AQ Khan

When South African police raided the warehouse of a company called Tradefin Engineering, a manufacturer of pipes and valves, in September 2004, they discovered stacks of shipping containers eleven stories high loaded with parts marked for reassembly in Libya, that would have given the Libyans the ability to process enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs. Tradefin had become part of a vast, worldwide network supplying parts for the manufacture of nuclear weapons under the direction of A.Q. Khan, the former architect of Pakistan's nuclear program.

But the three men running the Tradefin operation were not new to the nuclear black market. All three had previously worked with the South African government obtaining, through underground trafficking networks, critical technology for South Africa's own top-secret nuclear weapons program in the mid 1980s.

South Africa's nuclear bomb program was conducted out of a top-secret facility called Kentron Circle, located in the broad savannah about thirty miles from Pretoria. Its still there, a conical concrete bunker, now empty, hidden in the hills about a ten-minute drive off the main road leading to Botswana. Inside, a team of twenty scientists, working in secrecy, ultimately succeeded in building six nuclear bombs, working from designs and technology smuggled in from illicit dealers around the world. At the time, South Africa's apartheid government was operating under severe international sanctions.

"We would tell them what we needed, and two or three weeks later it arrived," recalls Andre Buys, who was one of those scientists. Buys, now a Physics professor at Pretoria University, has since become active in global non-proliferation efforts. "[When] such equipment arrived, I'd say 'thanks'. I didn't ask how ask how it got there … Sanctions busting was a big business back then." Sanctions-busting brought everything from oil to consumer goods into South Africa's black market. The most sensitive and secret component of that illicit trade were the black market connections supplying the material and know-how for South Africa’s nuclear weapons program.

Among those sanctions-busters were three business-savvy engineers who would later surface as key players in the A.Q. Khan network: Gerhard Wisser, organizer of the Tradefin deal; Daniel Geiges, his chief engineer; and Johan Meyer, the owner of Tradefin.

In the 1980's Wisser's firm, Krisch Engineering, was a "key supplier of equipment" to the South African Atomic Energy Corporation, according to Wisser's plea agreement filed with South African prosecutors last year. The energy corporation was run by the apartheid government of the time and was one of the main companies responsible for the development of the secret nuclear weapons program at Kentron Circle—the place where Buys helped to build South Africa's nuclear bombs.

Daniel Geiges, Wisser's aide-de-camp and chief engineer, began working for him in 1981 and would later manage the Libyan project at Tradefin. They worked together to import technology to the South African nuclear program in defiance of international sanctions. While at the AEC, Wisser met the man who would some two decades later nickname their joint nuclear enterprise, "the beast." Johan Meyer was working for the South African Uranium Corporation—the company responsible for mining and processing the uranium that would be used in the nuclear weapons being assembled at Kentron Circle.

Wisser is German and Geiges is Swiss; both had become residents of South Africa, which at the time had what amounted to an open door policy for white immigrants, no questions asked. Meyer is a native South African afrikaneer.

Their trafficking was not an exclusively one-way enterprise. Wisser and Geiges were also in the business of exporting South Africa's own sensitive nuclear technology. And one of their key overseas clients was AQ Khan in Pakistan. Those dealings are laid out in the indictment of Daniel Geiges. It was all perfectly legal: South Africa's government-owned arms company made a profit too.

Over some twenty years, Wisser, Geiges, and Meyer were participants in a global underground network that helped facilitate some of the most egregious violations of non-proliferation laws in history. They enabled not only South Africa to build its bombs, but also helped AQ Khan himself develop Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

By 1989, South Africa began its historic revolution. Nelson Mandela was freed from twenty-seven years in prison, and by 1993 was preparing to take office as the country's first democratically elected president. Shortly before Mandela was inaugurated, then-President FW deKlerk informed the IAEA that the country had "decommissioned" its nuclear weapons. This was unprecedented; South Africa was the first country to have built, and then destroyed, a nuclear arsenal.

