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By Gordon Corera
A.Q. Khan was once the world's prime black industry broker in nuclear expertise, defined by means of a former CIA Director as "at least as risky as Osama bin Laden." A hero in Pakistan and respected because the Father of the Bomb, Khan outfitted a world clandestine community that offered the main heavily guarded nuclear secrets and techniques to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. the following for the 1st time is the riveting within tale of the increase and fall of A.Q. Khan and his function within the devastating unfold of nuclear know-how over the past thirty years. Drawing on unique interviews with key gamers in Islamabad, London, and Washington, in addition to with participants of Khan's personal community, BBC journalist Gordon Corera paints a really unsettling photo of the final word palms bazaar. Corera finds how Khan operated inside of an international of shadowy offers between rogue states and the way his privileged place in Pakistan supplied him with the safety to construct his specified and lethal company empire. It explains why and the way he used to be capable of function so freely for thus decades. Brimming with revelations, the booklet offers new perception into Iran's nuclear goals and the way shut Tehran could be to the bomb. additionally, the booklet comprises startling new details on how the CIA and MI6 penetrated Khan's community, how the U.S. and united kingdom eventually broke Khan's ring, and the way they persuaded Pakistan's President Musharraf to arrest a countrywide hero. The e-book additionally presents the 1st precise account of the high-wire dealings with Muammar Gadaffi, which ended in Libya's renunciation of nuclear guns and which performed a key position in Khan's downfall.The unfold of nuclear guns expertise around the world provides the best safety problem of our time. buying Bombs offers a distinct window into the demanding situations of preventing a brand new nuclear fingers race, a race that A.Q. Khan himself did greater than the other person to advertise.
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Additional resources for Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network
Example text
In January 1976, almost immediately after returning to Pakistan, Khan wrote saying he was sick and had to remain in bed but was missing the chicken and other food in Holland. 29 In another letter he asked Veerman to come to Pakistan on holiday, but Veerman became suspicious when Khan insisted that the Pakistani government pay for all the expenses and he declined. By the summer of 1976, Khan’s letters to Veerman (often passed on by hand via a visiting Pakistani scientist or someone from the embassy) began to ask for classified, highly specific technical information.
But it was convinced that any Pakistani nuclear weapons program would draw on plutonium not enriched uranium. There are two paths to developing nuclear weapons. One is developing fissile material for a bomb through uranium enrichment. The other involves reprocessing spent fuel from a nuclear power reactor to make a plutonium bomb. For this route, alongside a civilian nuclear reactor, all that’s needed is a specialist reprocessing plant to separate out the plutonium from the highly radioactive spent fuel rods—the plutonium can then either be used for a weapon or as further fuel for a reactor.
Suddenly, the program Bhutto had begun with such a flourish in 1972 acquired a real sense of urgency. It was no longer a mere option to be pursued, it was now an imperative. The test also had its impact on Abdul Qadeer Khan watching events from the Netherlands. It seems to have been the tipping point that led Khan to turn to atomic espionage and to make his skillful pitch in the letter to Bhutto a few months later. It was India’s test that made Khan’s offer so tempting to Pakistan’s leader. Khan’s entreaty caught the attention first of Bhutto’s military secretary who then handed it to the prime minister himself.