Many Americans suffer from a mental delusion that nothing can happen in the world without America's express permission.
The reality is our efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons since the 1980s has only slowed things down a little bit, regardless of who has been President.
The long version of Dr A.Q. Kahn and Pakistan developing and selling nuclear weapons. - historycommons.org
The US didn't allow Pakistan to sell nuclear weapon blueprints to Libya and North Korea in the 1980s, but it happened all the same. Due to the import restrictions they live under, North Korea they abandoned their uranium project and proceeded with the Pakistani design for plutonium weapons. Libya never even attempted a program but is believed to have sold the blueprints on to the Palestinians, for whom these blueprints are equally useless, and Syria which has proceeded with a very constrained nuclear program.
After receiving his Doctorate in Amsterdam in 1972 working with the Urenco nucelar fuel reprocessing group, Dr Abdul Q. Kahn returned to Pakistan where Prime Minister Bhutto (our "close ally") provided him a nearly limitless budget to create nuclear weapons program from scratch.
Both India and Pakistan had created nuclear weapons by 1986-1988. Both nations confirmed this fact by testing their weapons in 1998.
From there the Pakistani government authorized Dr A.Q. Kahn to sell nuclear weapon blueprints to Libya and North Korea and for Dr Kahn to provide China with technical assistance with nuclear fuel enrichment using centrifuges.
In 1987 Dr A.Q. Kahn told journalists Pakistan had sold nuclear weapon blueprints to Libya and North Korea, President Ronald Reagan symbolically cut-off aid to Pakistan for six weeks in 1985. Aid resumed after Pakistan promised to stop selling blueprints for nuclear weapons and briefly placed Dr A. Q. Kahn under house arrest. Reagan certified that Pakistan did not have any nuclear weapons and aid to Pakistan resumed.
Courts in Amsterdam sentenced Dr A.Q. Kahn for espionage, in-abstentia, which prevented Kahn from taking any European vacations.
George H.W. Bush again cut-off aid to Pakistan in 1990 for nuclear weapons proliferation, until they agreed to destroy their nuclear weapon cores, but resumed aid two years later after certifying Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons in spite of the fact they had refused to dismantle their weapons.
Iran wanted to purchase these blueprints from Pakistani as well but the Pakistani government rejected this, so they purchased their plans from China, who had been provided with a nuclear weapon prototype to copy by Nikita Kruschev in 1957.
Bill Clinton punished China for selling Pakistan an intercontinental rocket to launch their nuclear weapons in 1992, but soon resumed normal relations with China. |
