Age, Biography, and Wiki
Abdul Qadeer Khan was born on April 1, 1936, in Bhopal, India. He gained prominence for his work in nuclear engineering, particularly in the field of uranium enrichment. Khan's involvement in Pakistan's nuclear program led to significant advancements in the country's military capabilities, earning him recognition as a national hero in Pakistan. His life and career are documented on his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan.
| Occupation | Presidents |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 1 April 1936 |
| Age | 89 Years |
| Birth Place | Bhopal, Bhopal State, British India |
| Horoscope | Aries |
| Country | Pakistan |
| Date of death | 10 October, 2021 |
| Died Place | Islamabad, Pakistan |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited public information available about Khan's physical measurements.
The PAEC's senior scientists who worked with him and under him remember him as "an egomaniacal lightweight" given to exaggerating his scientific achievements in centrifuges. At one point, Munir Khan said that, "most of the scientists who work on the development of atomic bomb projects were extremely 'serious'. They were sobered by the weight of what they don't know; Abdul Qadeer Khan is a showman." During the timeline of the bomb program, Khan published papers on analytical mechanics of balancing of rotating masses and thermodynamics with mathematical rigour to compete, but still failed to impress his fellow theorists at PAEC, generally in the physics community. In later years, Khan became a staunch critic of Munir Khan's research in physics, and on many occasions tried unsuccessfully to belittle Munir Khan's role in the atomic bomb projects. Their scientific rivalry became public and widely popular in the physics community and seminars held in the country over the years.
On 5 February 2004, President Pervez Musharraf issued a pardon to Khan as he feared that the issue would be politicised by his political rivals. Despite the pardon, Khan, who had strong conservative support, had badly damaged the political credibility of the Musharraf administration and the image of the United States who was attempting to win hearts and minds of local populations during the height of the Insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. While the local television news media aired sympathetic documentaries on Khan, the opposition parties in the country protested so strongly that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had pointed out to the Bush administration that the successor to Musharraf could be less friendly towards the United States. This restrained the Bush administration from applying further direct pressure on Musharraf due to a strategic calculation that it might cause the loss of Musharraf as an ally. In December 2006, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC), headed by Hans Blix, stated that Khan could not have acted alone "without the awareness of the Pakistan Government". Blix's statement was also reciprocated by the United States government, with one anonymous American government intelligence official quoted by independent journalist and author Seymour Hersh: "Suppose if Edward Teller had suddenly decided to spread nuclear technology around the world. Could he really do that without the American government knowing?".
At the height of the proliferation controversy in 2007, Khan was paid tribute by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on state television while commenting in the last part of his speech, Aziz stressed: "The services of [nuclear] scientist ... Dr. [Abdul] Qadeer Khan are "unforgettable" for the country".
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Dating & Relationship Status
Khan was married and had two daughters. However, details about his personal relationships are not widely documented.
Abdul Qadeer Khan (1 April 1936 – 10 October 2021) was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer. He is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program".
His father, Abdul Ghafoor, was a schoolteacher who once worked for the Ministry of Education, and his mother, Zulekha, was a housewife with a very religious mindset. His older siblings, along with other family members, had emigrated to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947, who would often write to Khan's parents about the new life they had found in Pakistan.
In 1962, while on vacation in The Hague, he met Hendrina "Henny" Reterink, a British passport holder who had been born in South Africa to Dutch expatriates. She spoke Dutch and had spent her childhood in Africa before returning with her parents to the Netherlands where she lived as a registered foreigner. In 1963, he married Henny in a modest Muslim ceremony at Pakistan's embassy in The Hague. Khan and Henny together had two daughters, Dina Khan - who is a doctor, and Ayesha Khan.
Frits Veerman, Khan's colleague at FDO, uncovered nuclear espionage at Almelo where Khan had stolen designs of the centrifuges from URENCO for the nuclear weapons programme of Pakistan. Veerman became aware of the espionage when Khan had taken classified URENCO documents home to be copied and translated by his Dutch-speaking wife and had asked Veerman to photograph some of them. In 1975, Khan was transferred to a less sensitive section when URENCO became suspicious and he subsequently returned to Pakistan with his wife and two daughters. Khan was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison in 1983 by the Netherlands for espionage but the conviction was later overturned due to a legal technicality. Ruud Lubbers, Prime Minister of the Netherlands at the time, later said that the General Intelligence and Security Service (BVD) was aware of Khan's espionage activities but he was allowed to continue due to pressure from the CIA, with the US backing Pakistan during the Cold War. This was also highlighted when despite Archie Pervez (Khan's associate for nuclear procurement in the US) being convicted in 1988, no action was taken against Khan or his proliferation network by the US government which needed the support of Pakistan during the Soviet–Afghan War.
