NEW DELHI – A scandalous claim has been made by a U.S. arms control that AQ Khan, Pakistan’s notorious nuclear engineer may have passed on nuclear energy to India. Joshua Pollack, a U.S. policy wonk (a person who studies or develops strategies and policies) who has worked on nuclear proliferation commented that India might be the fourth country along with Iran, Libya and North Korea, to which a shortcut to nuclear weapons were provided by A Q Khan.
Little credibility was offered by Pollack to back up his content, apart from some similarities between the centrifuges used by India in its uranium-enrichment program and Pakistan’s centrifuges engineered by Khan. South African court documents have been cited by him, which claims that a member of Khan “association” supplied India’s centrifuge program with specialized equipment, starting in the late 1980s.
It was through the plutonium route in 1972 that India went nuclear, several years before Pakistan, according to Pollack.
Pakistan’s notorious nuclear scientist AQ Khan may have passed on nuclear technology to India, cited newspaper ads in 2006 demanding centrifuge parts claimed a U.S. arms control expert.
“India’s enrichment program progressed slowly… In 2006 the Washington DC-based Institute for Science and International Security revealed that the Indian government had used newspaper ads to solicit bids for centrifuge parts. The details of these advertisements, along with documents Indians gave potential suppliers, provide strong clues about where New Delhi’s supercritical centrifuge technology came from,” Joshua Pollack said in a commentary in Playboy. “Despite some changes, the design is recognizable to the trained eye: It almost mirrors the G-2 centrifuge, a design Khan stole from URENCO in the 1970s and reproduced as Pakistan’s P-2 centrifuge,” as quoted by TOI
Gerhard Wisser,a German in South Africa was in collaboration with Gotthard Lerch in Switzerland to supply specialized equipments to both Pakistan and its proliferation partners, starting in the late 1980s, to India said Pollack.
Pollack speculates despite the fact Khan never mentioned having a fourth customer ever, “Could Khan have been ignorant about Wisser’s dealings with India? His own guilty conscience says otherwise.” Two conflicting cover stories were published as Khan answered his Pakistani interrogators which explain how Pakistan’s enrichment technology could have ended up in “enemy hands”.
