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The United States is investigating whether Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan sold nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and other countries, Time magazine reported Sunday. The news weekly, citing a source in Pakistan's defense ministry, said that Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, had also played a bigger role in helping Iran and North Korea with their nuclear programs than had been previously disclosed. "US intelligence officials believe Khan sold North Korea much of the material needed to build a bomb, including high-speed centrifuges used to enrich uranium and the equipment required to manufacture more of them," Time...

Here's an off the wall question. I've heard stuff about Clinton selling nuclear secrets to China, and I have a friend who doesn't believe me on this. He says nobody's ever heard of this before including himself. It's an old issue now and I don't remember if this is widely known or just a stupid conspiracy theory I picked up on the internet. Never really talked to anyone about it. Does anybody know of credible sources that support this, or am I just remembering some old conspiracy theory that circulated on the internet? It's nothing I'm willing to argue about...

WASHINGTON: New allegations made on Sunday by the New York Times say that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan sold $100 million worth of nuclear gear to Libya and as a “sweetener” included blueprints for a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb. The report says intelligence officials had watched Dr Khan, “for years”, though it fails to say why they waited, “for years”, before exposing his alleged network. US experts were unsure who else had those designs besides Libya. They were not certain if the designs had also been passed on to Iran, Syria or the Al Qaeda organisation. Experts from the US and...

When experts from the US and the IAEA came upon blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb in the files of the Libyan weapons program earlier this year, they found themselves caught between gravity and pettiness. The discovery gave the experts a new appreciation of the audacity of the rogue nuclear network led by A. Q. Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan's bomb. Intelligence officials had watched Dr. Khan for years and suspected that he was trafficking in machinery for enriching uranium to make fuel for warheads. But the detailed design represented a new level of danger, particularly since the Libyans...

Iran has arrested more than 10 people on charges of revealing its nuclear secrets to Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies, Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi said. Yunesi said those arrested were detained in Tehran and in the southern Hormozgan province during the Iranian year that began March 21, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. "These people were spying for Mossad and CIA," Yunesi said, referring to the Israel's spy service and the Central Intelligence Agency. The United States accuses Iran of running a secret program to build a nuclear bomb. Iran says its nuclear programs are peaceful. The minister said...

The insanity that the title suggests is not new. Its apparently been around since the 1940's. "Within days of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, politicians, military leaders, scientists, and newspaper editors across the United States began the acrimonious debate over the future of the atomic bomb." ... "The issues immediately after the war revolved around the following questions : Should the bomb be placed under military or civilian control ? Should the United States relinquish the bomb and its secrets to an international commission in an effort to prevent an all-out war" ... "President Truman had expressed his support...

VIENNA—When Libya ratted out the biggest global network in nuclear smuggling, among the thousands of black market items it turned over to U.N. inspectors were the blueprints for a nuclear warhead. Libyan officials handed over the stack of documents in the very same way they had received them — stuffed into two shopping bags from "Good Look" tailors in Islamabad. The U.N. inspectors were flabbergasted: the designs were for a bomb that could, if "properly" unleashed, devastate a city. The plans had arrived in Libya more than two years ago through a nuclear proliferation racket that spanned at least nine...

ISLAMABAD : US leading daily New Yark Times report on Friday that selling of atomic secrets and equipment around the world began from Europe and not Islamabad. Its Paris correspondent, Craig S. Smith quote documents and experts who monitor proliferation says that the court record shows that industry, scientists and Western intelligence agencies had known for decades that nuclear technology was pouring out of Europe despite national export control efforts to contain it. It says many of the names that have turned up among list of suppliers and middlemen, who fed equipment, material and knowledge to nuclear programmes to the...

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 20 -- The Sri Lankan businessman who was an associate of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has told Malaysian police how Khan shipped components to Libya and Iran for their nuclear weapons programs and received two briefcases with a $3 million payment from Iran, a Malaysian police report disclosed Friday. In an insider's account of Khan's operation, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir said that Khan asked him to send two shipping containers of used centrifuges -- sophisticated equipment for enriching uranium -- to Iran from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, aboard a merchant vessel owned by an...

The Chinese authorities are launching an investigation into new evidence that China supplied nuclear secrets to Pakistan in the early 1980s. US government officials say material recently handed over to the United States by Libya includes documents purchased from Pakistani nuclear scientists. These documents were allegedly supplied to Pakistan by the Chinese in the 1980s. If the reports turn out to be true, this means China was in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. In its first official statement on the issue, the Chinese government has not denied the accusations.

