Investigators have determined that the nuclear weapon blueprints found in Libya from the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan were of his own relatively crude type of bomb - not the more advanced models that Pakistan developed and successfully tested, U.S. and European arms experts have said in interviews.
The analysis of the blueprints, which establish a new link between Khan and the underground nuclear black market now under global scrutiny, has heartened investigators in Europe and the United States because his design is seen as less threatening in terms of the spread of nuclear weapons.
"If you had to have a design circulating around the world, we'd be worse off if it was a design other than Khan's," said a U.S. weapons expert who is familiar with the Libyan case.
However, European and U.S. investigators said they feared that Khan and his network of shadowy middlemen might have peddled the weapons blueprints to other nations that have not yet come to light. They also said the Libyan findings gave new credence to the theory that Khan apparently attempted more than a decade ago to sell a nuclear weapon design to Iraq.
Pakistani officials have focused their recent disclosures on Khan's illicit spread of equipment to enrich uranium to produce nuclear fuel, and have said little or nothing of the blueprints for a nuclear warhead that went to Libya, which are considered more sensitive. To the amazement of inspectors, the blueprints discovered in Libya were wrapped in plastic bags from an Islamabad dry cleaner. "The Libyans said they got it as a bonus," an official said of the plans.
The centrifuge equipment and warhead designs from Khan's laboratories in Pakistan were discovered in Libya after the country's leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, agreed to dismantle his secret nuclear program, opening it to U.S. and U.N. nuclear officials.
Late last month, a 747 aircraft was chartered by the U.S. government for the sole purpose of carrying the small box with the warhead designs from Libya to Dulles airport near Washington. They are now undergoing analysis.
The U.S. weapons expert said Western analysts, while relieved to find the blueprint was of Khan's design, were not overjoyed. "A bad bomb is still a nuke," he said. "It can still do pretty terrible things to your city."
Khan is known in Pakistan as the father of the Pakistani bomb or the founder of its nuclear weapons program, but Western experts say the credit is not all his. A metallurgist, he is an expert at building centrifuges - hollow metal tubes that spin very fast to enrich natural uranium in its rare U-235 isotope, which is an excellent bomb fuel. His mastery of the difficult art proved vital to Pakistan's acquiring a nuclear arsenal.
But other Pakistani scientists, Western experts said, had far greater success in turning the enriched uranium into nuclear warheads.
To develop the armaments, the U.S. expert said, Pakistan ran "two parallel weapons programs, one good and one bad; Khan ran the bad one." Khan's weapon was inferior in terms of such things as size, power and efficiency. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, the nation's official authority for nuclear development, ran the more successful program.
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