Author: Craig S. Smith
Publication: The New York Times
Date: February 19, 2004
[Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra:
And these very same countries with lax controls are wanting to put pressure
on India to have strong controls!]
The Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer
Khan has been demonized in the West for selling atomic secrets and equipment
around the world, but the trade began in Europe, not Islamabad, according
to court documents and experts who monitor proliferation.
The records show that industry scientists
and Western intelligence agencies have known for decades that nuclear technology
was pouring out of Europe despite national export control efforts to contain
it.
Many of the names that have turned
up among lists of suppliers and middlemen who fed equipment, materials
and knowledge to nuclear programs in Pakistan and other aspiring nuclear
nations are well-known players in Europe's uranium enrichment industry,
a critical part of many nuclear weapons programs. Some have been convicted
of illegal exports before.
The proliferation has its roots
in Europe's own postwar eagerness for nuclear independence from the United
States and its lax security over potentially lethal technology. It was
abetted, critics say, by competition within Europe for lucrative contracts
to bolster state-supported nuclear industries. Even as their own intelligence
services warned that Pakistan could not be trusted, some European governments
continued to help Pakistan's nuclear program.
"It was an economic consideration,"
said Paul Stais, a former Belgian member of the European Parliament who
lobbied unsuccessfully for tighter export controls.
One name to emerge from the international
investigations of Dr. Khan's nuclear trade was that of Urs Tinner, a Swiss
engineer who monitored production of centrifuge parts at a factory in Malaysia.
The parts were intended for Libya. Mr. Tinner's father, Friedrich Tinner,
also an engineer, came under scrutiny by the Defense Department in the
1970's and again by Swiss export control authorities and the International
Atomic Energy Agency in the last decade, because he was involved in exports
to Pakistan and Iraq of technology used in uranium enrichment.
In the 1970's, Friedrich Tinner
was in charge of exports at Vakuum-Apparate-Technik, or VAT, when the company
was identified by the Defense Department as shipping items with possible
nuclear-related uses to Pakistan, according to documents and VAT company
officials. He later set up his own company, now called PhiTec AG, which
was investigated by the Swiss in 1996 for trying to ship valves for uranium
enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. The Tinners were never found to have broken
any laws, Swiss officials said.
"Most of these people were heavily
investigated in the 1970's, 80's and 90's," said Mark Hibbs, the European
editor of the technical journal Nucleonics Week, published by McGraw-Hill.
The problem began with the 1970
Treaty of Almelo, under which Britain, Germany and the Netherlands agreed
to develop centrifuges to enrich uranium jointly, ensuring their nuclear
power industry a fuel source independent of the United States. Urenco,
or the Uranium Enrichment Company, was established the next year with its
primary enrichment plant at Almelo, the Netherlands.
Security at Urenco was by most accounts
slipshod. The consortium relied on a network of research centers and subcontractors
to build its centrifuges, and top-secret blueprints were passed out to
companies bidding on tenders, giving engineers across Europe an opportunity
to appropriate designs.
Dr. Khan, who worked for a Urenco
Dutch subcontractor, Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory, was given access
to the most advanced designs, even though he came from Pakistan, which
was already known to harbor nuclear ambitions. A 1980 report by the Dutch
government on his activities said he visited the Almelo factory in May
1972 and by late 1974 had an office there.
After Dr. Khan returned to Pakistan
with blueprints and supplier lists for uranium enrichment centrifuges at
the end of 1975, American intelligence agencies predicted that he would
soon be shopping for the items needed to build the centrifuges for Pakistan's
bomb. They soon detected a flow of equipment from Europe to Pakistan as
Dr. Khan drew on Urenco's network of suppliers using a trusted group of
former schoolmates and friends as agents.
The Dutch government report found
that in 1976, two Dutch firms exported to Pakistan 6,200 unfinished rotor
tubes made of superstrong maraging steel. The tubes are the heart of Urenco's
advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges.
In 1983, a Dutch court convicted
Dr. Khan in absentia on charges of stealing the designs, though the conviction
was later overturned on a technicality. Nonetheless, in the late 1980's,
Belgian ministers led delegations of scientists and businessmen to Pakistan,
despite warnings from their own experts that they were meeting with people
involved in the military application of nuclear technology.
"Every well-informed person knows
the inherent danger of an intense collaboration with a country such as
Pakistan," wrote René Constant, director of Belgium's National Institute
of Radioactive Elements in February 1987, chastising Philippe Maystadt,
then the country's minister of economic affairs, after one such visit.
That same year, despite American
warnings to Germany that such a sale was imminent, a German firm exported
to Pakistan a plant for the recovery of tritium, a volatile gas used to
increase the power of nuclear bombs. The company simply called the plant
something else to obtain an export license.
"The export control office didn't
even inspect the goods," said Reinhard Huebner, the German prosecutor who
handled the subsequent trial of the company's chief, Rudolf Ortmayers,
and Peter Finke, a German physicist who went to Pakistan to train engineers
there to operate the equipment. Both men were sentenced to jail for violating
export control laws.
But there were clues that the technology
had spread even further: a German intelligence investigation determined
that Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea had obtained uranium-melting
expertise stolen from Urenco in 1984, Mr. Hibbs reported in Nucleonics
Week several years later.
In 1989, two engineers, Bruno Stemmler
and Karl Heinz Schaab, who had worked for Germany's MAN New Technology,
another Urenco subcontractor, sold plans for advanced uranium enrichment
centrifuges to Iraq. They went to Baghdad to help solve problems in making
the equipment work.
In 1991, after the first Iraq war,
international inspectors were stunned to discover the extent of Saddam
Hussein's hidden program. Mr. Schaab was later convicted of treason but
only served a little more than a year in jail. Mr. Stemmler died before
he could be tried.
David Albright, a former weapons
inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he helped retrieve
a full set of the blueprints from Iraq after the major combat operations
ended last year. United States inspectors have not found evidence that
Mr. Hussein had restarted his nuclear program, but Mr. Albright said there
were still drawings unaccounted for.
"It's an unnerving issue," said
Mr. Albright, who is president of the Institute for Science and International
Security. "A lot of nuclear weapons design stuff could be missing in Iraq."
As recently as last year, German
customs agents seized high-tensile-strength aluminum tubes made by a German
company and bound for North Korea. The tubes matched the specifications
for the housings of Urenco's uranium-enriching centrifuges.
One name on a list of suppliers
to Iran that came to light in recent investigations was Henk Slebos, who
studied with Dr. Khan at Delft Technological University in Leuven, Belgium,
in the late 1960's.
In the early 1980's, Mr. Slebos
was arrested for shipping an oscilloscope, used in testing centrifuges,
to Dr. Khan in Pakistan. He was convicted and sentenced to a brief prison
term in 1985. Mr. Slebos declined to comment for this article.
In 1998, he withdrew five Pakistan-bound
shipments that the Dutch authorities had stopped in the Netherlands, Belgium
and Austria because they contained "dual use" items, which could be used
for uncovventional weapons as well as civilian purposes.
Last September, Mr. Slebos was among
the sponsors of an international symposium on advanced materials in Pakistan
organized by Dr. Khan. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who was then the Dutch foreign
minister and is now NATO's secretary general, told Dutch members of Parliament
that Mr. Slebos was still doing business with Dr. Khan, though he did not
elaborate.
