Today, according to Pakistan's Daily Times, Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesperson, Tasneem Aslam, condemned the nuclear test which was carried out yesterday by North Korea. In a statement, she claimed: "It is regrettable that the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) chose to ignore the advice of the international community not to test a nuclear weapons device....We are afraid that the step by North Korea is going to have a chain reaction which nobody wants."
Aslam's comments could be seen as pure hypocrisy, considering North Korea's ability to test a nuclear device in an underground site has been made possible by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, who gave centrifuges and technological information to the communist regime. Khan was the father of Pakistan's own nuclear bomb, and for this he had become a national hero.
Even when it was revealed that Khan had sold nuclear secrets to Libya and North Korea, which in turn shared material with Iran, Khan never had to face any substantial retribution. Abdul Qadeer Khan is still a national hero in Pakistan. Since his public confession in 2004 of selling nuclear secrets, he has been under house arrest, and forbidden to freely mix with people.
When 71-year old Khan went into hospital last month for an operation for prostate cancer, the hospital was inundated with tokens from well-wishers. At the gate of the Aga Khan Hospital in Karachi, bouquets, banners and cards were left, carrying notes such as: "The entire nation is praying for Dr Qadeer's early recovery." Politicians, such as former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, gave their messages wishing him a speedy recovery. A senior leader of the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, which wishes for sharia to be enforced in Pakistan, said outside the hospital that the entire Muslim world was praying for his early recovery.
The blast yesterday was felt even in Norway, 3,900 miles away. The shockwaves of the bomb's impact took 10 minutes to travel through the earth's crust.
For the insane regime of North Korea, where the Times states that in times of hunger, children scavenge the fields for crows, dragonflies and rats to eat, the test yesterday by Kim Jong Il ("Dear Leader") brought his country to become the ninth nation to possess a nuclear weapon. Before "Dear Leader" inherited the nation from his father Kim Il Sung ("Great Leader") in 1994, North Korea has pursued its nuclear goals while its own people starved.
The stages of this development go back to 1989, when US satellite imaging revealed a nuclear reprocessing plant at Yongbyon. According to the Independent, the components needed to create their nuclear development program were bought off the black market.
There was a huge famine in the 1990s, which killed up to 3 million people in North Korea. But while citizens of the People's Democratic Republic starved, funds from foreign donors to alleviate this famine were diverted into the nuclear weapons program. Now, according to the Times, "Dear Leader" is selling drugs to Japan and South Korea. These are amphetamines, manufactured in North Korean laboratories.
The bomb itself which was released yesterday was not large. It has been estimated as being from 5 to 15 kilotonnes, though France has claimed it is only 1 kilotonne. In terms of potential devastation, it is less powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but it is a bomb nonetheless.
The Clinton administration had tried to divert North Korea's interests away from nuclear weaponry, and in 1994 offered fuel oil and promises of safe reactors, incapable of producing weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for cessation of its plans for weaponry. The agreement withered away, and when George W, Bush said that North Korea was the third "axis of evil", "Dear Leader" accelerated his nuclear program. In 2005 he publicly announced he had nuclear weapons, and yesterday the test was triumphantly announced. Though world leaders, including China, have universally condemned the test, North Korea's ambassador to the UN said that his country should be "congratulated".
But North Korea has operated a draconian communist system since 1946, with internment camps set up to imprison anyone who expressed dissent, and with all political opponents made to "disappear". Yet despite this common knowledge, in 1975, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan had no qualms at all when he sold nuclear secrets to North Korea. So who is this hero to the Pakistani people? Is he anything other than a self-serving crook, or is he so blindly hateful against the West that he was prepared to willingly arm its enemies?
Khan was born in Bhopal, India in 1935. He grew up in a modest middle class Muslim home, and in 1952 he migrated to Pakistan. He gained a degree in engineering in Karachi University, and then worked in West Germany and the Netherlands. In 1972, he gained a PhD in Belgium, and then joined a company in Amsterdam.
As we wrote in November last year, it was within this company, Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory (FDO), that Khan gained information which would lead to the development of Pakistan's, and now North Korea's, nuclear bomb. FDO provided materials for uranium enrichment. Khan obtained details of centrifuges which were used to extract uranium 235 from uranium hexaflouride gas. He left Holland in the mid 1970s to return to Pakistan, where he began work on developing Pakistan's atomic bomb.
The knowledge of itself was not enough, and a Dutch employee at FDO called Hank Slebos maintained contact with Khan. He sent vital components and 20 kilograms of chemicals to Pakistan between 1999 and 2002. But he had been exporting materials for longer than that. In 1985, Slebos had been sentenced to 12 month's jail for sending an oscilloscope to Pakistan. Slebos last year publicly justified his actions, saying that Pakistan "needed an atom bomb".
In 1983, A. Q. Khan was sentenced in absentia by an Amsterdam court, for attempted espionage. This was later overturned on appeal.
In Pakistan, Khan worked on developing missiles, and set up a company in Kahuta, called Khan Research Laboratories. It was here that uranium was enriched, and most of Pakistan's nuclear research was carried out. Finally, in 1998, Pakistan did its first nuclear bomb test.
But by this time, it had already been alleged in Newsweek for May that Khan had offered to sell nuclear information to Iraq. Khan has denied this, though UN researches confirmed that an attempt had been made.
