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Abdul Kadir Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Passed away on sunday.
He was praised in Pakistan for transforming it into the world’s first Islamic nuclear-weapon power. But he is regarded as a dangerous traitor by the West, responsible for smuggling technology to rogue countries.
The nuclear scientist died in the capital Islamabad at the age of 85 after he was recently hospitalized for COVID-19.
He is regarded as a national hero because he puts the country on a par with neighboring India in the atomic realm and makes its defense “indestructible”.
But when he was accused of illegally proliferating nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, he found himself at the center of controversy.
Khan was effectively placed under house arrest in Islamabad in 2004 because he admitted to operating a proliferation network in these three countries.
In 2006, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, but recovered after surgery.
The court ended his house arrest in February 2009, but his actions are closely guarded, and every time he leaves his home in the tree-lined upscale area of Islamabad, he is accompanied by the authorities.
After the death of Pakistan’s late nuclear scientist Abdul Kadir Khan, security guards stood guard near his residence [Aamir Qureshi/AFP]Key contribution
Khan was born in Bhopal, India on April 1, 1936, when his family immigrated to Pakistan during the bloody division of the subcontinent at the end of British colonial rule in 1947, when he was a little boy.
He obtained a science degree from Karachi University in 1960, then studied metallurgical engineering in Berlin, and then completed advanced studies in the Netherlands and Belgium.
An important contribution to Pakistan’s nuclear program is the purchase of a blueprint for a uranium centrifuge, which converts uranium into weapon-grade fuel for nuclear fissile material.
He was accused of stealing it from the Netherlands while working for the Anglo-Dutch nuclear engineering consortium Urenco and bringing it back to Pakistan in 1976.
After returning to Pakistan, then Prime Minister Zolfikar Ali Bhuttojan Khan was in charge of the government’s new uranium enrichment project.
By 1978, his team had completed uranium enrichment, and by 1984, they were preparing to detonate the nuclear device, Khan later said in an interview with the newspaper.
The 1998 nuclear test put Pakistan under international sanctions and its economy plummeted.
In March 2001, then President Pervez Musharraf allegedly lifted the chairmanship of the Kahuta Research Laboratory under pressure from the United States and appointed him as a special adviser, Khan’s halo It starts to darken.
But Pakistan’s nuclear agency never expected that its most respected hero would be questioned.
The move was made after Islamabad received a letter from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN watchdog agency, which accused Pakistani scientists of selling nuclear knowledge.
Khan said in a speech to the Pakistan Institute of National Affairs in 1990 that he was dealing with the world market while developing Pakistan’s nuclear program.
“We can’t make every piece of equipment domestically,” he said.
“I saved the country”
Khan was pardoned by Musharraf after pleading guilty, but later retracted his remarks.
“When I made Pakistan a nuclear country, I saved the country for the first time, and when I admitted and blamed myself on myself, I saved the country again,” Khan said in an interview with Agence France-Presse in 2008 Said that he was effectively placed under house arrest at the time.
This scientist believes that nuclear defense is the best deterrent.
After Pakistan conducted an atomic test in 1998 in response to India’s test, Khan said that Pakistan “never wanted to build nuclear weapons, it was forced to do so”.
About ten years ago, Khan tried his luck on the political stage and formed a political party, Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Pakistan (Save Pakistan) in July 2012, hoping to win on the basis of the respect he still enjoys in Pakistan vote.
But he disbanded it a year later because none of its 111 candidates won seats in the national elections.
In the same year, Khan also sparked a new controversy in an interview with the Urdu-language newspaper Daily Jang. He said that he transferred nuclear technology to two countries under the direction of the killed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
He did not name these countries, nor did he say that in the afternoon of the two elections that were assassinated in 2007, orders were said to have been issued.
“I am not independent, but I must obey the Prime Minister’s orders,” he was quoted as saying.
Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party denied that this statement was “unfounded and unfounded”.
Even after years, none of these controversies seem to weaken Khan’s popularity.
He regularly writes column articles for the popular Jang newspaper and often promotes the value of science education.
Many schools, universities, research institutes and charity hospitals across Pakistan are named after him, and his portrait is decorated with their logo, stationery and website.
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