Home > Abdul Qadeer Khan
Abdul Qadeer Khan (born 1935) is a Pakistani engineer widely regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme. (His middle name is also occasionally rendered as Quadeer, Qadir or Gadeer and his given names are often abbreviated to AQ). In January 2004, he confessed to having been involved in an international network of clandestine nuclear proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea. On February 5, 2004, president Pervez Musharraf announced that he had pardoned Khan. On February 16, The Times of India reported that Khan had suffered a heart attack.[1] The Pakistani government denies this.
1 Early career
Born in 1935 into a middle-class Muslim family in BhopalTowns and cities of Madhya Pradesh Cities in India Bhopl is a city in central India. It is the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh. Bhopal is also the name of a district in Madhya Pradesh with Bhopal city as its headquarters. Historically, Bhopal was a, IndiaThe Republic of India is a large multicultural country in South Asia, with a population of over one billion. The Indian economy is the fourth largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, and is the world's second-fastest growing economy., Khan migrated to Pakistan in 1952Summary of notable events in 1952 . Events January events January 8 West Germany has 8 million refugees inside its borders. January 24 Sudden heavy snowfall in Algeria. January 24 Vincent Massey sworn in as first Canada-born Governor-General of Canada. following the country's partition from India five years earlier. He trained as an engineer at the University of Karachi before moving after graduation to West GermanyWest Germany was the informal but almost universally used name for the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 until 1990, during which years the Federal Republic did not yet include the eastern part of Germany. Since the German reunification of 1990, the F and BelgiumFor alternate meanings, see Belgium (disambiguation). Belgian redirects here. For the horse breed commonly used as a draft horse, see Belgian. The Kingdom of Belgium ( Dutch: Belgi French: Belgique German: Belgien is a country in Western Europe, bordered for further studies, earning a doctorateA doctorate is an academic degree of the highest level. Traditionally, the award of a doctorate implies recognition of the candidate as an equal by the university faculty under which he or she has studied. There are essentially three types of doctorates: from the Catholic University of LeuvenThe Catholic University of Leuven founded in 1425, is now the names of two Belgian universities, after the original university split in 1968: the Dutch-speaking Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Leuven, Belgium, and the French-speaking Universite catholique in Belgium in 1972.
That same year, he joined the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory, or FDO, in Amsterdam. FDO was a subcontractor for the URENCO uranium enrichment plant at Almelo in the Netherlands, which had been established in 1970 by the United Kingdom, West Germany and the Netherlands to assure a supply of enriched uranium for European nuclear reactors. The URENCO plant used highly classified centrifuge technology to separate fissionable uranium-235 from U-238 by spinning a mixture of the two isotopes at up to 100,000 revolutions a minute. The technical complexity of this system is the main obstacle to would-be nuclear powers developing their own enrichment facilities.
In May 1974, India tested a nuclear bomb, to the great alarm of Pakistan's government. Around this time, Khan had privileged access to the most secret areas of the URENCO plant as well as to documentation on centrifuge technology. A subsequent investigation by the Dutch authorities found that he had passed highly classified material to a network of Pakistani intelligence agents, although they found no evidence that he was sent to the Netherlands as a spy, nor were they able to determine whether he approached his government or whether it was the other way around. He left the Netherlands suddenly in January 1976 and was put in charge of the Pakistani nuclear programme with the support of then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
