WASHINGTON — Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts.
The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded dramatic evidence of China’s long-suspected role in transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s, they said. The Chinese designs were later resold to Libya by a Pakistani-led trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, added the officials and experts, who are based in the United States and Europe.
The packet of documents, some of them written in Chinese characters, contain detailed, step-by-step instructions for assembling an implosion-type nuclear bomb that could fit atop a large ballistic missile. Also included were technical instructions for manufacturing individual components for the device, the officials and experts said.
"It was just what you’d have on the factory floor. It tells you what torque to use on the bolts and what glue to use on the parts," said one weapons expert who has reviewed the blueprints. He described the designs as "very, very old" but "very well-engineered."
U.S. intelligence officials concluded years ago that China had provided early assistance to Pakistan in building its first nuclear weapon — assistance that appears to have ended in the 1980s.
Still, weapons experts familiar with the blueprints expressed surprise at what they described as the wholesale transfer of sensitive nuclear technology to another country. Notes included in the package of documents suggest China continued to mentor Pakistani scientists on the finer points of bomb-building over a period of several years, the officials said.
China’s actions "were irresponsible, and raise questions about what else China provided to Pakistan’s nuclear program," said David Albright, a nuclear physicist and former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq who has been briefed on the materials found in Libya. "These documents also raise questions about whether Iran, North Korea and perhaps others received these documents from Pakistanis or their agents."
The package of documents was turned over to U.S. officials in November after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction and open his country’s weapons laboratories to international inspection. The blueprints, which were flown to Washington last month, have been analyzed by experts from the United States, Britain and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Weapons experts in Libya also found large amounts of equipment used in making enriched uranium, the essential ingredient in nuclear weapons. It was that discovery that helped expose a rogue nuclear trading network that officials say funneled technology and parts to Libya as well as Iran and North Korea.
A central figure in the network, Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, acknowledged last month that he had passed nuclear secrets to others. Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf then pardoned Khan.
Libya appears to have made only minimal progress toward building a weapon, and had no missile in its arsenal capable of carrying the 1,000-pound nuclear device depicted in the drawings, the officials said. However, weapons experts noted, the blueprints would have been far more valuable to the other known customers of Khan’s network.
The design "appears deliverable by North Korea’s Nodong missile, Iran’s Shahab-3 missile and ballistic missiles Iraq was pursuing just prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War," said Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security has studied the nonconventional weapons programs of both states.
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