Chinese Warhead Drawings Among Libyan Documents

Drawings of a nuclear warhead that Libya surrendered as part of its decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction are of 1960s Chinese design, but probably came from Pakistan, diplomats and experts said Sunday.

China is widely assumed to have been Pakistan’s key supplier of much of the clandestine nuclear technology used to establish Islamabad as a nuclear power in 1998 and resold to governments through the black-market network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The drawings appeared to be of a design never used by Pakistan, which went on to develop more modern nuclear weapons, said the diplomats and experts, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Still, they said, the drawings were probably supplied by China as part of the transfer of technology that Khan used to develop Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

One of them called the drawings “dramatic evidence” of the Chinese-Pakistani nuclear link.

Libya surrendered the drawings in December after volunteering to scrap all research into developing weapons of mass destruction. The blueprints and accompanying documents are now in the United States under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

One of the experts said the drawings detailed how to build a warhead for a large ballistic missile, using technology developed by the Chinese in the 1960s that triggers a nuclear blast by a small conventional explosion.

Although the instructions on the drawings were in English, some other documents surrendered by Libya along with the blueprints were in Chinese, he said.

He said that if built, the warhead would have weighed more than 1,000 pounds. That’s too bulky for any delivery system the Libyans possessed but not for the ballistic missiles developed by North Korea and Iran.