Word: plante
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seems, his mission accomplished. When Khan returned to his homeland, only two commercial gas centrifuge plants existed-one in Capenhurst, Britain, and the other in Almelo. The blueprints for both factories are highly classified, since the uranium produced by a gas centrifuge can be used to make nuclear weapons. Today, Khan is apparently director of Pakistan's one and only gas centrifuge plant, which is now under construction near the country's capital, Islamabad. The onetime Almelo adviser managed to carry home critical information about the gas centrifuge process needed to build such a factory, thereby enabling Pakistan...
...that Khan got his chance to get into the gas centrifuge plant at Almelo. Owned and operated by a consortium called Urenco, it was administered jointly by Britain, West Germany and The Netherlands. Khan had first come to Holland in 1963 at the age of 27 to enroll in the prestigious Technical University of Delft. He performed well, both there and, later, in the doctoral program at Belgium's Catholic University in Louvain...
While at the gas centrifuge plant, Khan was asked to translate classified documents of a West German uranium enrichment project into Dutch. From these papers, according to a Dutch official, he compiled a complete list of the plant's subcontractors and suppliers and passed it along to Islamabad. Pakistani officials, in turn, put together a shopping list of the materials needed for a gas centrifuge system. They then used dummy companies and agents in Europe to make individual purchases from the list...
Khan might still be at Almelo today if he had not been caught reading secret documents he had not been assigned to translate. Plant officials quickly asked that he be moved back to the Amsterdam laboratory, where he was assigned to a department that had no dealings with Almelo. At the same time, the Dutch intelligence agency Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst began an investigation. They learned from Khan's neighbors that a black Mercedes with diplomatic license plates often visited his house. Before the inquiry progressed further, however, Abdul Qadar Khan left Holland in late 1975 to take...
...several countries, including the U.S., pieced together the Pakistani buying spree and reached the conclusion that Islamabad was buying itself the bomb. Washington, which promptly cut off most of its aid to Pakistan, was caught by surprise: it had persuaded France last year not to sell a nuclear reprocessing plant to Pakistan for fear the country would use it to produce Plutonium for a bomb. It now turned out that Pakistan was already well on its way to making nuclear bombs not from plutonium but from another deadly substance-enriched uranium...