Abdul Qadeer Khan - Proliferation of URENCO Technology

Proliferation of URENCO Technology

Abdul Qadeer Khan then established an administrative proliferation network through Dubai to smuggle URENCO technology to Engineering Research Laboratories. In 1998, his fellow theorist Dr. G.D. Alam, issued a confessional statement to the public media and made first public acknowledgment of A.Q. Khan's nuclear proliferation work, where he maintained that the "blueprints were incomplete and did not contain the scientific information needed even for the basic gas-centrifuges." According to one scientist, the URENCO Group's blueprints of centrifuges were based on first generation technology and were filled with many of the serious technical errors. Its SWU rate was extremely low that it would have to be rotated for thousands RPMs on the cost of taxpayer's millions of dollars, Allam maintained. The team compromising his fellow theorists, contained Tasnim Shah and Qadir Hussain, head by theorist G.D. Alam, had developed an improvised but powerful version of the centrifugal machines, and Abdul Qadeer Khan had nothing to do with it. Many of Qadeer Khan's colleagues were irritated that he seemed to enjoy taking full credit for something he had only a part in, and many of his fellow scientists were transferred back to PAEC as they had developed serious disagreements with Abdul Qadeer Khan over his nuclear proliferation activities.

In 1980, a foreign government from an unknown Arab country contacted Dr. A.Q. Khan, offering a large sum of money. While, Qadeer Khan took the proposal under consideration, he asked his fellow scientists in his scheme, including Alam. When Qadeer Khan accepted the proposal, one scientist notified the President Zia-ul-Haq about his recent activities in other countries. In his statement, Ghulam Dastigar Alam said, "To this day, Dr. A.Q. Khan knows nothing about the topics in the "(modern) physics" apart from the introductory physics. He still lacks the knowledge to speak about topics involved in the nuclear physics."

Abdul Qadeer Khan was known for enjoying taking full credit of something he had done a part in, and often getting engrossed in projects which were theoretically interesting but practically unfeasible. About his full role in the atomic bomb project, physicist Samar Mubarakmand maintained in 2004 that:

"Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan first visited Chagai on May 28, 1998. He arrived 15 minutes prior to the tests... The Theoretical Physics Group (TPG) of PAEC that worked on the design of the bomb and developed the whole programme. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was only tasked with the enrichment project that he had taken over in 1976. If he knew how to build the designs of weapons, Iraq, Libya and Iran would have developed the weapons by now.