Tale of a big time thief
Farida Shaikh takes a peek into nuclear pilferage
Book @ zine, shop 1-2 Basement, Jordine House, 1 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong was one of the sites for the biggest book sale of the year. Among heaps of the latest works on fiction and non-fiction the piquant title of this book struck me. Was the book about the danger we face all the time? Of detonation of the nuclear bomb or man-made formless terrorism? The word nuclear in the title at once got attached to the bomb, to defense, to military warfare, and to reactor. Then there was this other big word, jihadist. It comes from Jihad, which literally means 'an effort or striving.' It is a religious war against unbelievers, a religious duty, according to the Quran, to advance Islam by repelling evil. The Nuclear Jihadist is then the story of a man who is advancing nuclear know how and nuclear technology. It is a politicized title and presupposes the particular religious creed and gender of the person. The book takes the western audience's point of view and is written in a narrative style that gives the reader familiarity with the background events that unfolded during the three decade long period of this mysterious nuclear story. It is about the rise and role of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan as one of the architects of the second nuclear age. He is said to have been ambitious and though labeled a 'mediocre' professional, he helped Pakistan build the bomb and enabled regional countries acquire, for the first time, nuclear information and technology. The man was respected throughout the Middle East as the 'Father of the Islamic Bomb.' Much more significant was his exploding the myth that the poor countries were too poor to join the nuclear power. Khan was held up as a great patriot. His one and only aim was to protect his country from arch rival India. He is said to have stolen secrets from European nuclear designs and change his scientific operations to selling secrets to repressive regions, and 'transforming himself into a nuclear jihadist devoted to pay back real and imagined grievances suffered by Muslims across the world.' Later he became arrogant, corrupt and powerful, operating with impunity, and amassed a fortune out of his black market deals. Khan, aged 38 years, was working at FDO in Amsterdam on ultra centrifuges. He told visiting Pakistani scientists about his plan to build a nuclear weapon to save his country from India.Their response was discouraging. So in August 1974 he personally wrote to Z.A.Bhutto with details on uranium enrichment and his expertise in metallurgy. Khan waited impatiently for a response, and in September wrote a second letter, and in December went to Islamabad. Earlier, in 1972, Bhutto had toured the Middle East, scouting for funds to build Pakistan's nuclear program. Struck by the international oil crisis a year later, Bhutto called Muslim nations to an Islamic summit in Lahore in 1974. There he announced his plan for an alliance of poor Muslim countries with wealthy brothers to fight the Zionists and their western backers. Khan was deeply inspired by outcome of the summit. He had in 1971 wept over the Pakistani surrender, the permanent division of Pakistan and the emergence of the new nation of Bangladesh. One clear objective of BCCI's international finance super fraud was the provision to Pakistan, privately and through public finance, of the means to create the necessary nuclear industry as the foundation for the country's weapons program. Frantz is very critical of the CIA's approach to nuclear non-proliferation. He observes that at each juncture over more than twenty years, the CIA had both the clear evidence, and the means for stopping the Pakistani project, but in each instance decided against that track and in favor of more passive watching and waiting in hopes of finding yet more tentacles of Khan's nuclear marketplace. During the Reagan years the policy was to downplay any aspect of non-proliferation policy in favor of short-term political interests, such as maintaining Pakistani support for the 1980 war in Afghanistan. Any official could be linked to responsibility for the Khan network's success in building the Pakistani Bomb, and spreading the industrial knowledge of wide-spread proliferation. The Nuclear Jihadist is definitely an exciting read. However, as the reading progresses the gaps in thinking begin to show in the form of dramatic stunts, farce, irony and questions.
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