Talking to foreign media in the past, AQ Khan once said the confession "was handed into my hand".
My Nuclear Manifesto
In an article titled "My Nuclear Manifesto" published by the Newsweek on May 16, 2011, Dr. AQ Khan said:
Pakistan's nuclear program has always been a target for Western propaganda and false accusations. I would like to make it clear that it was an Indian nuclear explosion in May 1974 that prompted our nuclear program, motivating me to return to Pakistan to help create a credible nuclear deterrent and save my country from Indian nuclear blackmail.
After 15 years in Europe with invaluable experience in enrichment technology, I came to Pakistan in December 1975 and was given the task of producing nuclear weapons by then-prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. On Dec. 10, 1984, I informed Gen. Zia-ul-Haq that we could explode a device at a week's notice, whenever he so desired. We achieved credible nuclear capacity by the second half of the '80s, and the delivery system was perfected in the early '90s. For a country that couldn't produce bicycle chains to have become a nuclear and missile power within a short spanand in the teeth of Western oppositionwas quite a feat.
Don't overlook the fact that no nuclear-capable country has been subjected to aggression or occupied, or had its borders redrawn. Had Iraq and Libya been nuclear powers, they wouldn't have been destroyed in the way we have seen recently. If we had had nuclear capability before 1971, we would not have lost half of our countrypresent-day Bangladeshafter disgraceful defeat.
Tellingly, theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein, wrote in the New York Review on April 9, 2009 that Like Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988), a German theoretical physicist and spy who worked at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project and passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan changed the history.
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