Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgical engineer who put Pakistan on the path to becoming a nuclear weapons power in the early 1970s and became known as the father of his country’s nuclear bomb program, died Oct. 10 at a hospital in the capital, Islamabad. He was believed to be 85.
The cause was covid-19, his family said.
Dr. Khan was mired in controversy that began even before he returned to Pakistan in the 1970s from the Netherlands, where he had worked at a nuclear research facility. He was later accused of stealing from the Dutch facility the centrifuge uranium-enrichment technology that he would use to develop Pakistan’s first nuclear weapon, according to research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Dr. Khan offered to launch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program in 1974 after neighboring India conducted its first “peaceful nuclear explosion.”
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He reached out to then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, offering technology for Pakistan’s own nuclear weapons program. Still smarting from the 1971 loss of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh, as well as the capture of 90,000 Pakistani soldiers by India, Bhutto embraced the offer, famously saying, “We [Pakistanis] will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will have our own” nuclear bomb.
Since then, Pakistan has relentlessly pursued its nuclear weapons program in tandem with India. Both are declared nuclear weapons states after they conducted tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests in 1998.
Pakistan’s nuclear program and Dr. Khan’s involvement have long been subjects of allegations and criticism.
Dr. Khan was accused by the United States of trading nuclear secrets to neighbor Iran and to North Korea in the 1990s after Washington sanctioned Pakistan for its nuclear weapons program.
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For 10 years during the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan, successive U.S. presidents certified that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons. The certification was necessary under American law to allow U.S. aid to anti-communist Afghan rebels through Pakistan.
But in 1990, just months after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Washington slapped Pakistan with crippling sanctions ending all aid to the country, including military and humanitarian assistance.
Pakistan was accused of selling nuclear weapons technology to North Korea in exchange for its Nodong missiles, which were capable of carrying nuclear warheads. A 2003 Congressional Research Service report said that while it was difficult to pinpoint the genesis of Pakistan’s nuclear cooperation with North Korea, it probably began in the mid-1990s.
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At home in Pakistan, especially among radical religious parties, Dr. Khan was heralded as a hero.
But Dr. Khan was rejected by Pakistan’s dictator president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, after 2001, when details of Dr. Khan’s alleged sales of nuclear secrets came under renewed scrutiny. He bitterly denounced Musharraf and his attempt to distance the state from his activities, always denying that he engaged in any secret selling or clandestine nuclear weapons technology exchanges.
In recent years, Dr. Khan mostly lived out of the public eye. Tributes from fellow scientists and Pakistani politicians began soon after his death.
Prime Minister Imran Khan called him a “national icon” whose nuclear weapons program “provided us security against an aggressive, much larger nuclear neighbor.” Fellow scientist Samar Mubarakmand said Dr. Khan was a national treasure who defied Western attempts to stifle Pakistan’s nuclear program.
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“It was unthinkable for the West that Pakistan would make any breakthrough, but finally they had to acknowledge Dr. Khan’s achievement of making the country’s nuclear weapons,” he said.
Dr. Khan was born in Bhopal, India, in 1935 or 1936, and grew up in Pakistan after the partition of India, which created the new majority-Muslim country in 1947. He studied at a university in Karachi before attending colleges in Europe. He received a doctorate in metallurgical engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
Survivors include his wife, Hendrina “Henny” Khan, and two daughters.
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