Nervous Gaddafi slowed nuclear bomb spread

It appears that Iran and North Korea may soon be armed with nuclear weapons. One privateer gave them a head-start. James Button writes in today's The Age (Melbourne):

Just days before the bombs fell on Iraq in March, 2003, Britain's secret service got an unexpected phone call. It led two MI6 officers to private rooms in a Mayfair hotel. There, a nervous young man told them that "the leader" was ready to reconsider his weapons of mass destruction program. The agents were astonished. The leader was the young man's father, Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi.

From that meeting with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a tense and top-secret diplomatic operation began. Libya wanted to shed its pariah status - the United States had designated it a "state sponsor of terrorism" in 1979 - but it feared betrayal by the US and Britain. Over nine months in 2003 it tortuously revealed details of its program to acquire nuclear weapons.

After a tip-off in September, agents working on behalf of the CIA and MI6 boarded the BBC China, a container vessel berthed in Taranto, Italy. In five containers bound for Libya they found thousands of components for a centrifuge, a device that can enrich uranium for a bomb.

The game was up. Soon after, Libya allowed US and British agents to inspect its weapons production sites for the first time. On December 19, its foreign minister announced on television that his country was giving up its nuclear weapons ambitions in return for the lifting of sanctions. As arranged, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush immediately endorsed the deal. The war on terror, it seemed, had finally borne fruit. A grateful Gaddafi even sent Blair boxes of oranges and dates.

But when Libya came in from the cold, something even bigger and less cheering came in with it. The seizure of the centrifuge parts in Taranto was the last step in exposing a sophisticated global network that traded the materials and know-how to make nuclear arms.

The network was vital to Iran's march down the nuclear path. It seems to have helped North Korea in its attempt to build a bomb. It tried to sell to Iraq. It was constructing an entire nuclear weapons capability for Libya. It was dominated by shadowy European businessmen but at its head was a high-profile Pakistani scientist who had helped forge his country's atomic weapons program ...

Read on at Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity and the Rise and Fall of the A. Q. Khan Network