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Muammar el-Qaddafi Coughs It Up
GW Bush's biggest, most important foreign policy victory yet. Colin Powell is
over in Pakiland right now explaining to them about how we are going to know about everything Dr. Khan and his nuclear export ring did. The Iranian mullah's days are numbered. All their involvement with this supply chain is completely compromised. Dave http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/in...ia/16NUKE.html NY Times March 16, 2004 Pakistani's Nuclear Earnings: $100 Million By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD OAK RIDGE, Tenn., March 15 — The Bush administration said Monday that the clandestine network created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, netted $100 million for the technology it sold to Libya alone, and for the first time officials displayed a carefully selected sample of the type of equipment that the network sold to arm Libya, Iran and North Korea. Under extraordinary security — guards with automatic weapons stationed every few yards — officials showed reporters the most basic of the high-speed centrifuges that Dr. Khan marketed to countries seeking to enrich uranium for bomb fuel. Many of the centrifuges, flown out of Libya and stored here at one of America's first nuclear weapons laboratories, were still in their original packing crates. But the most critical components shipped out of Tripoli — including 4,000 more advanced centrifuges and the drawings Dr. Khan sold showing how to turn the uranium into crude warheads — were kept out of view. So were labels and other evidence that would link specific products to Pakistan, Germany, Malaysia and a dozen other countries where Dr. Khan's network of suppliers and manufacturers operated over the past decade. North Korea and Iran are believed to have purchased essentially the same package of technology that Libya obtained after negotiating with Dr. Khan in the mid-1990's. The event here on Monday was part of a weeklong effort by the administration to trumpet what it views as one of its biggest foreign-policy accomplishments growing out of the invasion of Iraq a year ago. "We've had a huge success here," said Spencer Abraham, the secretary of energy, who is in charge of overseeing the American nuclear stockpile. Surrounded by the cache of nuclear equipment, Mr. Abraham argued that the decision announced in December by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to disarm completely and rapidly came because of "the resolve that we and others conveyed in Iraq, which has forced countries to make a choice." Mr. Abraham said that virtually all of the 55,000 pounds of nuclear gear already brought out of Libya, which appears headed to a lifting of most American economic sanctions next month, now rests here, behind barbed-wire fences in the hills of eastern Tennessee. The equipment, he said, was "the largest recovery, by weight, ever conducted under U.S nonproliferation efforts" but was "just the tip of the iceberg" because a shipload of Libyan equipment is currently sailing to the United States. Such work, he said, "spells out our commitment to winning the war against terrorism." Libya never began to produce enriched uranium, though experts here said that if assembled, the equipment that the United States, the International Atomic Energy Agency and other nations have recovered could have produced enough fuel to make up to 10 nuclear weapons a year. Libya had obtained a bit less than half of the 10,000 centrifuges it hoped to operate, before determining that the program was not worth the diplomatic cost. "The program was much more advanced than we assessed," Robert Joseph, who heads counterproliferation efforts in the National Security Council, said here. "It was much larger than we assessed." The $100 million estimate was nearly twice as high as the highest previous estimate of what Libya paid for its nuclear technology. That figure does not include what Iran and North Korea or other customers of the Khan network that the officials declined to identify Monday, citing continuing investigations, paid to the network of suppliers. On Saturday, Iran announced a freeze on inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to protest the terms of a resolution that chided the country for failing to cooperate fully with inspectors. On Monday, the head of the agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Washington that Iran had changed its position and would allow the inspections to resume on March 27. The $100 million figure does, however, explain how a government scientist like Mr. Khan could afford a lavish lifestyle, in Pakistan, in homes around the world and at his hotel in Mali. One official noted that given the relatively small number of principal players in the Khan network — maybe a dozen people in all — it "made it a very lucrative trade." "The network's financial dealings were deliberately complex and we do not yet have a complete picture," said Jim Wilkinson, a deputy national security adviser who made the trip here. "The developing picture, however, indicates that the Khan network received at least $100 million for supplying technology, equipment and know-how" to Libya, he said. "It was truly one-stop shopping." Under a tent in a parking lot of the heavily guarded complex here, officials set up a display of dozens of large wooden packing crates that contained Libya's disassembled nuclear program, as well as small number of items that they had declassified. Among them were four aluminum centrifuges, called P-1's, the nomenclature for the first generation of Pakistani centrifuges based on a design that Dr. Khan stole from Europe and used to make the uranium for the first Pakistani nuclear weapons. Gleaming, the aluminum tubes stood more than six feet tall, with three pipes coming out the top of each. The centrifuges, basically hollow metal tubes, spin at the speed of sound to separate uranium 235 — which is used as the main ingredient for bombs — from unneeded uranium 238. In front of the display lay a six-foot-long piece of cascade piping — the line that in an operating plant would tie the centrifuges together. A set of thousands of centrifuges, called a cascade, concentrates the rare U-235 isotope to make potent bomb fuel. Each centrifuge in a cascade makes the uranium a little more enriched in the U-235 isotope. |
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