‘Pakistan may have helped North Korea build nuclear bomb’

WASHINGTON - Pakistan may helped North Korea find a second way to build nuclear weapons as early as the 1990s, the Washington Post reported Monday citing a previously unpublicised account by the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb.

North Korea constructed a plant to manufacture a gas needed for uranium enrichment and may have been enriching uranium on a small scale by 2002, with “maybe 3,000 or even more” centrifuges, it said citing notorious Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The influential US daily also quoted Khan as saying that Pakistan helped the country with vital machinery, drawings and technical advice for at least six years.

The Post said Khan’s account could not be independently corroborated as North Korea’s nuclear programme is among the world’s most opaque.

But one US intelligence official and a US diplomat cited by the Post said Khan’s information adds to their suspicions that North Korea has long pursued the enrichment of uranium in addition to making plutonium for bombs. It may also help explain Pyongyang’s assertion in September that it is in the final stages of such enrichment.

Khan’s account of the pilot plant, which he says North Korea built without help, is included in a narrative that depicts relations between the two countries’ scientists as exceptionally close for nearly a decade.

Khan says, for example, that during a visit to North Korea in 1999, he toured a mountain tunnel. There his hosts showed him boxes containing components of three finished nuclear warheads, which he was told, could be assembled for use atop missiles within an hour.

“While they explained the construction (design of their bombs), they quietly showed me the six boxes” containing split cores for the warheads, as well as “64 ignitors/detonators per bomb packed in 6 separate boxes,” Khan said.

Khan said, however, there was a tacit agreement between the two governments that his laboratory “would advise and guide them with the centrifuge programme and that the North Koreans would help Pakistan in fitting the nuclear warhead into the Ghauri missile” - his country’s name for its version of the Nodong missiles that Pakistan bought from North Korea.

Pakistan gave North Korea vital equipment and software, and in return North Korea also “taught us how to make Krytrons” - extremely fast electrical switches that are used in nuclear detonations and are tightly controlled in international commerce.

Contradicting Pakistani statements that the government had no involvement in such sensitive transfers, Khan says his assistance was approved by top political and Army officials, including then Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who currently oversees Pakistan’s atomic arsenal.