'Why Not An Islamic Bomb?': How Israel Planned & Failed To Stop Pakistan Going Nuclear

Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the godfather of Pakistan's nuclear program, is a national hero to almost 250 million Pakistanis, despite being considered a threat by former CIA Director George Tenet and former Mossad Chief Shabtai Shavit. Khan was born in 1936 and died in 2021 at the age of 85, and he was more responsible than anyone else for Pakistan developing a nuclear bomb. He ran a sophisticated and clandestine international network that assisted Iran, Libya, and North Korea with their nuclear programs. Khan believed that by building a nuclear bomb, he had saved his country from foreign threats, especially its nuclear-armed neighbor India. Pakistan first decided to build a bomb after India tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974, and Khan was working for a subcontractor of a major nuclear fuel company in Amsterdam at the time. He had access to top-secret areas of the facility and blueprints of the world's best centrifuges, which enriched natural uranium and turned it into bomb fuel. Khan set up a research laboratory in Rawalpindi in 1976, which produced enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, and he was confident that Pakistan had the capability to produce nuclear weapons by 1986. Despite opposition from Israel and India, Pakistan continued to develop its nuclear program, and Khan was a key figure in the country's success. Khan's motivation was in large part ideological, and he wanted to question the holier-than-thou attitude of the Americans and British. He was hailed as a national icon by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan after his death in 2021, and he is still widely remembered as a hero in Pakistan today.