Dr Abdul Qadeer (A.Q.) Khan, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 85, is regarded as a national hero in Pakistan. He is known as the “Father of Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons” around the world.
Khan was born in India in 1936 and came to Pakistan with his family years after partition in 1952. At the age of 36, he was assigned to work in a Dutch laboratory and workshop that was part of the European URENCO partnership, which built uranium enrichment centrifuges.
Right after Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan’s death, Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that Israeli premier intelligence Mossad tried to assassinate Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan to stop the Muslim world from acquiring more nuclear weapons.
By coincidence, Arnon Milchan, who is well known Hollywood Tycon and then Israeli spy, was involved in a similar theft the same year.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that A.Q. Khan was the man who facilitated the first “Muslim bomb”. Dr AQ Khan was running shop in Dubai and ran a global network of helpers, engineers, contractors, financiers. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Syria rejected
his mercenary approach of bombs for bucks only the Libya and Iran did accept but altered the terms and scope of the offer.
Lacking serious scientific infrastructure and expertise, Libya’s then-leader Muammar Gadhafi asked Khan to take on the project as a turn-key project.
Post-revolutionary Iran, on the other hand during the Shah’s reign had already relatively advanced nuclear program, the scientists who had studied in the west chose its path.
Iranian Scientists have reportedly built their centrifuges remaining them Ir-1 and Ir-2 according to foreign reports.
Israeli’s intelligence service, led at the time by Mossad Chief Shabtai Shavit, did not understand what Khan was up to Ir-3-4-5-6-7 are now spinning in the uranium enrichment facilities of Natanz and Fordow.
Shavit says he would have considered sending a Mossad team to kill Khan and thus “change the course of history” at least in the context of Israel-Iran relations. What eventually exposed Khan’s network was Gadhafi Shavit’s writes in his memoirs.
Mossad and Aman were shocked when they heard the news on the BBC in December 2004. The CIA and M16 hid and departmentalized the negotiations with Gadhafi. Both Libya’s nuclear and chemical programs were dismantled by the IEA, but not before documents were destroyed.
The revelation of Libyan-American-British-Channel via the IAEA enhanced international pressure on Iran’s nuclear aspirations. In 2006, the UN Security Council imposed severe sanctions against Iran. Iran crawled to the negotiating table and signed JCPOA nuclear deal in 2015.
Dr A.Q Khan was Pakistan’s biggest ever private nuclear proliferator and as that rare bird a survivor in the lethal world of nuclear geopolitics and counter-Intelligence. He is among the few nuclear scientists who helped Israel’s enemies acquire game-changing strategic military capacities.