International intelligence was reporting that Khan was involved in selling nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for missile technology. But Pakistan issued denials. The scale of Khan's activities became public in February 2004, when the scientist appeared on Pakistani TV to confess that he had supplied nuclear technology and knowhow to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Within days of the televised confession, President Musharraf pardoned Khan. In 2001, when leaks of Khan's assistance in nuclear proliferation became known, the scientist had been demoted, but his secrets had been kept by the Pakistan administration.
In August last year President Musharraf told a Japanese news agency that Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea, but he maintained that these had not assisted North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons capability. By this time, Pyongyang had already announced that it had nuclear weapons, and Musharraf was playing down Khan's involvement.
Musharraf said then: "So, if North Korea has made a bomb...Dr. A.Q. Khan's part is only enriching the uranium to weapons grade. He does not know about making the bomb, he does not know about the trigger mechanism, he does not know about the delivery system." He claimed that the North Koreans must have obtained the other vital materials "themselves or from somewhere else and not from Pakistan."
Khan had given 20 centrifuges to North Korea. These included P-1 centrifuges, and the more sophisticated P-11 centrifuges. Musharraf said he was unsure if Khan had also supplied uranium hexaflouride gas to Ptongyang. He said: "Again, if A.Q. Khan had given UF6 gas, some cylinders, it is not enough. It needs tons and tons of UF6 gas to enrich uranium, to go through thousands of centrifuges to be able to produce 1 kilogram of enriched uranium. So, even if he has provided some gas, it is immaterial. They need so much more."
Musharraf stated that Pakistan had been engaged in conventional weapons exchanges, which had then been terminated, but claimed that there had never been any official agreements concerning nuclear technology.
In February 2004, it was revealed by Malaysian police that Khan had used a Sri Lankan middleman to send enriched uranium to Libya in 2001, and that the scientist had sold nuclear centrifuge parts to Iran in the mid-1990s.
The go-between was named as Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, who was married to a Malaysian wife. He had claimed to Malaysian police that UF6 had been sent by air from Pakistan to Libya in 2001. Centrifuge parts manufactured by Malaysian company Scomi Precision Engineering (Scope) had been intercepted on a ship bound for Libya in Ocotober 2003. The company is owned by the son of Malaysia's prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
A 12 page report by the Malaysian police cleared scope, but said that individuals from Germany, Turkey, Britain and Switzerland had been involved in the international transportation of nuclear technology.
Khan has been described by a former CIA director as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden".
He married Hennie, a woman of Dutch-South African origin, by whom he had two daughters who now live in Britain. It is rumored that these have information which may implicate Pakistan's government in Khan's activities.
But according to Gordon Corera, who wrote a biography of Khan, "Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network", Khan's motivations were less about Islamic fundamentalism, and more about his contempt for America and Britain. In 1979, he wrote a letter to der Spiegel, the German newspaper.
It is a very important letter and shows his strongest motive perhaps to build the bomb. He questioned in that letter 'the bloody holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the British. 'These bastards are God-appointed guardians of the world,' the letter complained, 'to stockpile hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads and have the God-given authority of carrying out explosions every month. But if we start a modest programme, we are the Satans, the devils.'
Khan did later claim that he saw the bomb as an "Islamic bomb", but this conclusion seems to have been developed later. His supporters in Pakistan include almost all of the Islamists, who hate India as a matter of routine, and by making comments that he was on a "holy mission" Khan appears to be trying to satisfy the expectations of these allies.
Corera states: "It is also true that over time, he began to see Pakistan as the centre of the Islamic world, thanks to his bomb to a great extent. His close associate Zahid Malik wrote in Khan's biography that the latter wanted to see the Islamic world rise above other nations, and in that Islamic world Pakistan would be pre-eminent. In all this, I believe he was a Pakistani patriot and nationalist first and a Muslim internationalist second."
Khan, like many Pakistanis, seemed to be filled with a need to prove his Islamic credentials. As writer Mihir Bose observes of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent: "They have been encouraged to forget they belong to a very different cultural strain than the Saudis. They are mostly converts from Hinduism and there is large measure of the gentle Sufi tradition in them. But, influenced by imams, themselves financed by Middle Eastern money, many try to prove they are as Muslim as their co-religionists from the Middle East."
Pakistani Muslims are always the poor relations of the Wahhabist culture of Islam, based at Mecca. Desperate to prove their cultures to be equal to Arabism, individuals such as President Musharraf, and also leaders of Malaysia and Indonesia, strive to set themselves up to the world as distinct and imitable varieties of Islam.
Khan was motivated by hatred of the West, a sense of inferiority, and later in his career he justified himself by means of this need to show that non-Arab Islam was as important as the Islam from Mecca.
Abdul Qadeer Khan's need to prove himself, coupled with an irresponsible greed for money and land, as well as a contempt for the more technically-developed West, has now borne its deadly fruit. With North Korea's "Dear Leader" finally proving to the world that his country is now nuclear-armed, there will be more uncertainty and instability in northeast Asia. And the world is now assessing the extent of the damage that A. Q. Khan has done to the international community.
On Friday, results from the widely-reported Scotland Yard investigation into the assassination of Bhutto's death dominated press coverage of 
