A well-settled and celebrated nuclear scientist in Holland, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was deeply shocked when his beloved homeland was divided into two after the fall of East-Pakistan in 1971. When India detonated its first atomic bomb in May 1974 under the name ‘Smiling Buddha’, Dr. Khan’s anxiety began to reach extremes.
He started writing letters to various Pakistani institutions and offered his services, but received no response from anywhere. Eventually, AQ Khan somehow managed to get a letter from the then Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in which he referred to his expertise in uranium enrichment and expressed hope that he would help build an atomic bomb.
His efforts bore fruit and upon his return to Pakistan in 1976 from Holland, Dr Khan became part of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. By this time, the Western media had smelled Pakistan’s nuclear program and they propagated the term “Islamic bomb” to malign AQ Khan’s name. Documentaries, essays and even books have been made on the “Islamic bomb.” The ‘investigative journalism’ left no stone unturned to present Dr Abdul Qadeer to the world as a ‘villain’.
Sadly, it was not just the Western world who bombarded AQ Khan with criticism. A Karachi professor named Qadir Hussain also accused Khan of stealing his method of Uranium enrichment.
On May 28, 1998, Pakistan detonated a nuclear bomb in Chaghi, Balochistan. It would be accurate to say that the blasts were the result of decades of hard work and sacrifices by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan and his team from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and Kahuta Research Laboratories.
As expected, with the nuclear tests, new sanctions were imposed on Pakistan. A race to take the ‘credit’ of this great achievement was also triggered in which politicians and scientists were equally involved.
Dr Abdul Qadeer was awarded Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 1989 and the highest civilian honour of Pakistan on August 14, 1996. In the year 2004, after a “briefing”, Dr Qadeer confessed on the national TV that he had been providing ‘nuclear secrets’ to other countries and apologized to the nation for his action.
Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan was used as a scapegoat to save the necks of ‘big thumbs’. However, the Pakistani government did not extradite Dr Abdul Qadir despite US pressure, and he was placed under house arrest in Islamabad for several years.
In an interview in 2008 about his alleged confession, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan said that he had “saved Pakistan for the first time when Pakistan became a nuclear power. The second time he saved his country when he took all the blame on himself.”
In addition to his role in Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan was instrumental in reorganizing Pakistan’s national space agency SPARCO, and in the space program, especially the first Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle Project and the Satellite Launch Vehicle.
Government and institutional affairs have been with Dr Abdul Qadeer no matter what, but his respect and esteem in the hearts of ordinary Pakistanis have never diminished. There is no denying that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan is our national hero and the most popular name in science in Pakistan.
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