Pakistani ring may have given Iran weapon blueprints

An international smuggling ring may have secretly shared blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon with Iran, North Korea and other “rogue” countries, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

The now-defunct ring, which was led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, is known to have sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea. A draft report by former top U.N. arms inspector David Albright says the smugglers also acquired designs for building a more sophisticated compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and other developing countries, according to the Post, which obtained a copy of the report.

The drawings were discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen; they were recently destroyed by the Swiss government under the supervision of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency to keep them from being spread to other countries or terrorists. But U.N. officials said they couldn’t rule out that the material already had been shared.

“These advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of the most treacherous regimes in the world,” Albright wrote in the draft, which was expected to be published this week.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, Nadeem Kiani, did not rebut the findings. “The government of Pakistan has adequately investigated allegations of nuclear proliferation by A.Q. Khan and shared the information with” the International Atomic Energy Agency, Kiani said. “It considers the A.Q. Khan affair to be over.”

Traveling with President Bush in Europe, national security advisor Stephen Hadley said he had not read accounts of the Albright report, “but obviously we’re very concerned about the A.Q. Khan network, both in terms of what they were doing by purveying enrichment technology and also the possibility that there would be weapons-related technology associated with it.”

In Vienna, a senior diplomat said the IAEA had knowledge of the existence of a sophisticated nuclear weapons design being peddled electronically by the black-market ring as far back as 2005. The diplomat, who is familiar with the investigations into the Khan network, spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

A CIA official said the agency would not comment because of the diplomatic and security sensitivities of the matter.

The Khan smuggling ring was previously known to have provided Libya with design information for a nuclear bomb. But Libya was given plans for an older and relatively unsophisticated weapon that was bulky and difficult to deliver. The newly discovered blueprints concerned a compact device that might allow for delivery by missile.

Iran possesses medium-range ballistic missiles and is accused by U.S. government officials of seeking the capability to build nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is only for generating electricity.