‘National Hero’ Nuclear Scientist A ‘Prisoner’ In Pakistan

SALEEM SAMAD

Pakistan’s ‘national hero’ scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who got his nation the secrets for a nuclear bomb has pleaded with the country’s Supreme Court to be allowed freedom of movement .

Khan was on Time magazine’s cover “The Merchant of Menace” in 2005 that exposed his sinister role in not only securing the secrets for Pakistan’s bomb by subterfuge and theft but also in selling the same to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

In a handwritten letter to apex court about a fortinight ago,  the architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, said that he is being kept prisoner and also being restrained from pleading for his free movement.

The 84-year old ‘deactivated’ nuclear scientist presently under house arrest also requested Pakistan’s apex court to safeguard his fundamental rights and allow him to be heard.

Presently he has no access to the internet, phone, computer device, and even visitors are barred to enter his residence.

Khan’s last public appearance was on 4 February 2004, when he appeared on national television and admitted to having helped supply materials necessary for making nuclear weapons to rogue nations, North Korea and Libya.

Several years ago, influential Abdul Qadeer Khan used to take a stroll into a park across the street from his mansion in Islamabad’s King Faisal Mosque and feed the monkeys that lived in the woods.

In his driveway sits a large Jasmine bush, trimmed into an odd but unmistakable shape – a mushroom cloud. Some say it was a sadistic gesture to have a nuke cloud in front of his palatial house was a dream to nuclearise the Muslim countries.

Once he was catapulted to fame as a national hero after Pakistan detonated five underground nuclear bombs in 1998 amid high tension with neighbouring India over disputed Kashmir.

Hand-painted portrait of “Father of Nuclear Bomb” adorned on the backs of trucks and buses all over the country, also celebrated in textbooks. He was twice awarded Pakistan’s highest civilian honour, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz medal.

Khan was born in Bhopal, India, in 1936, 11 years before the independence of Pakistan. When he immigrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan had developed an interest in science and loathing for India.

He has told his biographer of witnessing the massacre of Muslims by Hindus that followed the partition in 1947 after the end of British Raj, which Rawalpindi’s military hawks interpreted his extreme form of patriotism.

Overzealous of India’s nuclear programme, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed ‘Doctor Nuke’ to run Pakistan’s nuclear-research establishment, to develop a weapon.

In a decade, Khan stopped walking in the wooded park in Islamabad to feed the monkeys. The national hero turned a multimillionaire, owner of a fleet of vintage cars and properties from Dubai to Timbuktu.

Whether motivated by greed or ideology or both, Khan decided to go into business for himself. The father of the nuclear bomb masterminded a clandestine and profitable enterprise selling to rogue leaders in Libya and North Korea, the technology and equipment to produce nuclear arsenals.

He donated $30 million to various Pakistani charities and had enough money left over to buy his staff and colleagues cars and pay for the higher education of their children.

With his accumulated fortune, he paid to restore the tomb of Sultan Shahabuddin Ghauri, an Afghan who conquered Delhi, Khan put up a portrait of himself next to the Sultan.

White House claimed that Khan’s customers were the notorious regime of Iran and North Korea – two countries identified by Bush administration as members of the “axis of evil”.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna says so far it has not found definitive proof that Iran has a weapons programme. Well, not enough proof that Khan gave those countries including Islamic Iran the rudimentary but effective designs for nuclear warheads.

Western intelligence could not find solid evidence of business with Al Qaeda and there is reason to suspect the link had existed. The Rawalpindi GHQ intelligence apparatus had worked closely with Khan in his role as the government’s top nuclear scientist, are known to sympathise Osama bin Laden.

It remains a mystery how Pakistan’s nuclear blue-eye nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan outwitted Western intelligence to build a global nuclear-smuggling network that made the world a more dangerous place. #

First published in news portal The Easternlink.com on 7 June 2020 

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender in Bangladesh. He is recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. Twitter @saleemsamad; he could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com

Spending in Bangladesh: The most bucks for the biggest bang

Buddy, can you spare a dime? A very, very large one?

