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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abdul Qadeer Khan | 1/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:08:05.989909+00:00 | kb-cron |
Abdul Qadeer Khan (1 April 1936 – 10 October 2021) was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer. He is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program". A Muhajir emigrant from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase transitions of metallic alloys, uranium metallurgy, and isotope separation based on gas centrifuges. After learning of India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974, Khan joined his nation's clandestine efforts to develop atomic weapons when he founded the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976 and was both its chief scientist and director for many years. In January 2004, Khan was subjected to a debriefing by the Musharraf administration over evidence of nuclear proliferation handed to them by the Bush administration of the United States. Khan admitted his role in running a nuclear proliferation network – only to retract his statements in later years when he leveled accusations at the former administration of Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1990, and also directed allegations at President Musharraf over the controversy in 2008. Khan was accused of selling nuclear secrets illegally and was put under house arrest in 2004. After years of house arrest, Khan successfully filed a lawsuit against the Government of Pakistan at the Islamabad High Court whose verdict declared his debriefing unconstitutional and freed him from house arrest on 6 February 2009. The United States reacted negatively to the verdict and the Obama administration issued an official statement warning that Khan still remained a "serious proliferation risk". On account of the knowledge of nuclear espionage by Khan and his contribution to nuclear proliferation throughout the world post-1970s, and the renewed fear of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists after the September 11 attacks, former CIA Director George Tenet described Khan as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden". After his death on 10 October 2021, he was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque before being buried at the H-8 graveyard in Islamabad.
== Early life and education == Abdul Qadeer Khan was born on 1 April 1936, in Bhopal, a city in the erstwhile British Indian princely state of Bhopal. He was a Muhajir of Urdu-speaking origin. Khan provided conflicting details regarding his family background. While addressing a convocation in 2019, he stated that he belonged to an Orakzai family long settled in Bhopal; he also wrote at another occasion in Jang that his maternal lineage was from Tirah Valley while from his paternal side, his ancestor was an Uzbek soldier who came to India with Muhammad of Ghor, the 12th century conqueror; this ancestral link inspired Khan to later name a ballistic missile the Ghauri. In 1994–95, Khan would have a mausoleum built over the grave of Muhammad Ghori situated in Dhamiak village around 80 kilometres from Islamabad. At a 2014 event marking the publishing of a book on the history of Khanzada Rajputs, Abdul Qadeer Khan asserted that he belonged to Khanzada community although his family adopted the surname "Khan" instead of "Khanzada". His father, Abdul Ghafoor, was a schoolteacher who once worked for the Ministry of Education, and his mother, Zulekha, was a housewife with a very religious mindset. His older siblings, along with other family members, had emigrated to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947, who would often write to Khan's parents about the new life they had found in Pakistan. After his matriculation from a local school in Bhopal, in 1952 Khan emigrated from India to Pakistan on the Sind Mail train, partly due to the reservation politics at that time, and religious violence in India during his youth had left an indelible impression on his world view. Upon settling in Karachi with his family, Khan briefly attended the D. J. Science College before transferring to the University of Karachi, where he graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in physics with a concentration on solid-state physics. From 1956 to 1959, Khan was employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (city government) as an inspector of weights and measures. During this time, he applied for a scholarship that allowed him to study in West Germany. In 1961, Khan departed for West Germany to study material science at the Technical University in West Berlin, where he academically excelled in courses in metallurgy, but left West Berlin when he switched to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1965. In 1962, while on vacation in The Hague, he met Hendrina "Henny" Reterink, a British passport holder, who had been born in South Africa to Dutch expatriates. She spoke Dutch and had spent her childhood in Africa before returning with her parents to the Netherlands, where she lived as a registered foreigner. In 1963, he married Henny in a modest Muslim ceremony at Pakistan's embassy in The Hague. Khan and Henny together had two daughters, Dina Khan, who is a doctor, and Ayesha Khan. In 1967, Khan obtained an engineer's degree in materials technology – an equivalent to a Master of Science (MS) offered in English-speaking nations such as Pakistan – and joined the doctoral program in metallurgical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He worked under Belgian professor Martin J. Brabers at Leuven University, who supervised his doctoral thesis which Khan successfully defended, and graduated with a DEng in metallurgical engineering in 1972. His thesis included fundamental work on martensite, and its extended industrial applications in the field of graphene morphology.