‘Kindest Man in Pakistan’ Behind Blasts

Every morning, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program strolls into the woods across from his house and tosses peanuts to the monkeys that have gathered to wait for him.

“I am the kindest man in Pakistan,” said Abdul Qadeer Khan on Sunday, the day after his country exploded another nuclear device in defiance of the world. “I feed the ants in the morning. I feed the monkeys.”

Khan, 62, is the chubby, affable face of one of the world’s most relentless nuclear weapons programs. After two decades of begging, cadging and copying weapons-grade technology for one of the poorest countries on Earth, Khan basked Sunday in an outpouring of national adulation for finally shoving his beloved nation into one of the world’s most exclusive clubs.

It was a fitting reward for a man who has devoted his life and talents to a country he wasn’t even born in, passed up lucrative opportunities around the globe and even risked jail to help Pakistan become a nuclear-armed state.

“He is not a dull scientist,” said Zahid Malik, editor of the Pakistan Observer and one of Khan’s closest friends. “He is a national hero.”

*

Outside Pakistan, Khan is better known for his zealous pursuit of high-speed nuclear triggers, enriched uranium, zirconium tubes, electrical inverters and the thousands of other sophisticated components needed to put together a nuclear weapon. To the Westerners who track the ominous spread of nuclear weapons around the globe, Khan is the brilliant, nationalistic operator they so fear.

“There is no question he is the father of what Pakistan managed to put together,” said Herb Hagerty, former political counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan. “He was involved in all the things we were trying to stop.”

At a news conference Sunday in his home in one of Islamabad’s finest neighborhoods, Khan reaffirmed that his nation successfully tested six nuclear devices last week. Sporting sandals and a silver neck chain, he said that although his nation acquired the materials and expertise to detonate a nuclear device nearly a decade ago, it was forced to test now in order to deter India, whose government surprised the world last month by testing five nuclear devices.

Pakistan’s atomic tests, coupled with those of archrival India, have, to many Western observers, heightened the risk of a nuclear exchange to levels unknown since the Cuban missile crisis.

“If India had not done the tests, we never would have done anything,” Khan said. “They were a threat to our security.”

Khan volunteered little new information on the nuclear tests, whose key details are being disputed in the press here and by intelligence experts in the West. He refused to say whether the Pakistanis had attempted any tests that failed, nor would he divulge the explosive force of the devices that were tested.

Khan said that although his team of scientists has not yet constructed or deployed nuclear warheads, it could do so quickly whenever politicians asked. He said that his government plans no more nuclear tests but that it does intend to test more missiles--presumably the Ghauri, the intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to most parts of India.

“Most likely we will have more tests,” he said.

That could be an ominous step: It was the first test of the Ghauri, on April 6, that Indian officials said made them finally decide to conduct their atomic tests.

Khan was born in Bhopal, India, the very country his weapons now threaten. The son of a teacher, he fled his native country along with his family five years after the British Raj split into India--a predominantly Hindu country--and Pakistan, dominated by Muslims. Khan’s family ended up in Pakistan.

For Khan, as for millions of people living on the subcontinent, the partition was a time of tragedy and suffering not easily forgotten. The memory of his forced flight from his birthplace seems to lie at the heart of his drive to make Pakistan, which in the Urdu language means “Land of the Pure,” into a nuclear power.

“They chased me away,” he said Sunday after the news conference.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program began in earnest 27 years ago, when Khan was still working as a metallurgist in the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam. It was 1971, and Pakistan had just suffered a humiliating and disastrous defeat at the hands of India, which had helped strip Pakistan of what is now independent Bangladesh. When, in 1974, India tested a nuclear device for what it cryptically said was “peaceful purposes,” its neighbor’s drive, already intense, turned desperate.

The key moment for Pakistan came in 1976, when Khan, educated in Europe and married to a Dutch-speaking South African, decided to come home.

According to nuclear weapons experts, Khan began a worldwide search for the many components needed to put together an atomic arsenal.

“We bought everything on the open market,” Khan said Sunday. “Ninety percent of what you need to build a nuclear bomb is available.”

Though much of the technology and training in Pakistan are believed to have been provided by China, many of the key components of its nuclear program, experts say, were purchased in Europe.

“Khan knew the European scene,” said Hagerty, the former State Department political counselor. “I think they got what they wanted in the local market.”

*

Khan’s specialty was one of the trickiest aspects of nuclear weaponry--the enrichment of uranium so that it can be used in a bomb. It was in the pursuit of such a formula that he ran into legal trouble in Amsterdam in the late 1970s, when he was suspected of stealing technology for uranium enrichment.

Khan denied Sunday that he engaged in any illegal activity, and he noted that no charges were brought against him.

Still, Pakistan’s relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons so worried the U.S. that it had suspended almost all foreign aid to the country by the early 1990s.

Not everyone in Pakistan holds Khan in awe. Some who have worked with him remember him as a egomaniacal lightweight given to exaggerating his expertise.

“Most of the scientists who work on weapons are serious. They are sobered by the weight of what they don’t know,” said Munir Ahmad Khan, the former head of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission. “Khan is a showman.”

Khan describes himself as an optimist.

“If I weren’t an optimist, I never would have been able to accomplish the things I did,” he said.

In his spare time, Khan dotes on his family--he has two daughters--and on animals. Each day at sunrise, he takes a sackful of peanuts when he walks into the lush Margala Hills across from his home and feeds the monkeys.

Khan, the owner of several cats and dogs, also keeps a pet South American parrot, named Polly, who sits on his shoulder.

“She doesn’t give away our secrets,” Khan joked.

Despite having shepherded Pakistan’s nuclear arms program, Khan says he feels comfortable with the responsibility. He says he favors a rapprochement with India, and he thinks now that the two sides have nuclear weapons, that may be possible.

“The bomb gave peace to Europe for 50 years,” Khan said. “I believe I have saved thousands of people.”