Word: weaponize
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...threat does his illicit enterprise still pose? When you piece together the details of Khan's career, his business dealings and the covert operation that brought him down, what emerges is a portrait of a brainy engineer who devoted his life to the pursuit and proliferation of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Born to humble beginnings, he became a globe-trotting magnate who relished the luxury that fame and savvy brought him. But colleagues say he was also driven by a devout faith and a burning belief that Muslim possession of nuclear weapons would help return Islam to greatness...
...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 needed for a nuclear weapon...
...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 to reinvent the wheel or buy it," says Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group in Islamabad. Khan decided...
...TIME that following the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, he railed against the West and its operations against the Muslim community. After the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear test, Khan became convinced that the U.S. was bent on destroying Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, its main weapon against India's far mightier army...
Whether motivated by greed or ideology or both, Khan decided to go into business for himself, even as he oversaw Pakistan's nuclear development. Khan offered a one-stop shop for regimes interested in producing nuclear weapons. He offered centrifuges--known as P-1, for Pakistan, and later P-2, a more sophisticated version--as well as machines that make centrifuges (critical to Khan's customers because hundreds or thousands of them are needed to make highly enriched uranium in quantities sufficient for a weapon). Utilizing a variety of contacts in Europe, Asia and Africa, Khan built a network...