China provided Pakistan with a "do-it-yourself" kit and weapons grade uranium for making two nuclear bombs in 1982, a leading American daily said on Friday quoting notes made by disgraced Pakistani scientist A Q Khan.

The Washington Post said the deliberate act of proliferation was part of a secret nuclear deal struck in 1976 between Chinese leader Mao zedong and Pakistan's prime minister Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto.

"Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister... had gifted us 50 kg [kilograms] of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons," Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb programme.

Khan prepared the notes for Pakistan's intelligence after his January 2004 detention for unauthorised nuclear commerce, the daily said.

The Post said it obtained Khan's detailed accounts from Simon Henderson, a former journalist at the Financial Times who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has maintained correspondence with Khan.

In a first-person account about his contacts with Khan in the September 20 edition of the Sunday Times, Henderson disclosed several excerpts from one of the documents.

According to Khan, the daily said, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan's bomb effort.

The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: US officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran, in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan's clandestine network.

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