'Islamic bomb': The secret Pakistani scheme to make Iran a nuclear power

Are these bastards God-appointed guardians of the world? So said Abdul Qadeer Khan, the godfather of Pakistan's nuclear programme, when asked to justify his international network aimed at giving nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. One of the biggest US-Israeli justifications for their war on Iran over the past six weeks has been to stop the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons. Israel is widely known to have nuclear weapons, although it has never admitted this publicly. Back in the 1980s, Israel tried and failed to stop another Muslim-majority country from obtaining the bomb: Pakistan. The man most crucial to Pakistan's successful nuclear programme, known in his country as AQ Khan, did not simply aim to make his own country a nuclear power. Under surveillance by Israeli spies, Khan aimed to challenge the United States and the West by helping other countries, Iran among them, with their own programmes. Former CIA director George Tenet later judged him at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden and ex-Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit regretted not killing him. Of the countries Khan assisted, only North Korea became a nuclear power. In the early 2000s, Iran's programme was exposed and destroyed. The story of how the Pakistani scientist got the Iranians so close is extraordinary. 'Key to our national survival' Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, twice Pakistan's prime minister in the 70s, masterminded his country's nuclear programme. We were not building a bomb, Munir Ahmad Khan, who oversaw the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission under Bhutto's direction, later reflected. We were building a deterrent. Bhutto decided to build a bomb after India tested its first nuclear weapon, codenamed Smiling Buddha, on 18 May 1974. We will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, Bhutto vowed, but we will get one of our own. There was, he said, “a Christian bomb, a Jewish bomb and now a Hindu bomb. Why not an Islamic bomb?” He saw the project as existential for the country. The bomb is not just a weapon, he proclaimed. It is the very key to our national survival. Pakistani PM Bhutto (3rd R) with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi (2nd), Bangladeshi PM Mujibur Rahman (2nd L) and PLO President Yasser Arafat (L) at the Islamic Summit Conference in 1974 (AFP) The man who would build that key, AQ Khan, was in 1974 working for a subcontractor of a major nuclear fuel company, Urenco, in Amsterdam. The company supplied enriched uranium fuel for European nuclear reactors. Khan had access to top-secret areas of the Urenco facility and blueprints of the world’s best centrifuges, which enriched natural uranium and turned it into bomb fuel. He sent a handwritten letter to Pakistan, addressed to Bhutto, saying: I have acquired very detailed and comprehensive knowledge of the gas centrifuge system and am now in a position to help Pakistan... This is a matter of utmost urgency. He later said that he wrote the letter with full awareness that I could be arrested or killed. But I felt I had no choice. India had tested. We had to respond. 'I promised it. I kept that promise' Khan has been accused of having stolen a blueprint for uranium centrifuges, which can turn uranium into weapons-grade fuel, from the Netherlands. In July 1976 he set up a research laboratory in Rawalpindi which produced enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Despite Indian and Israeli opposition, China provided the Pakistanis with enriched uranium, tritium and even scientists. US President Jimmy Carter cut aid to Islamabad in April 1979 in response to its programme being exposed, but then reversed the decision months later when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan: America would need the help of neighbouring Pakistan. In the 1980s, the US covertly gave Pakistani nuclear scientists technical training and turned a blind eye to its programme. 'I felt I had no choice. India had tested. We had to respond' - AQ Khan But everything changed with the end of the Cold War. In October 1990, the US halted economic and military aid to Pakistan in protest against the nuclear programme. Pakistan then said it would stop developing nuclear weapons. AQ Khan later revealed, though, that the production of highly enriched uranium secretly continued. On 11 May 1998, India tested its nuclear warheads. Pakistan then successfully tested its own in the Balochistan desert later that month. It had become the world’s seventh nuclear power. I told Bhutto Sahib we would get the bomb, Khan said. I promised it. I kept that promise. The Iranian programme But throughout this time, Khan was running another, even more daring programme: an international nuclear network that sent technology and designs to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran's programme for peaceful nuclear power received western backing, but this vanished once the shah was removed. