TOKYO, 25 August 2005 — Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has given details for the first time on the kind of nuclear technology that former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan transferred to North Korea, a Japanese media report said yesterday. Musharraf reportedly told Kyodo news agency in an interview that Qadeer provided centrifuge machines and their designs to North Korea.
“Yes, he passed centrifuges — parts and complete. I do not exactly remember the number,” Musharraf told Kyodo in Islamabad.
Musharraf’s spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said the Pakistani leader had confirmed that Qadeer provided centrifuges for enriching uranium and their designs to North Korea in an interview Tuesday, but added that the technology was only a small part of what would be needed to develop a nuclear bomb.
Qadeer, regarded as the father of the program that built Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, confessed in early 2004 that he had spread sensitive technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea without the knowledge of the government.
Qadeer, who is accused of operating an international black market network in weapons technology, was subsequently pardoned by Musharraf but is still kept under house arrest in Islamabad.
The Pakistani government has since given only scant details about the transfers that Qadeer made, particularly to Pyongyang’s secretive communist regime.
Musharraf told Kyodo that while the disgraced scientist’s laboratory engaged in uranium enrichment, it was not involved in other key steps needed to make a nuclear bomb, such as conversion of uranium into gas and development of the trigger mechanism and delivery systems. “So if North Korea has made a bomb ... Dr. A.Q. Khan’s part is only enriching the uranium to weapons grade. He does not know about making the bomb,” he said.
If the North Koreans have acquired such bomb-making capabilities, the North Koreans “must have got it themselves or somewhere else — not from Pakistan,” he said.
Kyodo said the Pakistani leader rejected media reports that Qadeer had bartered uranium enrichment secrets for North Korean help in developing Pakistan’s medium-range Ghauri missile.
