A Pakistani official said Thursday that his country's disgraced nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had given centrifuges to Iran, but not with the government's consent.
It was Pakistan's first specific public declaration that the nuclear technology had been sold to Iran, though it stopped short of saying what else had been supplied by Khan's black-market network. The official, Information Minister Sheik Rashid Ahmed, did not discuss sales to other nations and he reiterated Pakistan's refusal to let foreign investigators interview Khan.
"This was an individual act, nothing to do with the government of Pakistan," Ahmed said in a telephone interview Thursday evening. Other Pakistani officials also have insisted that Khan worked without help from government officials, even though some of his equipment was transported on Pakistani military aircraft.
Ahmed first made his remarks at a news conference in Islamabad, the capital, earlier in the day, according to news agency reports.
Senior officials of the CIA and other intelligence services have expressed frustration that they have not been able to question Khan directly, and they have said they are suspicious about some of the answers that get passed back to them from Pakistani officials.
Ahmed said, "We have investigated him and have no intention of giving up."
Centrifuges can enrich uranium, turning it into fuel for nuclear power plants or, with considerable enrichment, for weapons. Iran has maintained that it wants enriched uranium only to generate electric power. President Bush contends that Iran's true intent is to build a bomb, although the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said it has not found proof of an Iranian weapons project. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to visit India and Pakistan next week.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS