FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2004 11:45:36 PM ]
Did Pak, N Korea conduct joint N-tests?
http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/525092.cms WASHINGTON: The revelations about the international nuclear trading of the Pakistani scientist AQ Khan have rekindled a debate inside the American intelligence community over an unresolved but crucial strategic question from the last decade: did Pakistan conduct a secret nuclear weapons test in partnership with North Korea?
Startling clues were detected after underground tests that Pakistan carried out in May 1998, when ‘it proved to the world that its own efforts to build nuclear weapons had succeeded’. According to former and current American intelligence officials, an American military jet sent to sample the air after the final test in the wastelands of the Baluchistan desert picked up traces of plutonium.
That surprised experts at the Los Alamos national laboratory, because Pakistan said openly that all of its bombs were fuelled by highly enriched uranium, produced at Dr AQ Khan’s nuclear laboratories.
Among the possible explanations hotly debated after the tests was that North Korea perhaps in return for the help from Dr Khan might have given Pakistan some of its precious supply of plutonium to conduct a joint test of an atomic weapon.
****Seems like the US was constantly being surprised during the 90's.
Safe to say the Pakistanis seem to have run rings around Uncle Sam.
since their program came from China, this is not at all surprising.