THERE is no lack of world-beating records in Bangladesh. It starts as the world’s most densely populated country (not counting city-states and the like). Its capital, Dhaka, merely an undistinguished district headquarters at time of partition from India in 1947, can now be counted as the fastest-growing city in the world. Female leaders have ruled the country for longer than have men—which is to say, longer than women have anywhere else. No country at peace with its neighbours has more citizens shot dead by the security forces of one of its neighbours. The world’s biggest NGO, also apparently the best, BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), bears the name of its home country. Despite astounding progress, 53m Bangladeshis, fully one-third of the population, still live below the poverty line.

Until the end of January, Bangladesh was also the location of South Asia’s biggest infrastructure project to funded by donors. The Padma bridge, a proposed river crossing that was to cost $3 billion to build, would also have been the world’s longest, at a length of about 10km. But its fate has become forlorn, since the Bangladesh government withdrew its request to the Word Bank for financing, on January 31st. The decision to turn down $1.2 billion in cheap loans—the biggest pile of cash the World Bank has ever offered to a single country—came a day after the bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, forcefully stated his commitment to not allow crony capitalism to persist under his watch. (Mr Kim went on to use the Padma bridge as an example of the bank’s stance in the face of “insufficient response by the authorities to the evidence of corruption”.)

Thanks, but no thanks, seemed to be Bangladesh’s reply. With the refusal of the World Bank’s conditions went the loans that had under negotiation with the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Co-operation Agency: altogether nearly $3 billion. Since Bangladesh cannot borrow from international markets, the net result of the government’s apparent intransigence is that 30m people, who are cut off from Dhaka by the vast Padma and the Jamuna (known to India as the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, respectively), and cut off from the rest of the country as well, will have to be patient.

But forget the bridge for a moment. It appears that the government has developed a taste for other symbols of power, of the kind that were till recently in the preserve of regional-powers-with-adversaries. No longer. Last year Bangladesh ordered its first satellite. Only last week it announced plans to buy its first submarines. Finally, Bangladesh intends to spend the single-largest amount of cash it has ever seen devoted to a single project—and start building nuclear power plants.

More than 50 years after politicians in what was then East Pakistan conceived the idea, the government has found a donor in Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. Mr Putin’s conditions, compared with those of Bangladesh’s other international partners, are financially inferior but politically irresistible.

This is a country, after all, where as recently as 2007 the army stepped in to lock up the political class, including the two heads of dynasty, and installed its own military-backed administration. One must be prepared for exigencies, and it helps when the men in green see things the same way. Russia made a $1 billion loan to Bangladesh, to buy Russian-made arms, last month, which might well punch a hole in those recent statistical estimateswhich showed that Bangladesh might be at especially high risk of suffering a coup d’etat in 2013.

The arms sale however will be small in comparison. The price tag for the country’s first nuclear plants is believed to be somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion; the Russians have agreed to lend $500m to kick-start the project. The idea is for Rosatom, the Russian state’s nuclear company, to build and operate two plants in Rooppur, in western Bangladesh. If all goes well Bangladesh may soon be the seventh Asian country with an operational nuclear power plant (the others being China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Pakistan).

So how bad an idea is it?

The first thing to say is that Bangladesh has an energy problem the scale of which tends to be, like the country as a whole, hugely underreported. According to the World Bank, there is no country where businesses find it more difficult to get electricity than Bangladesh. In its latest “Doing Business Survey”, the bank ranks Bangladesh an unflattering 185th out of 185 countries in this category. More than 60% of people do not have access to electricity.

