US being forced to face Pak proliferation issue

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration is being forced to confront the A Q Khan nuclear proliferation issue in the final months of its term after it nearly succeeded in sweeping the scandal under the carpet because of Pakistan's perceived sensitivities that Washington felt would endanger the war on terror.

New revelations that nuclear smuggler A Q Khan was in possession of sophisticated Pakistani nuclear weapons design which he may have passed on unknown third countries or players has thrown the Washington establishment into a tizzy.

After ducking the Khan issue for years saying the proliferation network has been rolled up and buying into Pakistan's explanation that the matter is closed, an embarrassed Bush administration now finds that the genie is still outside the bottle.

The latest disclosures challenge Pakistan's eclipsed military ruler Pervez Musharraf's glib explanation that A Q Khan, a metallurgist, was untutored in the matter of nuclear weapons design, and his expertise was limited to centrifuges meant for enriching weapons-grade uranium. Khan's theft of centrifuges from the Dutch company Urenco in early 1970s enabled Islamabad to produce the nuclear bomb, an effort celebrated as a national achievement in Pakistan.

But it turns out that some of the computers from the Khan network examined over the last two years by western experts contained blueprints of sophisticated and compact nuclear weapons. The designs are better than that of the crude, first generation, 1960s-style nukes that Khan was thought to have passed on to Libya, which subsequently surrendered them to the US and exposed Pakistan's proliferation.

These designs are of a newer, compact weapon of the kind Pakistan tested in 1998, which can be mounted on missiles. Because the designs indicate a compact and miniaturized weapon, compared to the unwieldy design of the 1960s vintage found with the Libyans, US experts and officials are in frenzied speculation about whether the blueprint have been passed on to other third parties, including the Bush administration's current bogey Iran.

Iran, like Pakistan, possesses missiles that could be mounted with such compact nuclear warheads, a prospect that freaks out the US, Israel, and other countries in the region. Also, smaller the nuclear weapons, more easy it is for them to be smuggled by terrorist networks.

The Bush administration has been almost blasé in recent months about the Khan proliferation network, believing it had all but wrapped up the issue. But the fresh disclosures that surfaced this weekend in the US media, along with reports that the civilian government in Pakistan had lifted some of the restrictions on Khan, has come as a wake-up call to an administration that is fading away.

Courtesy:timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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