Abdul Qadeer Khan

A.Q. Khan • A. Q. Khan • “father of the Pakistani bomb” • Abdul Qadir Khan • Abdul Kadir Khan • Abdul Qadeer Khan

Abdul Qadeer Khan (1 April 1936 – 10 October 2021) was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer. He is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program". A Muhajir emigrant from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase...

Abdul Qadeer Khan (1 April 1936 – 10 October 2021) was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer. He is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program". A Muhajir emigrant from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase transitions of metallic alloys, uranium metallurgy, and isotope separation based on gas centrifuges. After learning of India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974, Khan joined his nation's clandestine efforts to develop atomic weapons when he founded the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976 and was both its chief scientist and director for many years. In January 2004, Khan was subjected to a debriefing by the Musharraf administration over evidence of nuclear proliferation handed to them by the Bush administration of the United States. Khan admitted his role in running a nuclear proliferation network – only to retract his statements in later years when he leveled accusations at the former administration of Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1990, and also directed allegations at President Musharraf over the controversy in 2008. Khan was accused of selling nuclear secrets illegally and was put under house arrest in 2004. After years of house arrest, Khan successfully filed a lawsuit against the Government of Pakistan at the Islamabad High Court whose verdict declared his debriefing unconstitutional and freed him from house arrest on 6 February 2009. The United States reacted negatively to the verdict and the Obama administration issued an official statement warning that Khan still remained a "serious proliferation risk". On account of the knowledge of nuclear espionage by Khan and his contribution to nuclear proliferation throughout the world post-1970s, and the renewed fear of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists after the September 11 attacks, former CIA Director George Tenet described Khan as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden". After his death on 10 October 2021, he was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque before being buried at the H-8 graveyard in Islamabad. Early life and education Abdul Qadeer Khan was born on 1 April 1936, in Bhopal, a city in the erstwhile British Indian princely state of Bhopal. He was a Muhajir of Urdu-speaking origin. Khan provided conflicting details regarding his family background. While addressing a convocation in 2019, he stated that he belonged to a Pashtun-Orakzai family long settled in Bhopal; he also wrote at another occasion in Jang that his maternal lineage was from Tirah Valley while from his paternal side, his ancestor was an Uzbek soldier who came to India with Muhammad of Ghor, the 12th century conqueror; this ancestral link inspired Khan to later name a ballistic missile the Ghauri. In 1994–95, Khan would have a mausoleum built over the grave of Muhammad Ghori situated in Dhamiak village around 80 kilometres from Islamabad. At a 2014 event marking the publishing of a book on the history of Khanzada Rajputs, Abdul Qadeer Khan asserted that he belonged to Khanzada community although his family adopted the surname "Khan" instead of "Khanzada". His father, Abdul Ghafoor, was a schoolteacher who once worked for the Ministry of Education, and his mother, Zulekha, was a housewife with a very religious mindset. His older siblings, along with other family members, had emigrated to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947, who would often write to Khan's parents about the new life they had found in Pakistan. After his matriculation from a local school in Bhopal, in 1952 Khan emigrated from India to Pakistan on the Sind Mail train, partly due to the reservation politics at that time, and religious violence in India during his youth had left an indelible impression on his world view. Upon settling in Karachi with his family, Khan briefly attended the D. J. Science College before transferring to the University of Karachi, where he graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in physics with a concentration on solid-state physics. From 1956 to 1959, Khan was employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (city government) as an inspector of weights and measures. During this time, he applied for a scholarship that allowed him to study in West Germany. In 1961, Khan departed for West Germany to study material science at the Technical University in West Berlin, where he academically excelled in courses in metallurgy, but left West Berlin when he switched to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1965. In 1967, Khan obtained an engineer's degree in materials technology – an equivalent to a Master of Science (MS) offered in English-speaking nations such as Pakistan – and joined the doctoral program in metallurgical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He worked under Belgian professor Martin J. Brabers at Leuven University, who supervised his doctoral thesis which Khan successfully defended, and graduated with a DEng in metallurgical engineering in 1972. His thesis included fundamental work on martensite, and its extended industrial applications in the field of graphene morphology. Career in Europe In 1972, Khan joined the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory (or in Dutch: FDO), an engineering firm subsidiary of Verenigde Machinefabrieken (VMF) based in Amsterdam, from Brabers's recommendation. The FDO was a subcontractor for Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland of the British-German-Dutch uranium enrichment consortium, URENCO Group, which was operating an uranium enrichment plant in Almelo, and employed gaseous centrifuge method to assure a supply of nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants in the Netherlands. Soon after, Khan left FDO, but was consequently offered a senior