<p>PARIS -- We observed the Abdul Qadeer Khan affair, the incredible story of this Pakistani nuclear scientist who delivered over 15 years -- freely and with impunity -- his most sensitive secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Then we learned that President Musharraf in person, after an interview from which little or nothing has been divulged, ended up granting Khan his "pardon." Case closed? End of story? That's what the American administration, falling oddly in step with the official Pakistani doctrine, would have us believe. But knowing something of the case -- and being the first French observer, to my knowledge, to have tried to alert public opinion to the extreme gravity of the situation -- I believe that we are only at the very beginning this story.</p>

Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts. The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded dramatic evidence of China's long-suspected role in transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s, they said. The Chinese designs were later resold to Libya by a Pakistani-led trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, added the officials and...

February 13, 2004 Islamabad accused of nuclear 'cover-up'By Edward Luce in Islamabad Relatives of six scientists who worked with A.Q. Khan, the disgraced "father of the Islamic bomb", have accused Islamabad of indulging in a cover-up to protect the Pakistani military from being tainted by the nuclear proliferation scandal.The Pakistani government alleges that the scientists, five of whom have been held since 17 January and one since 27 November, "passed on" nuclear materials, designs and machinery to "foreign countries" - thought to be Libya, Iran and North Korea.Last week, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, pardoned A.Q. Khan after he had...

Nobody can question AQ Khan: Experts Islamabad Asian News International, February 9 No international body can question the Father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Dr AQ Khan, including the United Nations and the European Union under the international law as Pakistan is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This was the view of international law experts, practitioners, academicians and diplomats, The News reported. Interviewing a host of experts, the paper further went on to say that a majority of them supported the Pakistan Government's stance of carrying out a voluntary investigation after receiving a letter from the Vienna-based International...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Pervez Musharraf, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, pledged that Pakistan had put a stop to the covert export of nuclear weapons know-how. "Please let it not be thought that the same proliferation activity will start again," Musharraf told the NBC network in an interview in Islamabad. "Never. That will never happen." He was responding to questions about his handling of the confession last week by Abdul Qadeer Khan, revered as the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, that he had leaked secrets to Libya, North Korea (news - web sites) and Iran as head of Pakistan's...

VIENNA, Feb 6 (Reuters) - The illicit network the father of Pakistan's atom bomb used to skirt sanctions and sell Iran, Libya and North Korea nuclear technology spans the globe and was run by middlemen who covered their tracks well, diplomats say. Earlier this week Abdul Qadeer Khan, the metallurgist credited with building up Pakistan's atomic weapons programme, publicly confessed to leaking nuclear secrets. President Pervez Musharraf swiftly pardoned Khan, who remains a national hero in Pakistan. But the extent of Khan's nuclear sales network, which Western diplomats told Reuters made the Pakistani scientist and others extremely wealthy, is only...

Cabinet Recommends Pardon For Dr. Khan ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Feb 06 (PNS) - The Federal Cabinet on Thursday recommended to the President to pardon Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan for unauthorized proliferation activities. The Federal Cabinet in a special meeting here chaired by Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali reviewed the mercy petition of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan referred by the National Command Authority (NCA) on February 4 and "decided to forward its recommendations to the President to pardon the Scientist." Dr A.Q Khan met the President on Wednesday and accepted full responsibility for all proliferation activities, which were conducted by him...

WASHINGTON: The United States has opted for a Faustian deal to absolve Pakistan of any official complicity in nuclear proliferation because of its crucial role in the war on terrorism. Pieces of the proliferation jigsaw now falling into place indicate that Washington has known about Pakistan’s reckless endangerment of international security for some years now, and certainly since Gen Musharraf came to power. But instead of publicly citing Islamabad for spread of nuclear weapons technology, a step that would have automatically invited sanctions against Pakistan’s defence establishment and disrupted the war on terrorism, the Bush administration chose to tweak Musharraf...

Nuclear bombshell Leader Friday February 6, 2004 The Guardian Critics of the Iraq war often predicted that the conflict would divert attention from the more important fight against terrorism. That contention found broad support this week in the Commons foreign affairs committee; the undiminished nature of the al-Qaida threat is in any case self-evident. It was also claimed, before the war, that the government's obsessive focus on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was a distraction that could weaken the global counter-proliferation effort. In this case, the outcome appears to be worse than even the most pessimistic critics feared. Aside...

The father of Pakistan's atomic weapons programme last night admitted on national television that he had illegally traded nuclear secrets to other countries. Contradicting reports from recent days, Abdul Qadeer Khan also claimed that he had done so without the knowledge of the government. Speculation is now mounting that Dr Khan may not be prosecuted. A former army chief, Mirza Aslam Beg, an ally of Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, yesterday told the Guardian he believed Dr Khan would have to be kept out of court "because he knows too much". Mr Beg added: "If [Dr] Khan had appeared in a...