The network led by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan shipped partly enriched uranium directly to Libya aboard a Pakistani airplane in 2001, providing the fuel stock in addition to the designs and technology to make a nuclear bomb, according to a report by Malaysian investigators released Friday.
The report provides a wealth of evidence that businessmen and engineers in Turkey, Germany, Switzerland and Britain, as well as Dubai and Malaysia, were closely involved in recent years in Libya’s clandestine nuclear program. It is based primarily on the Malaysian authorities’ interrogation of B.S.A. Tahir, 44, a key middleman in Khan’s global nuclear-trading network.
The shipment of uranium was one of many deliveries of nuclear components to Libya that began with a meeting in Istanbul in 1997 between Khan and Libyan officials, the Malaysian report says.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear monitoring group, confirmed in a report that Libya received a shipment in February 2001 that included 1.87 tons of uranium hexaflouride, a form that is a standard raw material for centrifuges. The uranium required major further enrichment to reach bomb-grade quality, nuclear experts said. The amount was ideal for testing centrifuges but also would be sufficient to make one small bomb, they said.
The two reports make clear that Khan and his associates were directly involved in providing Libya the essential weapons component that also is the most difficult to procure: the uranium fuel.
The report from the IAEA was obtained from a Western diplomat. It described a Libyan nuclear weapons effort that was considerably more ambitious than previously known. However, Libya was not close to producing a bomb when it decided to disclose and abandon its nuclear program last year.
The IAEA reported that Libya made a strategic decision in July 1995 to redouble its nuclear efforts. In 1997, it said, “foreign manufacturers” provided 20 preassembled centrifuges of the P-1 type, a model that Khan developed. Libya also obtained components for an additional 200 P-1 centrifuges.
The agency found that from late 2000 to April 2002, much of that gear was made ready for use. But then Libyan officials decided to dismantle it and put into storage “for security reasons.”
Starting in 2000, Libya embarked on a parallel effort to acquire more advanced centrifuges with rotors made of maraging steel, a superhard alloy, and known as P-2, also a signature design of Khan’s.
Libya received two of the advanced centrifuges in September 2000, the IAEA report said, and ordered 10,000 more, with parts starting to arrive in large quantities in December 2002. All were made outside Libya.
The report said Libya received no more steel rotors–the heart of the advanced machine. It added, however, that Libya acquired a “large stock of maraging steel” to make centrifuge parts and that Libyan technicians trained for such work at foreign sites on at least three occasions.
Private experts said that 10,000 machines, if successfully completed and operated, could make enough highly enriched uranium each year for about 10 nuclear weapons. However, the report said that Libya was only in the planning stages.
