21 Sep 2009, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: A Q Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, has gone public with what the world at large had always suspected — that his efforts to help out North Korea, Iran and China in building their capabilities had the backing of the Pakistani government and army.
Pakistan has all along denied that it had abetted Khan’s project, maintaining that he was doing it all alone, but the latest revelations are certain to make its claims suspect in the eyes of the US and other western nations. Khan writes about the Pakistani leadership in a December 2003 letter to his wife Henny that has finally been made public by an interlocutor. The interlocutor is a journalist contact by the name of Siman Henderson. He has now made the letters public.
“The b******* first used us and are now playing dirty games with us. If the government plays any mischief with me, I’ll take a tough stand. They might try to get rid of me to cover up all the things they got done by me,” Mr Khan writes about the Pakistani leadership. The letter was exposed by Henderson in The Sunday Times.
Describing the four-page letter as “extraordinary”, Henderson says in numbered paragraphs, it outlines Pakistan’s nuclear co-operation with China, Iran and North Korea, and also mentions Libya. Some of the disclosures are stunning, and in one para that is bound to embarrass Beijing, besides implicating it, Khan writes about how Pakistan helped China in enrichment technology in return for bomb blueprints. “We put up a centrifuge plant at Hanzhong (250 km southwest of Xian). The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us 50 kg of enriched uranium, gave us 10 tonnes of UF6 (natural) and 5 tons of UF6 (3%),” says Khan.
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