Atomic Agent

The stint with Siemens may have been responsible for Qadeer moving to Germany to study. That was the take-off point. Qadeer’s professional education was entirely in western Europe. By 1972 he had reached the level of senior metallurgist/deputy manager at FDO Engineering Consultants in Holland.

Qadeer left the company in 1975, taking with him designs to make bomb material. He landed in Pakistan, all set to boost the nuclear weapons programme started by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto shortly after the 1971 war.

At a personal level, Qadeer claims to be the ‘‘kindest man in Pakistan’’ and keeps a small menagerie of pets. Most mornings he was to be seen taking a handful of peanuts to Margala Hills, not far from his expansive bungalow in Islamabad, to feed monkeys. Colleagues remember him as an ‘‘egomaniacal lightweight’’ given to exaggerating his expertise.

This attribute became evident in January 1987. Speaking to Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar — and stung by his interviewer’s assertion that Pakistani scientists were not capable of making the bomb — Qadeer angrily retorted they had already done so!

Yet, despite widespread assumptions he did little to discourage, Qadeer was never in charge of the actual nuclear weapons development. He did work at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Corporation (PAEC) for a few months in 1976, and was considered a ‘‘showman’’ by its head, Munir Ahmad Khan. But weapon development and eventual testing were carried out by PAEC.

This is why Samar Mubarakmand was in charge of the May 1998 tests at Chagai; and on the first anniversary of those tests admitted Pakistan had tested a nuclear device in the spring of 1983, a test generally believed to have been carried out at China’s Lop Nor site.

But it was Qadeer who made the claim in 1984 that Pakistan had achieved nuclear weapons capability. The army-led establishment of Pakistan was content with the duality, since it provided some sort of cover for clandestine operations.

Qadeer was well suited for a role to project the nuclear programme as an Islamic bomb. Bhutto may have used the term initially, but it is often ignored that General Zia ul-Haq, who brought extensive Islamisation into Pakistan’s society and governance, said in 1986, ‘‘It is our right to obtain nuclear technology. And when we acquire this technology, the Islamic world shall possess it with us.’’

So acquisition and proliferation ran together, the latter if not the former overseen by Abdul Qadeer Khan. He was well rewarded for it — becoming a popular figure in his country, so much so that it won him a presidential pardon this past week, and enough money to, among other things, build himself a hotel in Timbuktu.

Given recent days, he could certainly do with some rest and recuperation. Perhaps a lifetime of it.