A Q Khan was born in Bhopal, India and, unlike Salam, was an immigrant to Pakistan and migrated to the new nation with his family at the time of the partition of India. The journey to Pakistan as a refugee was a traumatic one and it clearly had a profound effect upon Khan, who developed a lifelong antipathy for India. He grew up in a devoutly Muslim household that held orthodox Sunni views. Following his fall from grace, his cause has been championed by many Islamists (amongst others), and they have always claimed him as one their own. His life had much in common with one of his later patrons: dictator Ziaul Haq. Both were refugees from India and enjoyed the adulation and patronage of the Islamists. Khan’s academic achievements did not enjoy the stellar trajectory of Salam’s, and he rose up the ladder of academia with modest results and eventually became a metallurgist by training.
Khan’s career took off after a spell in the Netherlands working for FDO and URENCO, both companies specialising in work relating to the nuclear industry in general and the building of centrifuges in particular. Considerable controversy surrounds Khan’s work in the Netherlands with claims that, on the pretext of translating highly confidential documents relating to the building of nuclear centrifuges, Khan secretly copied these designs and took them with him to Pakistan. This led to a court in the Netherlands convicting him in absentia for industrial espionage (denied by Khan). Khan was without doubt a talented metallurgist, but arouses considerable fury amongst nuclear scientists in Pakistan who refuse to acknowledge his title of ‘father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb’ — a mantle that Khan is more than happy to accept and takes great pride in recounting his own central role in the nuclear programme at fawning Islamist gatherings.
A turning point in Khan’s life was the 1971 debacle leading to the break-up of Pakistan, and the ascendancy of India as a nuclear-armed nation. Khan had by this time started to court Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and assured him that he could deliver a viable nuclear weapons programme. Khan aroused fury and suspicion amongst other nuclear scientists in Pakistan but, through a mixture of conspiracy against the Pakistani nuclear establishment and displays of extreme antipathy towards India, he was able to find patronage amongst the military elite. By the time Zia took over the country, Khan had become the nuclear weapons programme supremo and had sole charge of the weapons programme, specifically the building of nuclear centrifuges. Khan had persuaded Zia to remove his programme from oversight of the civilian Pakistan Nuclear Energy Commission (PNEC), and instead had brought in the army’s corps of engineers as his partners in development.
Little is known about when exactly Khan began his nuclear proliferation programme; suffice it to say that it would seem that there were little or no checks and balances or civilian oversight of Khan’s activities. By 1998, following the successful testing and explosion of a nuclear device, Khan was acclaimed as a national hero and crowned the father of the nuclear bomb by a wildly exuberant and patriotic Pakistani populace.
Khan’s acclaim and adulation would later come to a crashing halt as the full extent of his proliferation was exposed to Pakistan and the world in general. Pakistanis were bewildered by the public humiliation of Khan and his fall from grace to general ignominy. Islamists in particular, who regarded Khan as one of their own, were quick to claim evidence of a western plot to tarnish the reputation of a national hero. The fact that the national hero has now admitted that he personally delivered bag loads of cash and diamonds to various military officers seems not to trouble the Islamist zealots who regard it as a wider conspiracy against the world of Islam.
Salam was a Pakistani patriot throughout his life who, despite having lived in the UK for many years, refused to take up British citizenship. For, as he told my father, if the day came that he was ever awarded the Nobel Prize, he wanted the honour to go to Pakistan. He regarded himself as a Muslim and part of the Muslim ummah and, upon receiving the prize in Stockholm recited verses of the Quran during his acceptance speech, dressed to the hilt in full Pakistani national dress. He was buried in Pakistan and his gravestone was inscribed with the words describing him as the first Muslim Nobel Laureate. The government of Pakistan instructed that the word ‘Muslim’ be erased, leaving the nonsensical inscription describing Salam as the first Nobel Laureate.
The lives of both Professor Abdus Salam and A Q Khan are linked inextricably with Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Both represented the two faces of Pakistan and its twin curses. Whilst Salam fell victim to the adoption in Pakistan of a virulent and pernicious version of Islam that countenanced nothing but its own Deobandi/Wahabi orthodoxy, Khan fell victim to the curse of greed and corruption that afflicts modern-day Pakistan.
Had fate not intervened with Pakistan’s lurch to religious extremism and the adoption of obscurantist Islamist ideology, Salam may have led Pakistan towards a renaissance in scientific excellence and the adoption of a nuclear energy programme that not only provided the deterrence that Pakistan so desperately craved but a civilian nuclear programme that would have solved Pakistan’s energy crisis.
Instead, the metallurgist and future nuclear proliferator A Q Khan was instrumental in giving Pakistan the bomb but, at the same time, betrayed its national interest for that most venal of reasons — a bag full of cash and diamonds.
(Concluded)
The writer is a lawyer working in the Middle East. He writes on regional affairs and can be reached at [email protected]