By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
North Korea would not likely have nuclear capability without the earlier proliferation of nuclear technology by Abdul Qadeer Khan. At age 85, Khan died this October 9 from COVID-19. Honored and celebrated in Pakistan as the “father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program,” Khan was also responsible for providing technical information to North Korea, Libya, and likely Iran.
After graduating from Karachi University in 1960, Khan studied metallurgy in Berlin, Belgium and the Netherlands. He then worked for a British-Dutch-German nuclear engineering company, where he copied the blueprints for centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, and brought them back to Pakistan in 1976. Prime Minister Bhutto put Khan in charge of the Pakistan enrichment project.
But Khan also illegally shared knowledge of nuclear technology, in particular the ultracentrifuge designs with Iran, Libya and North Korea. The United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency exposed his involvement and he confessed in 2004. But since India had already moved ahead in nuclear bomb research, Khan’s work was considered important for providing a counterbalance. He was pardoned by Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and was kept under house arrest for five years.
In response to nuclear tests conducted by India, Islamabad also carried out atomic tests in 1998. This military doctrine of “mutual assured destruction (MAD)” has been considered worldwide to be the factor that has prevented nuclear war—so far. If both sides of a conflict possess the power to destroy the other, then such annihilation of both supports this theory of ongoing deterrence.
Khan’s contribution to the initial nuclear abilities of North Korea and Iran are described in the 2008 book “The Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches from the Underground World of Nuclear Trafficking” by William Langewiesche, an American author and journalist.
But MAD raises the question of which world leaders of nuclear nations have actually considered nuclear war a sane option?
The United States has been the only country to actually use nuclear bombs in war—at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Henry Kissinger’s book “On China,” he summarizes how, on March 16, 1955, President Eisenhower confirmed the possible use “...observing that so long as civilians were not in harm’s way, he saw no reason the United States could not use tactical nuclear weapons.” But over time, it was becoming obvious that the danger from nuclear radiation went beyond the effects of the immediate explosion. Not only were there long term deaths in Japan from those initial bombs, but still today deaths result from the long-term effects of cesium and strontium isotopes released by above-ground testing by the U.S. and Soviet Union many decades ago. Eisenhower was speaking of very limited tactical nuclear weapons used only on enemy troops. Now we know any use will devastate large numbers of civilians worldwide.
That was not a concern for Mao Zedong, who at that early time did not yet have nuclear weapons. Kissinger explains Mao’s standard speech: “We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out—conventional or thermonuclear—we’ll win.” Khrushchev and all other world leaders have since come to understand that no one wins a nuclear war, as Khrushchev proved when he backed down from the Cuban missile crisis.
Until recently. The so-called “Nuclear Club” has expanded from including the United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union to adding Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Another twenty countries could soon produce nuclear weapons. And the size of some weapons is small enough they could fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
Today, the only modern leader who has proposed use of nuclear weapons was the prior U.S. President who on several occasions stated that “we have nukes, why don’t we use them?”
Back on July 31, 1985, CBS Reports ran a special on the situation 40 years after the bomb (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), narrated by Walter Cronkite. He interviewed Dr. Harold Agnew, a physicist who helped develop the first bomb, who stated: “I'm convinced that unless a person has actually felt the heat...from a high-yield multimegaton weapon, the danger of a person saying, ‘Let's use nuclear weapons’ will persist. Perhaps we ought to have a requirement...that leaders of nuclear power states every five years or so witness in their underwear a nuclear multimegaton detonation.”
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.