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.