Pakistani’s Black Market: Disturbing Revelations
March 21, 2005The New York Times is reporting today that the black market network of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan might have been trading more than the technology for enriching nuclear fuel and the blueprints for nuclear weapons. Investigators fear that he was also selling “hard-to-master engineering secrets needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.”
This potentially raises the stakes in Iraq and North Korea — if these secrets, as some believe, made it to those countries. As the Times points out, President Bush has stated that he will not tolerate either of those two countries obtaining a nuclear weapon (of course North Korea probably already has them).
Not to be a master of the obvious, but this story underscores the dangerousness of the world we live in and the difficult problems lying ahead for President Bush and the United States in the next few years.