So if the size of the problem were to suggest the size of the solution, a chunky 2,000MW more from two nuclear power stations might be a good start. The Russian plants would generate enough power to fill the current supply gap and would be a big step towards meeting the government’s goal of producing 20,000MW by 2020. The country’s current electricity-generation capacity stands at a mere 5,000-6,000MW. Domestic reserves of gas, the main source of energy, are not plentiful. The government’s short-term strategy, to fix the power crisis by installing oil-based power plants, is both unaffordable and environmentally precarious. Coal deposits exist, but too many people live on top of them. Any politician who dares touch the coal is likely to get a hostile reaction similar to the one experienced last week by foreigners who offered to help in digging it up.

The obvious solutions to Bangladesh’s long-term energy future would be a mix of coal and gas imports from Myanmar or the Middle East. But they don’t sound nearly as impressive as indigenous nukes, do they? Bangladesh’s political parties cannot agree on much, but they both like the idea of nuclear power.

There are a few problems with trying to produce 5,000MW of nuclear power (ie a fifth of the total projected generating capacity) by 2030 in what is essentially one big hot river delta. The lack of an alternative source of power, in case cooling systems collapse, and annual flooding, which, in a bad year, can cover up to two-thirds of the delta, come to mind. An earthquake once shifted the course of the mighty Brahmaputra, which used to flow east of Dhaka, to its current riverbed, 150km west of the capital. Experts may find that the plants’ proposed site on the bank of the Padma river is safe. Yet public protests, like the one in Kundankulam in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, over the same type of Russian reactor, are to be expected nonetheless. 

Bangladesh is not set to enrich its own uranium in any case; Russia would provide the radioactive fuel rods. But both the Bangladeshi public and neighbouring India, whose border with Bangladesh is only 25km from the proposed site, are likely to demand guarantees concerning the safe transport of nuclear material. The rods would have to travel from the port of Chittagong on roads that are among the world’s deadliest.

And if the transport of nuclear material is to circumambulate the urban sprawl of Dhaka, then they will have to cross the Padma. So unless the government puts the Chinese, say, in charge of constructing that bridge quite swiftly, the nation’s first nuclear-fuel cask will have to take a boat.

First appeared in The Economist, February 6th 2013

Rooppur Nuclear Deal Between Russia And Bangladesh

Dr. PETER CUSTERS

Few critical questions have been raised so far by Bangladesh’s intellectual community regarding the deal towards construction of two nuclear power plants in Rooppur. Yet questions do need to be posed. On November 2 last, Russia and Bangladesh signed the long awaited nuclear power agreement on the supply of two 1000 Megawatt reactors. 

Significantly, the deal was closely followed up by a major defense deal worth $1 Billion Dollars for delivery of armored vehicles, transport helicopters and other weaponry. This last deal was sealed during Sheikh Hasina’s recent Moscow visit. The given pattern - of a deal facilitating the purchase and transfer of nuclear technology paving the way for enlarged armament transfers – is broadly similar to the pattern set by the US and India when they signed their framework agreement on nuclear cooperation in 2008 (*). Here, an expansion in US exports of armaments to India was the hidden, reverse side of the nuclear deal. And while ostensibly there is no direct link between the two types of trade, - both the US and Russia evidently are equally eager to enlarge both their sales of nuclear technology and of weaponry towards countries of the Global South. Yet whether the Rooppur deal and the sequential defence deal – both involving huge sums of public money - are really in the interests of Bangladesh? This urgently needs to be scrutinized.

Here I will limit myself to last November’s deal on Rooppur, which Bangladesh’s nuclear lobby undoubtedly will have celebrated as a grand success. After all the dream to provide Bangladesh with nuclear energy is longstanding, dating from the time Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan. The first critical point to be noted is the fact that few details regarding the contents of the nuclear agreement have been revealed to Bangladesh’s public. From the ‘self-evaluation report’ submitted by Bangladesh to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the middle of 2012, however, it appears that the two nuclear reactors to be supplied by Russia to Bangladesh will be of VVER-1000 design. This is a water-cooled and water-moderated reactor reportedly devised in the late 1970s. Towards the cooling of the nuclear fuel rods, water is pumped into the primary circuit of the reactor and kept under constant pressure to prevent it from reaching boiling point. And after its use in the reactor complex, the (polluted) water needs to be released, i.e. dumped back onto the environment. This immediately raises the question as to the consequences of Rooppur for the fisherfolk in Ishwardi, the subdistrict of Pabna where Rooppur is located. Will biodiversity in the reactor’s surrounding water bodies be affected, yes or no?