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the nuclear bomb, saying it violated Islam. But behind closed doors in the 1980s, the Iranian government approached Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, for help. We had talks with the Pakistanis, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Iranian president between 1989 and 1997, revealed in 2015. We were at war, and we wanted to have such an option for the day our enemies wanted to use nuclear weapons. This was our state of mind. Iranian former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani arrives for a press conference at the interior ministry in Tehran on 21 December 2015 (AFP) Abdul Qadeer Khan believed that the Islamic world had to have a nuclear bomb, Rafsanjani recalled. It was agreed that they [Pakistan] should help us a bit - for example, by delivering second-hand first-generation centrifuges, along with some designs - so that we could build it ourselves. Gradually, we started the work... The Pakistanis gave us 4,000 second-hand first-generation centrifuges, along with designs. The Israeli sabotage attempt The fiercest opposition to Pakistan came from Israel. The Israelis didn’t want a Muslim country to have the bomb, according to Feroz Khan, a former official in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. In the early 1980s, Israel proposed to India that the two collaborate to bomb and destroy Pakistan’s nuclear facility at Kahuta in Pakistan’s Rawalpindi district. How Pakistan positioned itself at the centre of global crisis management Read More » Then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi approved the strike. A plan developed for Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighterjets to take off from the Jamnagar airbase in India’s Gujarat and launch strikes on the facility. But Gandhi later backed out and the plan was shelved. Meanwhile, Khan was ordering double the number of parts the Pakistani nuclear programme required and then secretly selling the excess on. By this point, Khan was known in Pakistani military circles variously as the Invisible General, Dr AQQ, Father of the Bomb and Mohsin-e-Pakistan (Saviour of Pakistan). Between 1986 and 2001, Pakistan gave Iran key components it needed. A Mossad chief's lament The Mossad had Khan under surveillance as he travelled around the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s, but failed to work out what the scientist was doing. Then-Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit later said that if he had realised Khan’s intentions, he would have considered ordering him to be assassinated to change the course of history. The Pakistani military kept civilian governments in the dark about Khan's international efforts. Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter, was not told a word about a nuclear technology-sharing programme with Iran by her generals. She only found out about it in 1989 by accident - in Tehran. Rafsanjani asked her whether they could reaffirm the two countries’ agreement on special defence matters. What exactly are you talking about, Mr President? asked Bhutto, confused. Nuclear technology, Madam Prime Minister, nuclear technology, replied the Iranian president. Bhutto was stunned. Six Iranian scientists were reportedly trained in Pakistan, at the Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology in Islamabad and the Nuclear Studies Institute. There have also been claims that Khan himself visited the Iranian reactor at Bushehr in February 1986 and in January 1987, which the scientist denied. Between 1989 and 1995, Khan is believed to have shipped over 2,000 components and sub-assemblies for centrifuges to Iran. 'An astounding transformation' In 2003, the whole operation came crashing down. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi blew Khan’s operation while attempting to win support from the US. From the Balkans to Bengal: How Persian culture has left an imprint around the globe Read More » Gaddafi disclosed to the CIA and MI6 that Khan was building nuclear sites for his government - some of which were disguised as chicken farms. The CIA seized machinery bound for Libya as it was being smuggled through the Suez Canal. Investigators found weapons blueprints in bags from an Islamabad dry cleaner. When the operation was exposed, the Americans were horrified. It was an astounding transformation when you think about it, something we've never seen before, a senior American official told the New York Times. First, [Khan] exploits a fragmented market and develops a quite advanced nuclear arsenal. Then he throws the switch, reverses the flow and figures out how to sell the whole kit, right down to the bomb designs, to some of the world's worst governments. The confessions of AQ Khan In 2004, Khan confessed to running the nuclear proliferation network, saying he had provided Iran, Libya and North Korea with nuclear technology. That February, he appeared on television and insisted he had acted alone, with no support from the Pakistani government, which then swiftly pardoned him. Later, Khan reflected that he saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself. Under intense international pressure, in 2005 Iran agreed to develop peaceful nuclear power under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Then in 2015, Iran signed a nuclear agreement with the US, China, France, Germany and Russia, accepting severe restrictions on its civil nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Three years later, the Trump administration pulled out of the agreement and reimposed tough economic sanctions on Iran. Supporters and officials gather around an ambulance carrying the coffin of AQ Khan following his death in Islamabad on 10 October 2021 (AFP) Those who knew AQ Khan insisted he firmly believed what he had done was right. His mission was to stand up to the West. He also said that giving technology to a Muslim country was not a crime, one anonymous acquaintance recalled. Khan defended what he believed was Iran's right to develop nuclear weapons. If Iran fires a missile then it is wrong, but if Israel does it then it is right, he remarked sarcastically in 2009, 12 years before his death in 2021. Today, Pakistan remains the only Muslim-majority country with nuclear weapons. Don't overlook the fact that no nuclear-capable country has been subjected to aggression or occupied, or had its borders redrawn, Khan reflected in 2011. Had Iraq and Libya been nuclear powers, they wouldn't have been destroyed in the way we have seen recently. 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