Every Iranian enrichment advance, every shortening of the path towards weaponsgrade uranium, rests upon foundations poured by Pakistani hands.
Kafkaesque; in the grand theatre of nuclear diplomacy, where men in dark suits discuss restraint, regimes, safeguards and other polite abstractions, one inconvenient nucleus sits quietly beneath the velvet carpet.
The beginning of Iran’s nuclear programme, and North Korea’s, and Libya’s, does not lie only in Tehran’s defiance, Pyongyang’s paranoia, or Gaddafi’s appetite for theatrical power. It lies in Pakistan. And now the very same Pakistan, whitewashed by time and strategic usefulness, presents itself as a noble mediator, responsible nuclear state, possible peacemaker. The world has not merely forgotten; it has institutionalised forgetting. The theatre of absurd has gone nuclear.
The story begins in 1975, in a Dutch town, when Abdul Qadeer Khan, a young metallurgist, left the URENCO enrichment facility with supplier lists, metallurgical specifications, cascade assembly instructions, and CNOR and SNOR centrifuge designs. These were not scientific papers, not abstractions floating in some clean academic ether; they were the operating manual of a nuclear weapons factory. Khan did not steal a machine alone, he stole an entire industrial ecosystem. The IAEA later confirmed that Pakistan’s P-1 centrifuges were reverse-engineered copies of URENCO’s German-designed ZM-235 machines. Pakistan mastered enrichment through theft, then metabolised theft into commerce.
By the mid-1990s, the importer had become exporter. Khan’s network was not merely a top-down ISI file with signatures and stamps; it was a decentralised-horizontal organism of brokers, middlemen and front companies, headquartered in Dubai, where plausible deniability could circulate like sewer rats in a metropolis. B.S.A. Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman in Dubai, became its financial nerve-centre. Scomi Precision Engineering in Malaysia manufactured centrifuge components. Krisch Engineering and Tradefin Engineering in South Africa added more parts. Brokers in Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom handled procurement. The network spread across thirty countries, a fungal map beneath the diplomatic soil.
The customers were not just Iran and North Korea. Mohamed ElBaradei stated that Khan negotiated with people in twenty countries, suppliers, middlemen or customers. At least one unnamed state was connected. Suspicion touched Syria, Turkey and Egypt. The full client list remains a state secret, preserved like a dangerous family shame. Pakistan shamelessly blocked direct international access to Khan with impunity, ensuring that the complete anatomy of the beast would remain partly unphotographed, partly guessed, partly protected.
Between 1994 and 1996, Khan gave Iran the architecture of what became Natanz: P-1 centrifuge designs, a starter kit for roughly five hundred machines, and uranium hexafluoride feedstock. Millions of dollars moved into Pakistani scientists’ accounts through Dubai’s opaque banking and Hawala channels. Tahir admitted receiving three million dollars in UAE dirhams for used centrifuges, delivered in briefcases to Khan’s Dubai guest house, history metamorphosing into a gangster film with radioactive isotopes. IAEA inspectors later found centrifuges at Natanz matching Pakistani and URENCO metallurgical signatures. Iran’s enrichment programme was not indigenous; it was purchased, complete with technical consulting, troubleshooting and training. The entry barrier to proliferation had been reduced from state-industrial capacity to money, contacts, and a Dubai account. Every Iranian enrichment advance, every shortening of the path towards weapons-grade uranium, rests upon foundations poured by Pakistani hands.
North Korea was another transaction, older and cruder, almost medieval except for the cargo. In the late 1990s, Pakistan received Nodong missiles, renamed Ghauri, in exchange for P-1 and P-2 centrifuge blueprints and uranium hexafluoride. American intelligence tracked Pakistani C-130 aircraft collecting missile components in Pyongyang. There was no cash trail; this was barter at the edge of Armageddon, sanction-proof and invisible to banking surveillance. The container used to ship UF6 to Libya contained plutonium isotopes from Yongbyon, suggesting trilateral links between Pakistan, North Korea and Libya. Pyongyang acquired centrifuge designs directly from the Khan network and later quadrupled its plutonium stockpile. Every North Korean missile arc across the sky carries, somewhere in its metal memory, Pakistani technology.
