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Afghanistan/South Asia
New light shed on Pakistan nuke sales
2005-03-21
U.S. nuclear investigators have determined the black market technology Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan was selling was far more detailed than first thought. While it has been more than a year since Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pardoned Khan, U.S. officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency have begun gleaning information from Khan's chief deputy, Buhari Sayed Abu Tahir, who is in jail in Malaysia.
You remember B.S.A. Tahir, he vanished into a "protective custody" black hole along with his family last year. I thought he was the key player most likely to cut a deal.
"It's becoming clearer to us that Khan was selling a complete package," a senior U.S. official told the New York Times. "Not a turnkey operation -- that would be overstating it -- but close to it." To investigators and other experts, the discovery that Khan was selling step-by-step directions for making crucial parts of a bomb was startling. "The real secrets are in the details of the metallurgy, the manufacturing and the engineering," said Siegfried Hecker, director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory from 1986 to 1997.
Khan is a metallurgist and an expert at making both centrifuges that enrich uranium and nuclear warheads. Investigators say that in the early 1980's, he obtained the detailed blueprints for a Chinese atomic bomb.
Posted by:Steve

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