Abdul Qadeer Khan Facts
Abdul Qadeer Khan Facts
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| Interesting Abdul Qadeer Khan Facts: |
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| Khan was born in the province of Bhopal to a member of the British ministry on education under the British Indian Government. |
| He and his family moved to Pakistan following the country's independence in 1947, where he went on to college to earn a degree in metallurgy before finishing further graduate work in Germany. |
| Khan worked and conducted research for a number of different companies and in different countries throughout Europe. |
| His work involved uranium metallurgy, high-strength metals, and the implications of martensite on the field of morphology, or the ability of physical objects to undergo change in phase, texture, shape, and size. |
| Khan contributed important work to the study of metals on gas centrifuges, which were important to the field of uranium enrichment for nuclear reactors. |
| His research helped make great improvements and paved the way for later development and innovation in these gas centrifuges. |
| Khan was later involved in a highly controversial atomic bomb project which originated in Pakistan. This project, which launched in 1971 and was allegedly in response to the testing of India's own nuclear weapon near the Pakistan border, spurred Khan to want to contribute to his country's defense efforts. |
| Initially, Khan was not invited into the project as they felt there was no role for a metallurgist, but he wrote the Prime Minister to explain his qualifications and outline his plan for using uranium instead of the more common plutonium. |
| After a lengthy background investigation and relentless discussions on the viability of uranium over plutonium, Khan was finally invited to join the team in 1976. |
| When Khan's research and evidence was dismissed by those working on Pakistan's atomic bomb project, a meeting was held and Khan was finally placed in charge of the uranium enrichment program. |
| Controversy and in-fighting plagued the research for years, and politics soon got in the way. When the project was finally ready for testing in the 1980s, Denmark actually sentenced Khan to four years in prison in absentia for espionage, claiming that his work in Pakistan was based on information he stole from URENCO when he worked there as a younger man. |
| Khan was named in a number of outside investigations from the West, including one that took down Libya's nuclear weapons program and in investigations into North Korean activity. Khan's research and cooperation were found to be behind both countries' activities. |
| Khan was placed under house arrest in 2004 after the US disclosed its evidence to the government of Pakistan that Khan had provided information to other countries. He confessed, although the government was criticized for iits role. |
| The house arrested was rescinded in 2009 and he is considered a free citizen of Pakistan, although the US has warned of his continued threat. |
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