Word: uranium
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...brilliant and charming man, a linguist who was liked by his colleagues and suburban Amsterdam neighbors. To be sure, Abdul Qadar Khan did seem a bit inquisitive to his fellow scientists at The Netherlands' top-secret gas centrifuge factory at Almelo, where enriched uranium is produced for nuclear plants around the world. On the other hand, asking questions was normal behavior for a bright young metallurgist who wanted to get ahead. After 17 days at the plant, however, Khan was politely but firmly told to leave Almelo, and went back to work in his Amsterdam laboratory. Shortly afterward...
...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...
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...
...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...
...part, Pakistan denies that it is building a nuclear bomb or that Gaddafi paid for a gas centrifuge plant. Officials do acknowledge that research is being carried out on uranium enrichment, but they insist the fuel will be used only in nuclear reactors. The Pakistanis, however, appear to be getting a bit protective about the project: when the French Ambassador to Pakistan and his First Secretary visited the ruins of an ancient fort 25 miles south of Islamabad last week, they seemed to have wandered too close to where the gas centrifuge factory is being built. They were set upon...