Word: khans
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...Khan was born in 1936, in Bhopal, India, 11 years before the founding of Pakistan. His youth was shaped by the communal violence that plagued India after the end of colonization. He has told his biographer of witnessing the massacre of Muslims by Hindus that followed the partition of the old British colony in 1947. By the time he immigrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan had developed an interest in science and a loathing for India...
...Khan enrolled in Karachi's D.J. Science College. But he soon uprooted again, moving to Europe and earning degrees in electrical engineering and metallurgy. After finishing his studies, he threw himself into the burgeoning field of nuclear science in the Netherlands. With oil prices soaring, interest in harnessing nuclear power for civilian energy was high. In 1975, Khan took a job at the Dutch branch of a European nuclear-research consortium, Urenco, which specialized in uranium enrichment. Khan soon recognized that the centrifuges Urenco had developed to enrich uranium for civilian use were powerful enough to produce the fissile material...
When he returned home in 1976, he displayed his talent for enterprise. He brought with him the Dutch woman who would become his wife--and extremely sensitive centrifuge designs, which the Dutch say he had stolen from his nuclear employer. In the context of Pakistan's rivalry with India, Khan's perfidy was considered an extreme form of patriotism. Since India had a nuclear program, Pakistan needed one too. Soon Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed Khan to run Pakistan's nuclear-research program, with the goal of developing a weapon as soon as possible. "Pakistan's choice was either...
There are two basic paths to producing bomb-grade material. One involves reprocessing the plutonium contained in spent nuclear fuel, a path taken by North Korea in the 1980s. But that method requires first building a nuclear reactor, a costly and cumbersome endeavor. Khan's experience in Europe steered him toward the cheaper option. Working the contacts he had made in Europe, he set out to acquire the rotational machines, known as centrifuges, that enrich uranium into bomb-grade material...
Pakistan's bomb program took years to mature, but in 1998, on the back of Khan's labors, the country detonated five underground nuclear bombs. At a time of high tensions with India over the disputed region of Kashmir, the event turned Khan into a national hero. His glowering, wavy-haired portrait was hand-painted on the backs of trucks and buses all over the country. He was twice awarded Pakistan's highest civilian honor, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz medal. Celebrated in textbooks, he was probably Pakistan's most famous...