Khan network's Nuke earnings $100 million: NYT

Khan network's Nuke earnings $100 million

FROM IFTIKHAR ALI

The network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan netted $100 million for the nuclear technology it sold to Libya alone, The New York Times reported Tuesday, quoting US officials.

Under what the newspaper called extraordinary security guards with automatic weapons stationed every few yards officials showed reporters the most basic of the high-speed centrifuges that Dr. Khan reportedly marketed to Libya, Iran and North Korea seeking to enrich uranium for bomb fuel.

Many of the centrifuges, flown out of Libya and stored in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at one of America's first nuclear weapons laboratories, were still in their original packing crates. But the most critical components shipped out of Tripoli including 4,000 more advanced centrifuges and the drawings Dr. Khan sold showing how to turn uranium into crude warheads were kept out of view, The Times said in a dispatch said. So were labels and other evidence that would link specific products to Pakistan, Germany, Malaysia and a dozen other countries where Dr. Khan's network of suppliers and manufacturers operated over the past decade. The event in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Monday was part of a weeklong effort by the administration to trumpet what it views as one of its biggest foreign policy accomplishments growing out of the invasion of Iraq a year ago, according to The Times.

'We've had a huge success here,' Spencer Abraham, the Secretary of Energy, who is in charge of overseeing the American nuclear stockpile was quoted as saying. Surrounded by the cache of nuclear equipment, Mr. Abraham argued that the decision announced in December by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to disarm completely and rapidly came because of 'the resolve that we and others conveyed in Iraq, which has forced countries to make a choice.'

Mr. Abraham said that virtually all of the 55,000 pounds of nuclear gear already brought out of Libya, which appears headed to a lifting of most American economic sanctions next month, now rests here, behind barbed wire fences in the hills of eastern Tennessee. The equipment, he said, was 'the largest recovery, by weight, ever conducted under US non-proliferation efforts' but was 'just the tip of the iceberg' because a shipload of Libyan equipment is currently sailing to the United States. Such work, he said, 'spells out our commitment to winning the war against terrorism.'

Libya never began to produce enriched uranium, though experts here said that if assembled, the equipment that the United States, the International Atomic Energy Agency and other nations have recovered could have produced enough fuel to make up to 10 nuclear weapons a year, the newspaper said. Libya had obtained a bit less than half of the 10,000 centrifuges it hoped to operate, before determining that the programme was not worth the diplomatic cost. 'The programme was much more advanced than we assessed, 'Robert Joseph, who heads counter-proliferation efforts in the National Security Council, was quoted as saying.

'It was much larger than we assessed.' 'The network's financial dealings were deliberately complex and we do not yet have a complete picture,' Jim Wilkinson, a deputy national security adviser was quoted as saying. 'The developing picture, however, indicates that the Khan network received at least $100 million for supplying technology, equipment and know-how' to Libya, he said.

'It was truly one-stop shopping.' Under a tent in a parking lot of the heavily guarded complex here, the newspaper said a display was set up for dozens of large wooden packing crates that contained Libya's disassembled nuclear programme, as well as small number of items that they had declassified. Among them were four aluminum centrifuges, called P-1's, the nomenclature for the first generation of Pakistani centrifuges. Gleaming, the aluminum tubes stood more than six feet tall, with three pipes coming out the top of each, the newspaper said.

The centrifuges, basically hollow metal tubes, spin at the speed of sound to separate uranium 235, which is used as the main ingredient for bombs from unneeded uranium 238. In front of the display lay a six-foot-long piece of cascade piping - the line that in an operating plant would tie the centrifuges together. A set of thousands of centrifuges, called a cascade, concentrates the rare U-235 isotope to make potent bomb fuel. Each centrifuge in a cascade makes the uranium a little more enriched in the U-235 isotope.