Pakistian Courts Gag Nuclear Scientist
An interesting story today comes from the AP (and, by association, CNN’s Website) telling the tale of a court in Pakistan that has issued a gag order on one of their Nuclear Scientists/Engineers/Physicists, Abdul Qadeer Khan, because he has been telling the media about how Pakistan helped North Korea develop nuclear bombs.
A court on Monday barred the disgraced architect of Pakistan’s atomic weapons program from speaking about nuclear proliferation, less than three weeks after he implicated the army in the sharing of nuclear technology with North Korea.
That’s right–the Pakistani court has the ability to refrain a person from talking completely about a subject because they don’t want to have to admit what happened. Great.
There are a few disturbing bits of information that are contained in this article. First of all, leaking any sort of researched secrets is a bad thing to do. The fact that Khan did so obviously makes him a untrustable scientist, much like Klaus Fuchs in the early atomic age. But more revelations made by Khan makes him seem much more innocent than originally thought. He claims that the Pakistani government allowed the shipment of centrifuges to North Korea aboard a North Korean plane with full military knowledge.
The fact that the Pakistani government may have willing provided other countries with their own nuclear secrets is a very scary thought. Most countries attempt to keep their nuclear secrets to themselves. Evidently the Pakistani government thought they had something to gain when they gave out their centrifuges to North Korea. Korea managed to produce a bomb, so I assume that is what Pakistan was going for. Either way it’s very scary to think that Pakistan is just handing out nuclear secrets/equipment left and right…