Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow for non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said Tuesday that Khan's network is "the biggest problem of proliferation of the past decade."
"At least a dozen countries sought to acquire nuclear technology through black market means," he said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. "This is a global problem of proliferation."
By Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
(CNSNews.com) - The Pakistan-based black market network responsible for providing Iran, North Korea and Libya with nuclear technology could resume nuclear proliferation, an international think tank is warning.
Despite the Bush administration's assertion that the network headed by disgraced former Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been rolled up, experts are not convinced that it no longer poses a threat.
Khan sold designs for centrifuges -- devices that spin at high speed and extract fissile material from uranium for building nuclear weapons. Not long after his illicit activities were exposed in 2004, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pardoned Khan.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow for non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said Tuesday that Khan's network is "the biggest problem of proliferation of the past decade."
"At least a dozen countries sought to acquire nuclear technology through black market means," he said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. "This is a global problem of proliferation."
Fitzpatrick is the author of a new IISS report on the network, which operated for almost two decades. He said Khan had "significantly lowered the technical barriers to nuclear weapons development," by digitizing the information necessary to create nuclear weapons so it can be easily disseminated.
After Khan confessed to passing on nuclear know-how to rogue states in the late 1980s and 1990s, President Bush said his network was "out of business."
"Governments around the world worked closely with us to unravel the Khan network, and to put an end to his criminal enterprise," Bush said in February 2004. "A.Q. Khan has confessed his crimes, and his top associates are out of business.
"The government of Pakistan is interrogating the network's members, learning critical details that will help them prevent it from ever operating again," the president added.
But Fitzpatrick argued that there remained "unknown elements that have not been rolled up."
Fitzpatrick acknowledged that "today's black market suppliers are far less integrated than Khan's one-stop shopping. His enterprise was unique in its ability to provide nearly the entire array of materials and services needed to produce highly enriched uranium."
At the same time, Fitzpatrick added, "at least some of Khan's associates appear to have escaped law enforcement attention and could, after a period of lying low, resume their black market business."
The IISS report says that Khan was not the only nuclear arms merchant and Pakistan was not the only country implicated in the network.
"Most of Khan's foreign accomplices remain free," it states.
"The few prosecutions and light sentences that have been imposed to date are not commensurate with the scale of the proliferation that the Khan network abetted. Nor do they create a credible deterrent to any future proliferation networks," the report says.
At the time, Bush hailed Khan's arrest as a victory and pointed to other programs including the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a multi-nation effort to stop and search ships suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction-related cargoes.
Fitzpatrick said international efforts that are underway are not enough to stop proliferation. He said there were not enough laws in place. Fitzpatrick also blamed lax enforcement of the laws that do exist and a lack of strict penalties for violating those laws.
A State Department official Tuesday disputed Fitzpatrick's remarks, saying "statements like that are meant to be provocative and they are provocative."
"We take them seriously but we've put a number of safeguards in place to try to prevent proliferation networks," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on behalf of the State Department.
"We're doing everything we can to make sure these networks don't reconstitute, and Khan's isn't the only one. There's a number of safeguards that are in place now that weren't before," the official added.
The official cited the PSI, financial tracking and U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540.
The resolution, unanimously adopted in April 2004, mandates governments to put in place and enforce "appropriate" and "effective" laws, controls and security measures to make it more difficult for terrorists to acquire WMDs or the means to deliver them.
