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Khan Network Ripples Could Spur Proliferation
The nuclear black market launched by former top Pakistani atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan remains a model for other potential proliferators to emulate, two experts said Monday (see GSN, May 12). David Sanger and William Broad, investigative reporters for the New York Times, said elements of the network could continue to operate, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. “What is uncertain here is not only which countries purchased [the technology], but what’s left of the network, even with the head cut off? Clearly there are a lot of elements of the network that can operate by themselves, and we have still seen Iranians, for example, importing a fair bit of goods from around Europe,” Sanger said during a Council on Foreign Relations panel discussion. “We don’t know whether each of the pieces of this were Khan-related or not. But you have to remember that this was a prototype business, it showed a business model that others can replicate,” he said. Sanger and Broad said Khan’s work might have furthered the nuclear efforts of Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Broad warned that private corporations might someday be able to acquire nuclear technology from a government and sell it to a third party. “Pakistan, in the semi-stable structure that it's in today, may not be that way tomorrow,” he said. “We know from history that other states that had nuclear weapons went through periods of incredible turmoil, revolution. Soviet Union, China, South Africa; a peaceful revolution, but they had nukes, and that was an open question for a while. So things change.” Broad also said nuclear personnel trained in uranium enrichment could also be involved in leaks. “We are moving into the second nuclear age, where some of the estimates are that maybe by 2050 we’ll have a nuclear infrastructure around the world of 1,000 nuclear reactors going. Today there’s what, 250? Just an enormous increase,” Broad said. “With that comes a whole kind of nuclear commerce, nuclear infrastructure. People, lots and lots of people who are learning the intricacies of the ‘star guard.’” The equipment needed to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium is also easier to operate and smaller than prior technologies, Broad said. “There’s another generation of even more efficient smaller technologies up around the bend,” he said. “It’s called laser-isotope-separation. It’s not real efficient for making commercial fuel but it looks like it could be pretty good for special circumstances where you want to enrich some uranium for a bomb. It’s something that the Iranians looked at.” The reporters said it was more likely that a terrorist group would seek to acquire ready-made fissile material rather than to produce the material. They also said there was no evidence that al-Qaeda has obtained such material. Sanger said the more pressing concern is how authorities should react if they discover that a group has and could be preparing to use a nuclear device. “If you think this went to the hands of a terror group, do you retaliate against the country that knowingly or unknowingly slipped this to the terror group? Do you retaliate against the civilian population for the act of a small group of terrorists? It’s a much more complex political calculation than it was in the simpler days of the Cold War, where you said: ‘If you take out New York, we take out Moscow,’” he said (Nikola Krastev, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 7).
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