Nuclear smuggling

Decoding the truth behind Pakistan’s A-bomb

In February 2004, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, AQ Khan, confessed on television he had been running a nuclear smuggling ring. Hassan Abbas, then part of Islamabad’s anti-corruption investigation body, was asked to investigate. He abandoned the effort as being beyond his organisation’s paygrade, though not before gaining some access to scientists involved in Pakistan’s nuclear programme. That experience, plus a careful reading of the existing literature, is brought together in an interesting but inevitably incomplete volume.

There are two schools of thought regarding AQ Khan, Abbas writes. One argues that Khan’s covert nuclear deals with various international undesirables were rogue operations. Proponents of this theory “contend there is scant evidence to support the allegation of state authorisation”. Unsurprisingly this represents the conclusion of all official investigations into Khan’s activities. The other school argues Khan exploited the spaces created by conflict between different Pakistani state bodies over the A-bomb, co-opting specific policy-makers at different times. After delivering the bomb to Pakistan, Khan simply gamed the system.