Unbeknownst to Khan, his nation's scientists were already working towards feasibility of the atomic bomb under a secretive crash weapons program since 20 January 1972 that was being directed by Munir Ahmad Khan, a reactor physicist, which calls into question of his "father-of" claim. After reading his letter, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had his military secretary run a security check on Khan, who was unknown at that time, for verification and asked PAEC to dispatch a team under Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood that met Khan at his family home in Almelo and directed Bhutto's letter to meet him in Islamabad. Upon arriving in December 1974, Khan took a taxi straight to the Prime Minister's Secretariat. He met with Prime Minister Bhutto in the presence of Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Agha Shahi, and Mubashir Hassan where he explained the significance of highly enriched uranium, with the meeting ending with Bhutto's remark: "He seems to make sense."
On June 7, 1998, 10 days after Pakistan's first underground nuclear test, there was yet another incident according to Foreign Policy. Kim Sa Nae, wife of a midlevel North Korean "diplomat", who was invited by Khan as part of a 20-member delegation was shot to death a few yards from Khan's official residence after she was suspected to be a spy for the United States by the ISI that subsequently informed the North Korean authorities. Privately, some Pakistani intelligence sources leaked this information to the Los Angeles Times. 3 days after Kim's death, both P-1 and P-2 centrifuges, warheads, and technical data, along with Kim's body, were flown to North Korea in the same American made C-130 cargo plane that was making rounds between Pakistan and North Korea from 1997-2002.
During his work on the nuclear weapons program and onwards, Khan faced heated and intense criticism from his fellow theorists, most notably Pervez Hoodbhoy who contested his scientific understanding in quantum physics. In addition, Khan's false claims that he was the "father" of the atomic bomb project since its inception and his personal attacks on Munir Ahmad Khan caused even greater animosity from his fellow theorists, and most particularly, within the general physics community, such as the Pakistan Physics Society.
Various motivations have been cited for Khan's role in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. According to the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, Moisés Naím, although his actions were certainly ideological or political in nature, Khan's motives remain essentially financial. This is evidenced, according to him, by his commercial maneuvers, his presence in North Korean trade as well as his real estate ownerships. For instance, Khan owned the Hendrina Khan Hotel in Timbuktu, named after his wife. It was one of dozens of his commercial enterprises. To build his hotel in Timbuktu, he reportedly used a Pakistan Air Force C-130 transport aircraft in the early 2000s to transport carved wooden furniture. The plane landed at Tripoli Airport in Libya and the cargo was then taken to Timbuktu by road as it was unable to land in Mali. Khan himself accompanied the furniture from Islamabad. His wife, two daughters and brother Abdul Quyuim Khan were all named in the Panama Papers in 2016 as owners of Wahdat Ltd., an offshore company registered in the Bahamas.
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| Husband | Hendrina Reterink (m. 1963) |
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Net Worth and Salary
The exact net worth of Abdul Qadeer Khan is difficult to determine due to the nature of his work and the lack of public financial records. His involvement in the nuclear black market and his key role in Pakistan's nuclear program suggest he may have had significant financial resources, but these are not publicly disclosed.
Career, Business, and Investments
Khan's career was marked by his founding of the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, which focused on developing uranium enrichment capabilities. He played a crucial role in Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and was involved in a black market for nuclear technology, supplying several countries including Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Khan was arrested in 2004 for these activities but was pardoned and later released from house arrest in 2009.
From 1956 to 1959, Khan was employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (city government) as an Inspector of weights and measures, and applied for a scholarship that allowed him to study in West Germany. In 1961, Khan departed for West Germany to study material science at the Technical University in West Berlin, where he academically excelled in courses in metallurgy, but left West Berlin when he switched to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1965.
In 1972, Khan joined the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory (or in Dutch: FDO), an engineering firm subsidiary of Verenigde Machinefabrieken (VMF) based in Amsterdam, from Brabers's recommendation. The FDO was a subcontractor for Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland of the, British-German-Dutch uranium enrichment consortium, URENCO which was operating a uranium enrichment plant in Almelo and employed gaseous centrifuge method to assure a supply of nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants in the Netherlands. Soon after, Khan left FDO when URENCO offered him a senior technical position, initially conducting studies on uranium metallurgy.
