16th
June 2008
Some Western military
and intelligence were shocked to learn that Iran had the
blueprints for making a nuclear warhead that could fit
onto its Shehab-3 missiles. The discovery was released
by the former UN weapons inspector, David Albright,
Sunday, June 16, ahead of the report on his
investigation of the nuclear smuggling ring run by the
father of the Pakistan nuclear bomb Abdul Qadeer Khan.
He alleged that the nuclear blueprints passed to Libya,
Iran and North Korea included “previously undisclosed
designs for a compact warhead that could fit on Iran’s
medium-range ballistic missiles.”
On
May 22, Swiss President Pascal Couchepin, disclosed
that, last December, the destruction had been ordered of
a batch of 30,000 documents detailing construction plans
for nuclear weapons, gas ultra-centrifuges to enrich
weapons-grade uranium and guided missile delivery
systems , evidence in a criminal case of a Swiss
family of three engineers involved in the Khan ring.
Sources disclosed on
May 30 that these nuclear blueprints were sold in
underhand deals to those countries - and possibly also
to al Qaeda - in the second half of the 1990s. Tehran
has therefore had those designs for between 10 and 13
years.
This discovery makes
nonsense of the supposedly definitive judgment in
Western and Israel intelligence that Iran lacks the
technology for building a nuclear missile delivery
system. Because of these estimates, Western governments
have been able to keep their sanctions-cum-diplomatic
track with Iran rolling as though tomorrow would never
come.
It is now evident
that not only North Korea and Iran have known for some
time how to build and deliver a nuclear warhead, but
unknown recipients of A.Q. Khan’s merchandise, including
terrorist organizations, may also command hazardous
nuclear knowledge.
The three Swiss
engineers, members of the Tinner family, are the father,
Friedrich, whose ties with Khan went back decades, and
his sons, Urs and Marco.
The
Khan ring set up marketing headquarters in Dubai and
Malaysia. The brothers have awaited trial for four years
in a Swiss jail. Their father is out on bail and
confined to Switzerland. The evidence against Urs
Tinner, the hard disk he stole containing the
incriminating nuclear documents, has now been destroyed
by the Swiss authorities under the supervision of the UN
nuclear watchdog.
Military experts
reported on May 30: If Urs Tinner, a small cog in the
Khan network, was able to steal a hard drive containing
a mass of the network’s nuclear secrets, three
conclusions are inescapable:
1. That Khan did not
retain an efficient security system for the data he was
selling. Therefore, his system was full of holes and his
confederates and agents, whether employed on the
technical or marketing side of the business, were able
to help themselves to documents, diagrams and other
illicit nuclear materials that were put on sale and,
perhaps, go into business on their own.
2. It is an open
secret among the American and Western intelligence
services involved in uncovering the Khan ring that large
sections are still going strong out in Pakistan, the Far
East and the Middle East through channels still
unexposed. They are bound to assume that the documents
destroyed by the Swiss government may exist in copies
still in circulation.
3. Some of their
holders may have hung onto them for the last four or
five years and then destroyed them when the Khan ring
was exposed, for fear of being linked to the trafficker.
On the other hand, it is possible that some of A. Q.
Khan’s agents and accomplices sold his nuclear plans and
secrets to terrorists linked to al Qaeda.