Libya received the deluxe package. Between 1997 and 2003, Gaddafi ordered ten thousand centrifuges, over one million components, a Chinese-origin warhead design, and 1.87 tons of uranium hexafluoride. The cost was estimated at one hundred to two hundred million dollars. Components were made in Malaysia and South Africa, shipped through front companies, falsely declared, routed through multiple ports until origin itself dissolved into haze. The machine may have continued replicating had the German-owned BBC China ship not been intercepted at Taranto, Italy, in October 2003, carrying components for one thousand P-1 centrifuges bound for Libya. The seizure, based on MI6 and CIA intelligence, forced Gaddafi to dismantle his programme in December 2003 and handed Western intelligence a Rosetta Stone: client lists, pricing, supplier contacts, and the same Chinese warhead design passed through Pakistan.
Then came Khan’s confession in February 2004, but it was theatre, staged ritual sacrifice, one man placed under light so the institution could retreat into shadow. President Pervez Musharraf pardoned him the next day. Khan was never tried, never handed to the IAEA or CIA, never properly interrogated internationally. Around twenty associates were questioned in Pakistan. Not one was prosecuted. He is still considered a hero there.
Beyond the confirmed clients lies Saudi Arabia, a quiet gravitational body. Intelligence reports suggest Saudi officials, including Defence Minister Prince Sultan, visited Kahuta in the late 1990s. Saudi Arabia supplied subsidized oil and cash during Pakistan’s balance-of-payments crises. The Islamic Bomb financing was never written as treaty or guarantee, but strategic understandings often live best without ink. Pakistan’s deterrent was understood to serve Saudi security. If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, Saudi Arabia could cash in on decades of investment rather than build indigenously. Proliferation may not rise from laboratories; it may arrive ready-made between allies.
Pakistan’s 2004 Export Control Act, drafted with American and Japanese help, excluded retroactive prosecution. It also allowed the Vice Chairman of the Export Promotion Bureau to waive regulations for any enterprise, with no oversight to audit exemptions. This was law as costume, compliance as painted scenery. A Musharraf aide admitted Khan had a complete blank check: he could do anything, go anywhere, buy anything at any price. This was not merely a rogue scientist; it was deliberate-structural feigned ignorance, state policy disguised as absence of knowledge. No written orders, no explicit oversight, no accountability trail. When exposure became inevitable, the man was sacrificed, the organism survived.
Two decades later, Pakistan asks to enter the Nuclear Suppliers Group and calls itself responsible, discriminated against, stabilising. The world nods, because amnesia is useful. After September 11, 2001, Pakistan became a frontline state in the war on terror; sanctions were waived, accountability postponed, Al-Qaeda prioritised over the most prolific nuclear black market ever exposed. Afghanistan, China, South Asian crisis-management, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, mediation offers on Iran and Afghanistan, all have purchased immunity. Tactical nuclear weapons like Nasr, designed to lower the threshold against India’s conventional superiority, are marketed as stabilising. Strange vocabulary; lowering the cliff and calling it safety.
The most dangerous legacy is knowledge. Digital P-2 blueprints appeared on black-market laptops in Europe and Southeast Asia after Khan’s house arrest. In 2009, European investigations found individuals still trading components from original supplier lists. The Chinese warhead design sent through Pakistan to Libya entered permanent IAEA and intelligence archives. Metal can be seized, ships can be stopped, as BBC China was stopped; but digitised knowledge travels like light, like infection, like memory.
Pakistan now offers mediation while Tehran was recently enriching uranium to 60%, near weapons-grade, and the JCPOA struggles for breath. It forgets to say that without Pakistani P-1 designs, Iran’s breakout would be measured in decades, not months. It expresses concern over North Korean missiles, forgetting the barter that gave Pyongyang enrichment technology. After 2004, the Strategic Plans Division centralised the programme with American assistance and Permissive Action Links, preventing rogue operations but professionalising the deterrent, deepening the Indian security dilemma, and allowing reform without confession.
The centrifuges at Natanz used to spin on Pakistani blueprints. Yongbyon carries Pakistani know-how. The Saudi hedge rests on Pakistani capacity. Before praising the arsonist for bringing water, remember who built the fire. Nuclear proliferation is a supply-chain problem, an ecosystem problem, a knowledge problem; and until the state that enabled, protected and profited from Khan is named, the fires will spread, while arsonists stand solemnly, holding the hose.
And a deluded world will clap….
Brijesh Singh is a senior IPS officer and an author (@brijeshbsingh on X). His latest book on ancient India, “The Cloud Chariot” (Penguin) is out on stands. Views are personal.
