A China nuclear arms link is reported
A China nuclear arms link is reported
Data from Libya may reflect chain of Asia connections
By Joby Warrick and Peter Slevin, Washington Post, 2/15/2004
WASHINGTON — Investigators have identified China as the origin of nuclear-weapon designs found in Libya last year. Such a connection would expose another link in a chain that passed nuclear secrets through Pakistan to other countries in Asia and the Middle East, according to government officials and arms specialists.
The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded evidence of a long-suspected Chinese role in transferring nuclear information to Pakistan in the early 1980s, the officials and specialists said. The designs were later resold to Libya by Pakistani scientists through a nuclear trading network that is now the focus of an international inquiry, added the officials and specialists, based in the United States and Europe.
The packet of documents, some of them written in Chinese characters, contain detailed, step-by-step instructions for assembling an implosion-type nuclear bomb that could fit on a large ballistic missile.
Also included were technical instructions for manufacturing individual components for the device, the officials and experts said.
“It was just what you’d have on the factory floor: It tells you what torque to use on the bolts and what glue to use on the parts,” said a weapons specialist who has reviewed the blueprints. He described the designs as “very, very old,” but “very well-engineered.”
US intelligence officials concluded years ago that China provided assistance to Pakistan in building its first nuclear weapon. That assistance appears to have ended in the 1980s.
China’s actions “were irresponsible and raise questions about what else China provided to Pakistan’s nuclear program,” said David Albright, a nuclear physicist and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq who has been briefed on the materials found in Libya.
The package of documents was turned over to US officials in November after the Libyan leader, Colonel Moammar Khadafy, decided to renounce weapons of mass destruction and open his country’s weapons laboratories to international inspection. The blueprints, which were flown to Washington last month, have been analyzed by specialists from the United States, Britain, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog.
Weapons specialists in Libya also found equipment used in making enriched uranium, the essential ingredient in nuclear weapons. It was that discovery that led to the exposure of a rogue nuclear trading network that officials say funneled technology and parts to Libya as well as Iran and North Korea. A central figure in the network, Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist, acknowledged last month that he had passed nuclear secrets to others. Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, then pardoned Khan.
Of the many proliferation activities linked to Khan’s network, the selling of weapons designs is viewed as the most serious. The documents found in Libya contained most of the information needed to assemble a bomb, assuming that the builder could acquire the plutonium or highly enriched uranium needed for a nuclear explosion, according to US and European weapons specialists familiar with the blueprints.
Libya appears to have made only minimal progress toward building a weapon and had no missile in its arsenal capable of carrying the 1,000-pound nuclear device depicted in the drawings, the officials said.
“This design would be highly useful to countries such as Iran and North Korea,” said Albright, of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, where the nonconventional weapons programs of both states have been studied. The design “appears deliverable by North Korea’s Nodong missile, Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, and ballistic missiles Iraq was pursuing just prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War,” he said.
Such a relatively simple design also might be coveted by terrorist groups who seek nuclear weapons, but who lack the technical sophistication or infrastructure to build a modern weapon, said a urope-based weapons specialist familiar with the blueprints. Although most of the essential design elements were included, a few key parts were missing, the officials and specialists said. Some investigators have speculated that the missing papers could simply have been lost or perhaps they weren’t yet provided, possibly because they were being withheld pending payments.
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