The latest disclosures in the Sunday Times by British correspondent Simon Henderson (September 20, 2009), quotes excerpts from the letter written by the Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr A.Q. Khan to his Dutch wife Henny in 2003, when he was under detention and interrogation by Pakistani authorities. These excerpts not only reveal China’s primary role in the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme and the deep involvement of successive governments and army chiefs in Pakistani proliferation, it also impeaches the credibility of US President George Bush, the US intelligence establishment and a number of academics and think-tanks who accepted the official Pakistani version put out in 2004 about Khan being solely responsible for Pakistani proliferation without the knowledge of Pakistani army and its governments. One can straightaway predict that the Pakistani government, the army, and much of the media and academic establishment will immediately denounce the disclosure as fabrication and one man’s unsubstantiated version. Dr A.Q.Khan himself may execute one of his U-turns and disown the letter and its authenticity. There are enormous international, Pakistani and Chinese vested interests in impeaching the contents of the letter.

Henderson has only quoted excerpts from the four-page letter. One does not know whether what he has withheld relate to less important matters or more explosive issues. For instance, there is no mention in the letter about A.Q.Khan’s linkages with the CIA, about which the former Dutch Prime Minister Dr Rudd Lubbers has told several audiences, including the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in Delhi. It is obvious that over the last five years since Khan became the most notorious proliferator, American efforts to get access to him is less than whole-hearted.The Pakistani leadership has been able to deny the International Atomic Energy Agency access to Dr Khan in view of the US and Western interests in covering up the full details of Khan’s proliferation, which included US and Western European permissiveness of Khan’s proliferation efforts during the Eighties. Khan claims that Pakistan helped to put up the Chinese uranium centrifuge plant at Hanzhong in the early Eighties. Most of the equipment for that should have been procured from Western Europe. Recently, Swiss authorities announced that they destroyed a computer recovered from Urs Tinner, one of Khan’s primary contractors, also a CIA informant, which contained a bomb design more advanced than the earlier design supplied by China.

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