Islamabad (TIP): Two decades ago, President George W Bush stood at a joint news conference with President Pervez Musharraf on the grounds of the presidential palace, the Aiwan-e-Sadar, in Islamabad. Ducks splashed in a flower-filled pool on the lawns and giant US and Pakistani flags hung vertically behind the dais. The US president was on his way back from a state visit to New Delhi. The high point of Bush’s visit was a landmark Indo-US civil nuclear deal that allowed India to buy uranium and nuclear reactors for its civilian nuclear program. Bush was asked whether Pakistan could get a similar nuclear deal.
“Both countries have different histories,” he said. “As we proceed further, our strategy will take into effect those well-known differences”. There was a reason Bush firmly slammed the door on Musharraf standing next to him.
Two years earlier, the Bush administration had submitted to Musharraf incriminating evidence about a Pakistani nuclear scientist running the biggest nuclear proliferation network in history.
Dr AQ Khan had sold nuclear materials, bomb designs and centrifuges to Libya, North Korea and Iran. Khan was a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, the legendary American missionary nurseryman who planted apple orchards in the 19th-century American frontier. Khan sold uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iran in the 1980s, which Iran reverse-engineered (which the US is now trying to destroy with airstrikes).
North Korea tested its first nuclear bomb just seven months after the Bush-Musharraf press conference. Only Libya voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — which is when IAEA investigators uncovered the Khan network. The nuclear blueprints Muammar Gaddafi had surrendered were for a Chinese nuclear bomb, the CHIC-4. The drawings were wrapped in shopping bags for Good Looks Tailors, Islamabad, where the nattily dressed Khan got his suits stitched.
The Pakistani establishment maintains to date that Khan, who passed away under house arrest in 2021, was a rogue individual acting on his own. This, interestingly, is the same doublespeak Islamabad has used for years to justify terrorists operating on its soil. The facts strain credibility. Khan took centrifuges and nuclear material from a heavily surveilled military-run nuclear program. He used the resources of the state, including Pakistani Air Force transport aircraft, to ship nuclear material to the three countries thousands of miles apart.
Despite Pakistan’s protestations, the perfidious shadow of AQ Khan looms over all its nuclear activities. It is unlikely to get a peaceful nuclear cooperation deal of the kind Saudi Arabia signed with the United States on July 22 for now. The deal allows Saudi Arabia to enrich its own nuclear fuel without the international oversight that would prevent it from converting the know-how into weapons-grade uranium. Saudi Arabia has publicly stated its intent to get a nuclear weapon.
“Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Al Jazeera in 2018.
Saudi Arabia can become a nuclear weapon state only with Pakistani assistance. In September 2025, as war clouds loomed over West Asia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact. Source: India Today
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