Further pertinent questions arise once we try to envision how Rooppur’s nuclear fuel rods will be supplied and disposed of. To some extent the arrangements chosen imply that Bangladesh’s own population will not itself be burdened with the damaging conse-quences of the nuclear waste that is generated in the nuclear production chain. Neither will massive amounts of low-level waste be dumped in the country in consequence of uranium mining. Nor will the country’s landscape or subsoil be disfigured due to the presence of storage tanks containing long-lasting, high-level fluid waste from nuclear reprocessing. These consequences will be borne by people elsewhere (!). Yet will these facts suffice to allay the public’s fears? Under the agreement signed between Russia and Bangladesh, Bangladesh will not itself enrich uranium. Russia will both supply the fuel elements for the reactors, and will take back the highly radio-active rods once they have completed their ‘life-cycle’. However, this does not mean that the people of Ishwardi and Pabna can rest re-assured. Central issues to be looked into here are the temporary storage of the radioactive fuel rods after the end of their usage and the transportation of the fuel rods to and from the Rooppur nuclear complex. In Europe the transportation by road of used fuel elements has for many years aroused fierce resistance by anti-nuclear activists.

Thirdly, there is the question of reactor safety from a nuclear catastrophe. Russian officials will surely argue that the VVER-1000 design has proven to be more secure than the design of the granite-moderated reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, where the world’s most catastrophic nuclear accident ever took place in 1986. Surely, it is the last-mentioned RBMK-design which has burdened the Russian state and people with nightmarish problems, - of hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths, of a vast contaminated region where agricultural production had to be suspended, and of a huge financial burden for the construction and re-building of a reactor-sarcophage. Yet the so-called ‘stress tests’ undertaken in Russia in 2011, subsequent to the Fukushima disaster in Japan, have laid bare numerous basic defects that Russian reactors share with those in Japan. A joint report brought out by Rosatom and other Russian state institutions in the middle of 2011, for instance, questioned the capability of the country’s reactors to remain safe if cooling systems collapse, and there reportedly is no guarantee that power backup systems will be effective in case of a cooling system failure. The official report also described how spent fuel is simply allowed to accrue in onsite storage sites because of lack of space. One wonders whether scientists belonging to Bangladesh’s nuclear establishment have reviewed this report by Russia’s state agencies. And whether their own worries have been dispelled.

What then is the best way forward? How can the risks deriving from Rooppur for Bangladesh’s population best be assessed? Scientists and economists who are concerned about solving Bangladesh’s energy needs will undoubtedly argue that we need a dispassionate debate on the issue, and that it would be wrong to oppose Rooppur merely on the basis of fear. Being no natural scientist myself and aware of the risks of over-simplification, I would nevertheless argue that the country would do well to take notice of the huge international controversy surrounding nuclear energy today. In neighboring India, for instance, there has emerged an informed debate, which is of immediate relevance for Bangladesh. Coincidentally the strongest opposition against nuclear construction has been built in the area surrounding Koodankulam, in Tamil Nadu, precisely in opposition against a VVER-reactor supplied by the Russian Federation. Being densely populated and subject to annual river flooding, Bangladesh can ill afford to take risks. Hence, whatever construction works in Rooppur, if any, should be preceded by an informed public debate, - a debate in which both the country’s progressive intellectuals, the new generation of urban activists, and Pabna’s peasants and fisher folk take part.

First published in Countercurrents.org, 22 January, 2013

Dr. Peter Custers, a theoretician on nuclear production, lives in Leiden, the Netherlands, author of Questioning Globalized Militarism (Tulika, New Delhi/Merlin Press, London, 2007), www.petercusters.nl