Boston Herald November 28, 2004
Notorious Dr. Nuke
By Jules Crittenden
At the heart of a very real Axis of Evil is a scientist who puts up a humble front, despite his years of boasting about his nation's nuclear might, despite accusations that he is behind what experts say is the most dangerous proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the world has ever seen.
``I am the kindest man in Pakistan. I feel the ants in the morning. I feed the monkeys,'' Abdul Qadeer Khan told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, when his quarter-century of work to build a bomb for Pakistan finally came to fruition with a nuclear test blast.
That was before A.Q. Khan, as he is known, fell from grace last February, when he took personal responsibility for transferring nuclear secrets to pariah states Iran, Libya and North Korea - claiming he acted without his government's knowledge. Also suspected of aiding Iraq in the early 1990s, he is now under house arrest, but weapons experts say it remains unclear exactly where he sold his deadly knowledge, or whether a nebulous network remains in place that might put advanced weapons technology in the hands of terrorists.
``This guy was peddling nuclear technology under our noses for a decade,'' said James Walsh of Harvard University's Belfer Center. ``He did more damage in a decade than any other country did in 50 years.''
After stealing nuclear secrets from his Dutch employer in the early 1970s, he founded Pakistan's nuke program in 1976 in response to archenemy India's bid to build nuclear weapons. Nationally revered as the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, observers say his public standing even in humiliation is such that President Pervez Musharraf has been unwilling to let U.S. agents question him directly.
``He was larger than life, larger than anyone,'' said Professor Adil Najam of Tufts University's Fletcher School, who added that Khan's arrogance and self-promotion also earned him enemies in Pakistan.
But Najam and others say Khan may be protected in part because of the fears that high-placed officials who tolerated his schemes might be compromised.
``The notion that this was a freelance operation is ludicrous,'' said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.Org. ``If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. This was an operation on the scale of the Colombian drug cartels.''
Pike and others say the threat of Russian nuclear weapons and technology proliferation by comparison largely has been contained, and that Khan has emerged as the world's leading rogue proliferator.
``He really set up a brokerage firm,'' said Walsh, who said Khan supplied the blueprints and sometimes some of the bomb-making equipment, and is also known to have had sophisticated parts shipped from firms in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates. Even if Khan is genuinely out of business, Walsh said, ``The question is, what about the rest of the network? There is some concern the rest of this network has not been rolled up.''
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