Abdullah Al Madani: Two outstanding nuclear scientists, two different paths
Avul Paker Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam in India and Abdul Qadeer Khan in Pakistan are both Muslim, miracle men, and have been known as the fathers of the nuclear bomb in their respective countries. The latter, however, is now facing humiliation and a trial, while the former is happily fulfilling his daily duties as the president of India.
The reason cannot but be attributed to the different political systems and the accompanying conditions under which each man has managed his life and career.
Kalam was born in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1931 to a poor Muslim family. After graduating in science from St. Joseph's College in Tiruchi, he studied aeronautical engineering in Chennai and joined Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. as a trainee.
India's well-established secular, democratic system, in which opportunities to climb up to the top are ensured to every citizen and are only conditioned by one's determination, loyalty to the country and academic achievements, helped Kalam emerge as the czar of science and technology in the country in two decades.
The boat owner's son, who sold newspapers as a child to save money for buying books, became proud of his national identity, and dedicated his knowledge and efforts for his country and people rather than being prejudiced towards the Muslim minority in India or serving other Muslim countries.
In his life and mission, he totally depended on local educational institutions and India's indigenous resources and capabilities, to the extent that his travel abroad was limited to a single trip to the US in 1963. Probably, these facts explain why Indians describe Kalam as "200 per cent Indian".
As a result of his key role in his country's missile programme and the 1998 nuclear tests at Pokhran, he was appointed Principal Scientific Adviser to the Indian Government, with the rank of a union cabinet minister in 1999, a position he held until he became the 11th president of India in July 2002.
Unlike Kalam, Abdul Qadeer Khan found himself lost in his new country, Pakistan, in which he had arrived with his family from his native Indian city of Bhopal in 1952 at the age of 16.
Under Pakistan's unstable political system and oscillation between corrupt civilian governments and military dictatorships, Khan's scientific talent and genius were not given attention, forcing him to seek opportunities abroad after his graduation in science from the University of Karachi in 1960.
He first landed in West Berlin, where he attended several courses in metallurgical engineering. In 1967, he obtained a masters degree in science from Delft Technological University in Holland, followed by a Ph.D. in metallurgy from the Catholic University of Leuvent, Belgium, in 1972.
Khan not only owes his advanced education to the west, but also his scientific experience, given the fact that he worked in the 1970s with an Amsterdam-based tri-national uranium enrichment centrifuge consortium, made up of Britain, Germany and Holland. At the time, security clearance to move inside and around European nuclear facilities was not very tight, something that Khan carefully exploited to enrich his own nuclear information.
Having been living in Europe, married to a Dutch-speaking South African with a British passport, and able to fluently speak several European languages, Khan had little trouble with routine security procedures. As a result, he managed to look at highly classified technical documents describing centrifuge technology and design, copy them and translate them into his native tongue.
By 1974, he began thinking of using his nuclear secrets to gain an influential position at home, where Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had seized power following Pakistan's debacle in the 1971 war. In contrast to his Indian counterpart, Khan always dreamed of power and loved the public spotlight and lavish lifestyle.
According to Shahid-ur-Rehman's book The Long Road to Chagai, Khan wrote to Bhutto offering his services to nuclearise Pakistan. Bhutto welcomed the offer. Thus, Khan returned to Pakistan in 1976.
But his sudden departure and prolonged disappearance, along with reports from European intelligence services, drove the Dutch authorities to investigate his activities during his stay in Holland. Eventually, in 1982, he was accused of nuclear espionage and sentenced in absentia to four years in prison.
Obviously, Khan has never been concerned about the nature of the regime under which he served. He co-operated with successive Pakistani regimes since the overthrow of his friend Bhutto. He did not even raise a finger when General Zia-ul-Haq hanged Bhutto in 1979 on a false charge.
Under Zia, Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented drive towards Islamisation and stronger focus on the notion of Islamic solidarity in foreign policy, both of which reinforced Bhutto's idea of producing an Islamic rather than a national nuclear bomb. Moreover, fundamentalism and corruption found their way into the military establishment, the apparatus controlling Pakistan's nuclear programmes, leading to the prominence of generals with links to extremist groups.
It was in such a climate and under such ideology, which continued to prevail after Zia, that Khan worked, mingling his duty towards his country with his services to other Muslim nations seeking nuclear technology.
Whether Khan acted on his own to share sensitive nuclear secrets with Iran and Libya (as he confessed on February 4) or did so in agreement with his bosses in the army and military intelligence (as he emphasised on February 2), the problem lies in the country's system and ideology.
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