By Jonathan Power
Whenever I introduced Munir Khan to a friend I would say light-heartedly “and this is the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”—just to enjoy the pleasure of watching the reaction. Khan himself would give a self-deprecatory smile. As Hans Blix, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear policeman, once put it to me, Khan was “a cheerful soul.”
The world has been told over and over again that the father of the Pakistani bomb was A. Q. (Qadeer) Khan, the famous metallurgist. But he, in fact, ran only one part of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, which Munir Khan chaired. More correctly, we have been told that Qadeer Khan secretly set up an international network to supply the likes of North Korea, Libya, and Iran with blueprints and materials for the manufacture of their own nuclear weapons. This was done for his private profit.
Just over one week ago, after five years of house arrest for this offense, Pakistan’s top court restored his freedom.
Khan and Khan. Too many got the two men muddled. This worked in Qadeer’s favor. He was a man who had no compunction about claiming every bit of credit for himself and who loved to woo gullible journalists and parliamentarians with his tales of achievement. No wonder that when he was finally exposed as a nuclear racketeer five years ago, President Pervez Musharraf couldn’t have him formally arrested and tried. Musharraf, in fact, pardoned him for his alleged crimes. Qadeer—a popular icon in Pakistan—was untouchable.
A long and well-researched article by M. A. Chaudri that appeared in the Pakistani Defense Journal, two years ago usefully drew back the curtain on the precise roles of these two men. Both foreigners and Pakistanis, he writes, “have failed to understand the underlying efforts under Munir Khan and his team of world class nuclear scientists and engineers. They developed and led the entire nuclear weapons program including uranium mining for the bomb itself, and all related nuclear facilities, training institutions and technologies and the development of the complete nuclear fuel cycle and the still largely unknown plutonium program.”
Munir was a friend of Zulifikar Bhutto and the two of them tried unsuccessfully to persuade President Ayub Khan to build a bomb. When Bhutto became president in 1971 he made his famous remark, “we shall eat grass if necessary but build the atomic bomb.” Munir was given the green light.
Munir had been on the staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency since 1958, head of the reactor engineering division. He developed extensive international contacts and was rich in managerial and scientific experience. It was he who pushed for the refinement of domestic uranium and persuaded the French to train his scientists in enrichment know-how.
Munir later recruited Qadeer, who brought to Pakistan the drawings of centrifuge designs he had purloined from the Dutch company for which he worked. But developing these designs to enable the successful enriching of uranium was a complicated and complex process which depended on the expertise Munir had assembled in Pakistan.
All along the pathologically ambitious Qadeer was working to undermine Munir. According to Chaudri, he paid Pakistani journalists to accuse Munir of being unpatriotic and a member of the outlawed Qadiani sect. (Earlier, the Nobel-prize winning physicist, Abdus Salem, had been driven out of Pakistan by a similar campaign.)
After the coup by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and the hanging of Bhutto, Munir’s grip was loosened. Zia, seeing Munir as a friend of Bhutto, allowed Qadeer to build up his image. Qadeer was willing, as Munir was not, to trumpet the idea of an “Islamic bomb.”
Munir, self-effacing to a fault, later confessed that he should have fought off Qadeer’s grab for fame. Nevertheless, Munir still held the reins when, in 1983, Pakistan reached an historic milestone—a secret “cold test” of the bomb. (A cold test is the actual detonation of a complete bomb but, instead of enriched uranium in the middle of the bomb, natural uranium is substituted.)
So only nine years after India’s “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but 15 years before it came into the open with a full nuclear test—Pakistan had its bomb.
Munir retired from the chairmanship of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission seven years before Pakistan went public with the bomb. He died in 1999, and in his later years he tried to persuade successive presidents that Qadeer was selling Pakistan’s know-how for profit. But by then Qadeer was simply too powerful to move against.
Munir himself was no saint. He was actually chairman of the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1986 to 1987. While chairman of the world’s nuclear policing authority, back home he was engaged in subverting it. Presumably earlier—when he had been an important staff member—he was building up the contacts and knowledge he later milked to build the bomb at home.
Pakistan’s nuclear scientists and the politicians who sponsored them duped the world many times over. Nothing suggests that the intrigue and the disinformation campaigns won’t continue; it’s now part of the culture of Pakistan’s military establishment—and the politicians and journalists who associate with them.
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Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).