Libya’s quest for nuclear weapons was aided by a sophisticated black market that offered weapons designs, technical advice and thousands of sensitive parts — some of them apparently made in secret factories, according to diplomats and experts familiar with the probe of Libya’s weapons program.
The scale of the black-market operation–described by one expert as an “international supermarket” for nuclear parts–exceeds anything seen before, and it was undetected by Western intelligence agencies until recent months, the officials said. The same operation also is believed to have aided Iran, they said.
The smuggling enterprise supplied Libya thousands of parts for gas centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, as well as machine tools for making additional centrifuges, the sources said. It also provided Libya designs for making a nuclear bomb, officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency disclosed Friday.
Investigators believe some of the centrifuge parts came from factories built expressly to make nuclear components for the black market, a radical development in nuclear proliferation. U.S. and IAEA officials are investigating one possible manufacturing site in Malaysia, with the help of that country’s government, officials said. U.S. officials have visited the site in the past two weeks, the sources said.
The identities of the people behind the smuggling operation have not been disclosed, but investigators say the centrifuges provided to Libya are of the same design as machines used in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. On Friday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that scientists from his country appeared to have sold nuclear designs to other nations, probably “for personal financial gain.” He denied that the Pakistani government knew of the sales at the time.
Objective: Enriched material
Most of the technical assistance was aimed at helping Libya produce enriched uranium, which can be used in weapons or in nuclear power plants. But the discovery of bomb designs strongly indicates an intention to build weapons, the officials said. The IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, disclosed that the designs had been turned over by Libyan scientists and would soon be removed from the country.
“The bomb designs have been placed under seal in Libya,” said IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky.
Details about suppliers to Libya’s clandestine nuclear program have emerged from a monthlong investigation by U.S., British and United Nations inspectors who have been given access to formerly secret nuclear facilities in and around Tripoli. The visits were granted in December after Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s announcement that he was renouncing weapons of mass destruction.
While Libya’s overall nuclear progress was described as modest — most of the parts it obtained were still packed in boxes — the disclosures about Libya’s procurement network surprised non-proliferation officials on both sides of the Atlantic. The U.S. and Britain have not commented on the results of the investigation, and officials who agreed to interviews did so only on the condition that they not be named.
“A moral barrier has been breached,” said one diplomat familiar with the Libya investigation. “Always, in the past, what we saw were single states, acting in their interests, looking to make nuclear weapons. Now we have atomic bomb factories.”
David Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq who has closely tracked the Libyan investigation, said Libya’s centrifuge supply network was similar to the one developed by Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s — only much bigger.
“The fact that Libya could go out and buy an entire centrifuge plant without anyone detecting it is startling,” said Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “It represents a failure of the export-control system, and most certainly a failure of intelligence.”
Much of the information about Libya’s black-market suppliers came from interviews with Libyan scientists and physical inspections of crate after crate of nuclear parts. The interviews and inspections revealed nearly a decade of efforts by Libya to master the difficult arts of uranium enrichment and weapons design, with increasing assistance from outsiders.
The centrifuges acquired by Libya are complex machines that spin at supersonic speeds to extract tiny amounts of weapons-grade fissile material from uranium. It takes hundreds of centrifuges working in tandem for months to create enough enriched uranium for a single bomb.
Purchases began in ’90s
Beginning in the late 1990s, Libya began buying components for a simple gas centrifuge but switched to a more sophisticated centrifuge design made of a high-strength metal called maraging steel, knowledgeable officials said. Both types of centrifuges were developed by Pakistani scientists in the 1970s and 1980s.
Officials familiar with the investigation said Libya had arranged to buy 10,000 of the more advanced centrifuges, enough to produce material for several bombs a year.
Some of the crates examined by inspectors this month in Tripoli contained what officials described as ready-to-assemble “kits” for centrifuges.
“Everything you needed was there,” one source said. “Someone had gathered the parts from all over and put them together. The boxes even had company nameplates and quality-control stamps.”
Libyan scientists told inspectors that the parts came with a customer-support service: The scientists were given the names of contacts who provide technical assistance on any matter, at any time.
