Times)