Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
Ties between Libya and Pakistan went back to 1973, when Pakistan
had just started its nuclear weapons programme. Libyan leader
Muammar Qaddafi agreed to finance Pakistan’s nuclear efforts in
exchange for knowledge about how to make nuclear fuel. Libya is
reported to have supplied Pakistan with uranium from 1978 to 1980.
But Tripoli did not receive any significant help from Pakistan during
that period. The transfer of nuclear materials started much later. Libya
contacted Dr Khan in 1997 for help in building centrifuges. He held
a series of meetings with Libyan officials starting that year and lasting
until 2002. The deals were made in Dubai, Istanbul and Casablanca
between 1988 and 2001. 40 In exchange for cash transfers to his bank
account in the Gulf, Dr Khan helped Libya establish contact with
black-market networks. The network Dr Khan had built involved a
Malaysian engineering firm and middlemen from Germany. Abu Tahir
who was the controlling shareholder in Gulf Technical Industries, a
Dubai-based enterprise, would receive the centrifuge shipment from
Malaysia, then load them onto a German ship to send to Libya. Until
2003, Libya had received network centrifuge equipment used for the
enrichment of uranium and blueprints for making a nuclear bomb,
together with a shipment of 1.5 tonnes of hexafluoride gas from Dr
Khan’s network.
Libya had reportedly paid $100 million to acquire nuclear
components from Pakistan and a variety of black-market dealers in
The Netherlands, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The enriched uranium
was sent from Pakistan to Libya on a Pakistani airliner around 2001,
and ‘a certain number of centrifuge units’ were sent in 2001–2002.
By that time, Musharraf was already in power. Documents handed
over by Libya to the IAEA revealed that the country had received
old Chinese designs for a workable nuclear bomb that had been
passed to Pakistan in the late 1970s. The blueprints for a ten-kiloton
atomic bomb discovered in Libya were wrapped in plastic bags from
the tailoring shop in Islamabad that had stitched Dr Khan’s suits. 41
The discovery brought to the focus the audacity of Dr Khan’s rogue
nuclear network.
The documents from Libya and Iran showed that the Khan network
had offered to sell instructions on such complex manufacturing steps
as purifying uranium, casting it into a nuclear core and making the
explosives that compress the core and set off a chain reaction. Unlike
the bomb designs themselves, these manufacturing secrets can take
years or even decades for a country to learn on its own. The critical