technical position by URENCO, initially conducting studies on uranium metallurgy. Uranium enrichment is an extremely difficult process because uranium in its natural state is composed of just 0.71% of uranium-235 (U235), which is a fissile material, 99.3% of uranium-238 (U238), which is non-fissile, and 0.0055% of uranium-234 (U234), a daughter product which is also a non-fissile. The URENCO Group utilised the Zippe-type of centrifugal method to electromagnetically separate the isotopes U234, U235, and U238 from sublimed raw uranium by rotating the uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas at up to ~100,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). Khan, whose work was based on physical metallurgy of the uranium metal, eventually dedicated his investigations to improving the efficiency of the centrifuges by 1973–74. Frits Veerman, Khan's colleague at FDO, uncovered nuclear espionage at Almelo where Khan had stolen designs of the centrifuges from URENCO for the nuclear weapons programme of Pakistan. Veerman became aware of the espionage when Khan had taken classified URENCO documents home to be copied and translated by his Dutch-speaking wife and had asked Veerman to photograph some of them. In 1975, Khan was transferred to a less sensitive section when URENCO became suspicious and he subsequently returned to Pakistan with his wife and two daughters. Khan was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison in 1983 by the Netherlands for espionage, but the conviction was later overturned due to a legal technicality. Ruud Lubbers, Prime Minister of the Netherlands at the time, later said that the General Intelligence and Security Service (BVD) was aware of Khan's espionage activities, but he was allowed to continue due to pressure from the CIA; with the US backing Pakistan during the Cold War. This was also highlighted when despite Archie Pervez (Khan's associate for nuclear procurement in the US) being convicted in 1988, no action was taken against Khan or his proliferation network by the US government which needed the support of Pakistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. Henk Slebos, a Dutch engineer and businessman, who had studied metallurgy with Khan at the Delft University of Technology, continued providing goods needed for enriching uranium to Khan in Pakistan through his company Slebos Research. Slebos was sentenced in 1985 to one year in prison, but the sentence was reduced on appeal in 1986 to six months of probation and a fine of 20,000 guilders. Though Slebos continued to export goods to Pakistan, and was again sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of around €100,000 was imposed on his company. Ernst Piffl was convicted and sentenced to three and a half years in prison by Germany in 1998 for supplying nuclear centrifuge parts through his company Team GmbH to Khan's Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta. Asher Karni, a Hungarian-South African businessman, was sentenced to three years in prison in the US for the sale of restricted nuclear equipment to Pakistan through Humayun Khan (an associate of Khan) and his Pakland PME Corporation. Scientific career in Pakistan Smiling Buddha and initiation Upon learning of India's surprise nuclear test, 'Smiling Buddha', in May 1974, Khan wanted to contribute to efforts to build an atomic bomb and met with officials at the Pakistani Embassy in The Hague, who dissuaded him by saying it was "hard to find" a job in PAEC as a "metallurgist". In August 1974, Khan wrote a letter which went unnoticed, but he directed another letter through the Pakistani ambassador to the Prime Minister's Secretariat in September 1974. Unbeknownst to Khan, his nation's scientists were already working towards feasibility of the atomic bomb under a secretive crash weapons program since 20 January 1972 that was being directed by Munir Ahmad Khan, a reactor physicist, which calls into question of his "father-of" claim. After reading his letter, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had his military secretary run a security check on Khan, who was unknown at that time, for verification and asked PAEC to dispatch a team under Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood that met Khan at his family home in Almelo and forwarded Bhutto's letter which instructed Qadeer Khan to meet the Prime Minister in Islamabad. Upon arriving in December 1974, Khan took a taxi straight to the Prime Minister's Secretariat. He met with Prime Minister Bhutto in the presence of Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Agha Shahi, and Mubashir Hassan where he explained the significance of highly enriched uranium, with the meeting ending with Bhutto's remark: "He seems to make sense." The next day, Khan met with Munir Ahmad and other senior scientists where he focused the discussion on production of highly enriched uranium (HEU), against weapon-grade plutonium, and explained to Bhutto why he thought the idea of "plutonium" would not work. Later, Khan was advised by several officials in the Bhutto administration to remain in the Netherlands to learn more about centrifuge technology but continue to provide consultation on the Project-706 enrichment program led by Mahmood. By December 1975, Khan was given a transfer to a less sensitive section when URENCO became suspicious of his indiscreet open sessions with Mahmood to instruct him on centrifuge technology. Khan began to fear for his safety in the Netherlands, ultimately insisting on returning home. Khan Research Laboratories and atomic bomb program In April 1976, Khan joined the atomic bomb program and became part of the enrichment division, initially collaborating with Khalil Qureshi – a physical chemist. Calculations performed by him were invaluable contributions to centrifuges and a vital link to nuclear weapon research, but continue to push for his ideas for feasibility of weapon-grade uranium even though it had a low priority, with most efforts still aimed to produce military-grade plutonium. Because of his interest in uranium metallurgy and his frustration at having been passed over for director of the uranium division (the job was instead given to Bashiruddin Mahmood), Khan refused to engage in further calculation