Henk Slebos, a Dutch engineer and businessman who had studied metallurgy with Khan at the Delft University of Technology, continued providing goods needed for enriching uranium to Khan in Pakistan through his company Slebos Research. Slebos was sentenced in 1985 to one year in prison but the sentence was reduced on appeal in 1986 to six months of probation and a fine of 20,000 guilders. Though Slebos continued to export goods to Pakistan and was again sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of around €100,000 was imposed on his company.
Ernst Piffl, was convicted and sentenced to three and a half years in prison by Germany in 1998 for supplying nuclear centrifuge parts through his company Team GmbH to Khan's Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta. Asher Karni, a Hungarian-South African businessman was sentenced to three years in prison in the US for the sale of restricted nuclear equipment to Pakistan through Humayun Khan (an associate of A. Q. Khan) and his Pakland PME Corporation.
Upon learning of India's surprise nuclear test, 'Smiling Buddha', in May 1974, Khan wanted to contribute to efforts to build an atomic bomb and met with officials at the Pakistani Embassy in The Hague, who dissuaded him by saying it was "hard to find" a job in PAEC as a "metallurgist". In August 1974, Khan wrote a letter which went unnoticed, but he directed another letter through the Pakistani ambassador to the Prime Minister's Secretariat in September 1974.
In April 1976, Khan joined the atomic bomb program and became part of the enrichment division, initially collaborating with Khalil Qureshi – a physical chemist. Calculations performed by him were valuable contributions to centrifuges and a vital link to nuclear weapon research, but continue to push for his ideas for feasibility of weapon-grade uranium even though it had a low priority, with most efforts still aimed to produce military-grade plutonium. Because of his interest in uranium metallurgy and his frustration at having been passed over for director of the uranium division (the job was instead given to Bashiruddin Mahmood), Khan refused to engage in further calculations and caused tensions with other researchers. Khan became highly unsatisfied and bored with the research led by Mahmood – finally, he submitted a critical report to Bhutto, in which he explained that the "enrichment program" was nowhere near success.
In 2003, merchant vessel BBC China was caught carrying nuclear centrifuges to Libya from Malaysia, the Scomi Group and Khan Research Laboratories were supplying nuclear parts to Libya through Khan's Dubai-based Sri Lankan associate Buhary Syed Abu Tahir. This was further revealed in the Scomi Precision Engineering nuclear scandal surrounding Scomi CEO Shah Hakim Zain and Kamaluddin Abdullah, son of former Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
Social Network
Given Khan's status as a national figure and his involvement in sensitive fields, his social network is not publicly detailed. However, he was widely recognized and celebrated in Pakistan for his contributions to national security.
On account of the knowledge of nuclear espionage by Khan and his contribution to nuclear proliferation throughout the world post 1970s, and the renewed fear of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists after the September 11 attacks, former CIA Director George Tenet described Khan as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden". After his death on 10 October 2021, he was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque before being buried at the H-8 graveyard in Islamabad.
Starting in 2001, Khan served as an adviser on science and technology in the Musharraf administration and had become a public figure who enjoyed much support from his country's political conservative sphere. In 2003, the Bush administration reportedly turned over evidence of a nuclear proliferation network that implicated Khan's role to the Musharraf administration. Khan was dismissed from his post on 31 January 2004. On 4 February 2004, Khan appeared on Pakistan Television (PTV) and confessed to running a proliferation ring, and transferring technology to Iran between 1989 and 1991, and to North Korea and Libya between 1991 and 1997. The Musharraf administration avoided arresting Khan but launched security hearings on Khan who confessed to the military investigators that former Chief of Army Staff General Mirza Aslam Beg had given authorisation for technology transfer to Iran.
Education
Khan studied metallurgical engineering at the University of Delft in the Netherlands and later earned a Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering from Leuven University in Belgium. His education laid the groundwork for his later contributions to nuclear engineering.
A Muhajir emigrant from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase transitions of metallic alloys, uranium metallurgy, and isotope separation based on gas centrifuges. After learning of India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974, Khan joined his nation's clandestine efforts to develop atomic weapons when he founded the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976 and was both its chief scientist and director for many years.
