Libyan nuke drawings 'Chinese'

2004-02-16 08:24

Vienna - Drawings of a nuclear warhead that Libya surrendered as part of its decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction are of 1960s Chinese design, but likely came from Pakistan, diplomats and experts told The Associated Press on Sunday.

China is widely assumed to have been Pakistan's key supplier of much of the clandestine nuclear technology used to establish Islamabad as a nuclear power in 1998 and resold to rogue regimes through the black market network headed by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The drawings appeared to be of a design never used by Pakistan, which went on to develop more modern nuclear weapons, said the diplomats and experts, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Still, they said, they were likely supplied by China as part of the decades-long transfer of technology that Khan used to develop Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

One of them called the drawings "dramatic evidence" of the Chinese-Pakistani nuclear link.

Libya surrendered the drawings in December after its leader Muammar Gaddafi volunteered to scrap all research into developing weapons of mass destruction. The blueprints and accompanying documents are now in the United States under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Warhead

One of the experts said the drawing detailed how to build a warhead for a large ballistic missile, using technology developed by the Chinese in the 1960s that triggers a nuclear blast by a small conventional explosion.

While the instructions on the drawing were in English, some other documents surrendered by Libya along with the blueprints were in Chinese, he said.

He said that if built, the warhead would have weighed more than 450kg. That's too bulky for any delivery system the Libyans possessed but not for the ballistic missiles developed by North Korea and Iran, the other nations said to have been supplied by Khan's network.

While there is no evidence either of those countries were supplied with the same or a similar drawing, "it would be a very nice warhead for those countries," said the expert.

North Korea runs a nuclear weapons program using plutonium. But US officials also believe it has a separate programme based on enriched uranium, possibly using technology imported from Pakistan. North Korea has denied the allegation.

Iran denies trying to develop nuclear weapons but suspicions persist because it kept secret attempts to enrich uranium for nearly two decades. Although it agreed to open all aspects of its nuclear activities to IAEA perusal late last year, inspectors for the UN watchdog agency recently found designs of advanced enriching equipment the Iranians had kept from them.

As well, critics say that Iran is not fully honouring an agreement to suspend uranium enrichment, something denied by Tehran, which says it is interested in the process not to make weapons-grade uranium but to generate nuclear power.

- AP