Foreword

Project Butter Factory: Henk Slebos and the A.Q. Khan nuclear network
Frank Slijper, September 2007

In late May 1998, the mountains in
Balochistan, Pakistan’s remote and desolate
western province, shook and turned white
from the force of a nuclear explosion. It was
Pakistan’s first nuclear test, the culmination
of a nearly three decade long effort to match
neighbouring India as a nuclear armed state.
India, Pakistan’s neighbour, had tested its
weapons a few weeks earlier; its first test had
been twenty four years earlier.

In both countries, the scientists that built the
bomb were lauded as heroes. None more so
than Abdul Qadeer Khan, dubbed by many as
the “father of the Pakistani bomb”. He was
already a national figure. For over a decade,
he had been in the public eye, seen on television
and in the press receiving the highest
national honours and shaking hands with
successive Presidents and Prime Ministers.
One Prime Minister of Pakistan wrote about
him as “a national hero” who had given “a
sense of pride to our nation”.

A.Q. Khan was an unlikely ‘national hero’ for
Pakistan. He was born in 1936, in Bhopal,
India. Unlike millions of Indian muslims, he
did not move to Pakistan when the country
was created as a majority muslim state by a
partition of India that uprooted millions and
claimed countless lives. But as a boy in India,
he developed a passionate hatred for India
and for Hindus that was to shape his life.
Khan eventually moved to Pakistan in 1952.
But he did not stay. He left in 1961 to study
abroad – first in West Berlin, then in the
Netherlands, finally receiving his PhD in
metallurgy in Belgium. He was not to return
and settle in Pakistan until 1975. But within a
decade, this itinerant engineer, who had
spent more time living in India and Europe
than Pakistan, became a central figure in that
country’s nuclear weapons programme, and
soon afterwards a key player in the nuclear
efforts of several others.

Project Butter Factory builds on the earlier
report A.Q. Khan, Urenco and the
Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Technology
(Greenpeace, 2004) to tell an important part
of A. Q. Khan’s story, in particular how he
was able to set up a uranium enrichment programme
that produced highly enriched uranium
for making nuclear weapons, and how
he tried to help other countries do the same.
It details how his path to becoming a ‘national
hero’ relied on personal relationships, especially
with his college friend Henk Slebos,
and how they benefited from the drive for
profit in perhaps a thousand different companies
and corporations, and were not stopped
because of competing political and bureaucracatic
self-interests at work in many countries.
It also reveals how those involved justify
what they do by a belief in nuclear weapons
as an acceptable basis for national security.

The multi-national origin of the Pakistani
bomb should come as no surprise. It may that
no country has ever build a nuclear weapon
totally by itself. The Manhattan Project, the
United States’ successful World War II effort
to make the first atomic bomb, was an incredibly
international enterprise. It brought
together scientists from many countries, who
shared their nuclear knowledge, and relied on
the support of many governments.

The Manhattan Project was both the first
instance of successful nuclear proliferation
and the source of the second. Klaus Fuchs, a
German physicist who fled the Nazis and
moved to Britain, and then was sent (along
with many others) to join the US bomb programme,
secretly passed nuclear weapons
design information to the Soviet Union.
Fuchs justified his actions by citing the need
to help Russia fight the Nazis and that Russia
had to be be prepared to confront other great
powers which might be armed with nuclaer
weapons in future.

All subsequent nuclear weapons programs, to
some degree, also received help from outside.
The United States helped Britain and then
France. Russia helped China and North
Korea. France and Britain helped Israel. India
built its nuclear programme on the basis of
the over 1,000 scientists trained in nuclear
science and engineering in the United States,
as part of the Atoms for Peace Programme.
India’s first reactor was a British design and
the plutonium it used in its first bomb was
made in a Canadian supplied research reactor.

For its part, over a hundred Pakistani scientists
were trained in the US as part of Atoms
of Peace. One of them went on to become the
Chairman of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy
Commission and was responsible for the
nuclear weapons programme at the time A.Q.
Khan (who was not part of this programme)
returned from the Netherlands and set up the
Kahuta uranium enrichment facility. More
direct help has come from China.

In turn, Pakistan has helped those it chose to
for whatever reason. A.Q. Khan has been
complicit in the nuclear efforts in Iran, Libya
and North Korea, and offered to help Iraq
and perhaps others. Like his friend and partner,
Henk Slebos, A.Q. Khan has not paid a
high price for spreading nuclear technology.
After Pakistan was officially confronted with
information about his activities, and his subsequent
televised public confession, taking all
responsibility for his activities, in 2004
A.Q.Khan was confined to one of his palatial
homes in Islamabad. In July 20007, some
restrictions were lifted. He is now allowed to
entertain friends and to travel to see his relatives.

Today, there are nine states armed with
nuclear weapons. Mohamed el-Baradei,
Director-General of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, has warned that there are
another 20 or 30 “virtual nuclear weapons
states” that have the capacity to develop
nuclear weapons in a very short time span.
For these countries, and others less well prepared,
it may take a threat from an existing
nuclear-armed state, a change in leadership, a
new found desire for national power and
prestige, a resourceful scientist or unexpected
access to technology to tip the balance.

Why has it come to this? Part of the reason is
that all states who have or seek nuclear
weapons share a common disregard for
democracy and their own people — every
state that has developed nuclear weapons has
done so in secret from its people. Few people
know that the very first resolution passed by
United Nations General Assembly was a call
for plans “for the elimination from national
armaments of atomic weapons and of all
other major weapons adaptable to mass
destruction.” Even fewer know that in 1961
the UN General Assembly declared that “any
state using nuclear and thermo-nuclear
weapons is to be considered as violating the
Charter of the United Nations, as acting contrary
to the laws of humanity and as committing
a crime against mankind and civilisation”.

Project Butter Factory tries to draw some larger
lessons from the story of A.Q. Khan, Henk
Slebos, and the failed international effort to
control nuclear proliferation. It makes some
useful recommendations. But it recognises,
wisely, that if we are to do more than just slow
down the effort by states to become nuclear
armed, we need to move purposefully
towards ending the nuclear age.

Zia Mian

Princeton, July 2007