After his matriculation from a local school in Bhopal, in 1952 Khan emigrated from India to Pakistan on the Sind Mail train, partly due to the reservation politics at that time, and religious violence in India during his youth had left an indelible impression on his world view. Upon settling in Karachi with his family, Khan briefly attended the D. J. Science College before transferring to the University of Karachi, where he graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in physics with a concentration on solid-state physics.
In 1967, Khan obtained an engineer's degree in materials technology – an equivalent to a Master of Science (MS) offered in English-speaking nations such as Pakistan – and joined the doctoral program in metallurgical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He worked under Belgian professor Martin J. Brabers at Leuven University, who supervised his doctoral thesis which Khan successfully defended, and graduated with a DEng in metallurgical engineering in 1972. His thesis included fundamental work on martensite and its extended industrial applications in the field of graphene morphology.
Though he had helped to come up with the centrifuge designs, and had been a long-time proponent of the concept, Khan was not chosen to head the development project to test his nation's first nuclear-weapons (his reputation of a thorny personality likely played a role in this ) after India conducted its series of nuclear tests, 'Pokhran-II' in 1998. Intervention by the Chairman Joint Chiefs, General Jehangir Karamat, allowed Khan to be a participant and eye-witness his nation's first nuclear test, 'Chagai-I' in 1998. At a news conference, Khan confirmed the testing of the boosted fission devices while stating that it was KRL's highly enriched uranium (HEU) that was used in the detonation of Pakistan's first nuclear devices on 28 May 1998.
In 1979, the Dutch government eventually probed Khan on suspicion of nuclear espionage but he was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence, though it did file a criminal complaint against him in a local court in Amsterdam, which sentenced him in absentia in 1985 to four years in prison. Upon learning of the sentence, Khan filed an appeal through his attorney, S. M. Zafar, who teamed up with the administration of Leuven University, and successfully argued that the technical information requested by Khan was commonly found and taught in undergraduate and doctoral physics at the university – the court exonerated Khan by overturning his sentence on a legal technicality. Reacting to the suspicions of espionage, Khan stressed that: "I had requested for it as we had no library of our own at KRL, at that time. All the research work [at Kahuta] was the result of our innovation and struggle. We did not receive any technical 'know-how' from abroad, but we cannot reject the use of books, magazines, and research papers in this connection."
Between 1987 and 1989, Khan secretly leaked knowledge of centrifuges to Iran without notifying the Pakistan Government, although this issue is a subject of political controversy. In 2003, the European Union pressured Iran to accept tougher inspections of its nuclear program and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed an enrichment facility in the city of Natanz, Iran, utilising gas centrifuges based on the designs and methods used by URENCO. The IAEA inspectors quickly identified the centrifuges as P-1 types, which had been obtained "from a foreign intermediary in 1989", and the Iranian negotiators turned over the names of their suppliers, which identified Khan as one of them. Heinz Mebus, a German engineer and businessman and college friend of Khan, was named as one of the suppliers - acting as a middleman for Khan.
Libya negotiated with the United States to roll back its nuclear program to have economic sanctions lifted, effected by the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, and shipped centrifuges to the United States that were identified as P-1 models by the American inspectors. Ultimately, the Bush administration launched its investigation of Khan, focusing on his personal role, when Libya handed over a list of its suppliers. Friedrich Tinner, a nuclear engineer and friend of Khan since their days at the Leuven University, was one of the heads of Libya's nuclear programme and worked in nuclear enrichment for Libya and Pakistan. In 2008, German nuclear engineer Gotthard Lerch was convicted and sentenced to five years and six months in prison for procuring centrifuges for Libya from Khan, Lerch also acted as Khan's middleman for Iran. Alfred Hempel, a German businessman, arranged the shipment of gas centrifuge parts from Khan in Pakistan to Libya and Iran via Dubai.
In the 1990s, Khan secured a fellowship with the Pakistan Academy of Sciences – he served as its president in 1996–97. Khan published two books on material science and started publishing his articles from KRL in the 1980s. Gopal S. Upadhyaya, an Indian metallurgist who attended Khan's conference and met him along with Kuldip Nayar, reportedly described him as being a proud Pakistani who wanted to show the world that scientists from Pakistan are inferior to no one in the world. Khan also served as project director of Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology and briefly tenured as professor of physics before joining the faculty of the Hamdard University; where he remained on the board of directors of the university up until his death in 2021. Later, Khan helped established the A. Q. Khan Institute of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering at Karachi University.
