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Pak rejects report about receiving bomb-grade uranium from China | Hours after a report in one of the leading US newspapers reported that China had provided weapons-grade uranium,
sufficient for making two atomic bombs, to Pakistan in 1982, Islamabad has rejected the report terming it as 'baseless'. "Pakistan strongly rejects the assertions
in the article that is evidently timed to malign Pakistan and China," The Dawn
quoted Foreign Office spokesperson Abdul Basit, as saying. "This is yet another
attempt to divert attention from the overt and covert support being extended by
some states to the Indian nuclear programme since its inception and intensified
more recently," Basit added. According to disgraced nuclear scientist Dr. A Q
Khan's accounts in The Washington Post, the transfer of nuclear fuel was 'part
of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and
Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate
act of proliferation by a nuclear power.' "The uranium cargo came with a blueprint
for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself
kit that significantly speeded Pakistan's bomb effort. The transfer also started
a chain of proliferation," the newspaper quoted Khan, who is currently under house
arrest in Pakistan, as saying. "China sent Pakistan 15 tons of uranium hexafluoride
(UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan's centrifuges, which were difficult to produce
on our own. The gas enabled the laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium
in 1982. Chinese scientists helped the Pakistanis solve other nuclear weapons
challenges, but as their competence rose, so did the fear of top Pakistani officials
that Israel or India might pre-emptively strike key nuclear sites," he added.
Khan, 72, has been effectively under house arrest in Islamabad since February
2004, when he confessed on television to sending nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya
and North Korea, although he later retracted his remarks. Military ruler and then
president General Pervez Musharraf pardoned Khan in 2004, but he was kept at his
residence, guarded by troops and intelligence agents. |
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