The Armageddon Conspiracy
LGF
TIME Magazine’s new issue (not yet online) contains an alarming report that the nuclear black market run by Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan was able to spread its tentacles much further than previously believed:
New York, NY - U.S. officials are investigating whether Khan’s network might have sold nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, according to a source in Pakistan’s Defense Ministry. At a moment when the international community is focused on a potential showdown with Iran, an extensive TIME investigation has revealed that Khan’s network played a bigger role in helping Tehran and Pyongyang than had been previously disclosed. TIME’s exclusive report on how A.Q.Khan became the world’s most dangerous nuclear trafficker hits newsstands Monday, Feb. 7.
The list of suspected nuclear clients is dizzying. Investigators believe that as head of Pakistan’s nuclear research laboratory, Khan traveled the world for more than a decade, visiting countries in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, TIME’s Bill Powell and Tim McGirk report. U.S. and IAEA investigators believe that Khan also traveled to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and to such African countries as Sudan, Ivory Coast and Niger. The purpose of those trips remains unclear, but intelligence officials have hunches: Saudi Arabia and Egypt are believed to be in the market for nuclear technology, and many African countries are rich in raw uranium ore, TIME reports.
Another article from the new issue says that Iran has completed the design of a nuclear detonator:
New York - The International Atomic Energy Agency has discovered that, despite its agreement to temporarily suspend all activities related to uranium enrichment, Iran was continuing to do maintenance work on a uranium-enrichment plant in southern Iran, TIME’s Daniel Eisenberg reports.
At the same time, the Iranians have allegedly finished designing a prototype of a detonator for a nuclear bomb, according to an opposition group based in Paris. Taking their cue from North Korea, the Iranians have seen “that you can extend a negotiating process and still build nukes,” says Bruno Tertrais, senior research fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.
Despite repeated entreaties from European government officials, the U.S. has so far refused to join the multilateral talks, which center on persuading Iran to shut down its uranium-enrichment work in exchange for a package of economic and political goodies. “You have to have a good cop and a bad cop [on every issue],” Mohamed el-Baradei, director of the IAEA, told TIME. “But they should share the same objective.”
So let us not talk falsely now,
The hour’s getting late.
— Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower |
