Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has admitted that disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan provided North Korea with centrifuge machines and their designs. In an interview to the Kyodo, news agency of Japan, Musharraf qualified his statemet by adding that Khan could not have been of immense help to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes because Khan merely helped in enriching the uranium to weapons grade.
Musharraf added that North Korea must have got additional facilities, such as making the bomb, the trigger mechanism, the bomb’s delivery system etc., themselves or somewhere else.
Khan, revered in Pakistan as the man who gave his country the weapons capability to balance that of the nuclear-armed neighbouring India, confessed last year to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He was later pardoned by General Musharraf but he was virtually under house arrest at his home in Islamabad since then.
