In Paksitan he was considered a kind of national hero, Abdul Qadeer Khan: the man who gave the country the atomic bomb died at the age of 85 after a long illness. In the 1970s he worked in a nuclear research center in the Netherlands. He was later accused of stealing centrifuge uranium enrichment technology from the Dutch plant which he would later use to develop the first nuclear weapon of the
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Pakistan.
Khan, who had a doctorate in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, offered to launch the Pakistani nuclear-wire program in 1974 after neighboring India conducted its first “peaceful nuclear explosion.” He contacted then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto offering the technology for the program: still grieved by the 1971 loss of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh, and India’s capture of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers, Bhutto accepted the offer. . “We (Pakistanis) will eat grass, we will also be hungry, but we will have ours (nuclear bomb),” he said.
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Since then, Pakistan has relentlessly pursued its nuclear weapons program in tandem with India. But Khan was also accused by the United States of trading nuclear secrets with neighboring Iran and North Korea in the 1990s after Washington authorized Pakistan to carry out its nuclear program. For 10 years during the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan, successive US presidents declared that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons. Certification was required under American law to allow US aid to anti-Communist rebels through Pakistan. Islamabad had sold nuclear weapons technology to North Korea in exchange for its No-Dong missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
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