But this epic change did not eliminate the trafficking networks that had evolved over the many years of South Africa's international isolation. Men like Wisser, Geiges, and Meyer were left without the lucrative black market deals that had made them wealthy. By the end of the century, the three were working together once again, manufacturing and exporting parts for A.Q. Khan's global nuclear weapons manufacturing scheme. Wisser and Geiges were paid $1.5 million for their work on behalf of A.Q. Khan, with checks drawn on Libyan, Pakistani and Middle Eastern banks; another $1 million was paid to Tradefin's owner, Johan Meyer.

The Nuclear Renaissance Starts Here, says the bright sales brochure for Westinghouse Electric Corporation's newest nuclear reactor, the AP1000.

The slogan is apt: In December 2006, the Chinese government awarded Westinghouse what was then the most lucrative contract in the history of commercial nuclear energy. The fast-growing, energy-hungry country would pay between $5and $8 billion for four AP1000 reactors. It was China's first step toward making good on its pledge to quadruple nuclear power production by 2020.

Thanks to climbing oil prices and concern about carbon emissions' contribution to global warming, China is not alone in looking to boost nuclear power production. Bob Pierce, the global business development manager for the AP1000, said his company has fielded inquiries about the reactor from more than 40 countries. "The renaissance," he says, "is bringing lots of new players into the marketplace."

But nonproliferation experts say that reviving the global nuclear energy industry presents serious security risks that, left unaddressed, far outweigh cuts in carbon emissions.

Worldwide, 439 nuclear reactors are currently producing power. Nuclear energy analyst Alan McDonald of the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that by the year 2030, there will be between 75 and 350 more reactors on line. That includes expansions of existing capacity in countries such as Japan, India and the United Kingdom, and countries entirely new to the technology, including Yemen, Indonesia and Egypt.

The additional reactors aren't themselves a problem, says Laura Holgate, who previously managed a Department of Defense program to destroy excess nuclear weapons in Russia, and now serves as vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a DC-based nongovernmental organization. "Modern power plants don't have material on site that can be used for a nuclear weapon directly."

But each one of those new power plants will need a steady supply of low-enriched uranium to fuel the nuclear reactors. And uranium enrichment is at the heart of the basic atomic dilemma that has plagued nuclear energy since its start: The very same facility that produces low-enriched fuel for a power plant can be used to produce highly-enriched fuel for a bomb.

"No one has figured out a way to break the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons," says David Albright, physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, DC. "The bomb and nuclear power are joined at the hip."

Straight out of the earth, raw uranium is composed almost entirely of a relatively heavy isotope called U-238. A nuclear reaction requires a higher proportion of U-235, and increasing the proportion of these light atoms is what's called enrichment. There are several ways to do it, including gaseous diffusion and gas centrifuges.

Like those lingering networks left behind in South Africa, the knowledge and connections that Khan assembled have not gone away. Building an enrichment plant is complicated and expensive, and requires specialized parts that are subject to multilateral export controls. But once up and running, the same technology that increases the concentration of U-235 atoms from less than one percent to five percent of the total mass—which is what's needed to fuel a power plant—can be used to increase the concentration to 90 percent, which is what's needed for a bomb.

"If there is a nuclear renaissance," says Albright, "then the proliferation risk will go up, because so often countries hide their nuclear ambitions within civil programs."

The fear is that countries can use nuclear power programs as an excuse to build enrichment plants, saying they need a reliable source of nuclear fuel—and then can use the enrichment plants to create weapons-grade uranium.

Currently, most countries that use nuclear fuel buy it, rather than manufacturing their own. Only six nations—the United States, Russia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom—manufacture and sell enriched uranium on the global market.

But some new entrants to nuclear power are concerned that their access to enriched uranium fuel could be shut off due to political tensions.

"In ten years they could say, 'We need our own enrichment abilities,'" says author and nuclear analyst Joseph Cirincione.

Some countries, such as Iran, are already insisting on developing their own enrichment programs. Brazil and Argentina recently announced plans to set up a joint company to enrich uranium.

To prevent more countries from building their own plants, several national governments and nongovernmental organizations are trying to reassure countries that use nuclear power that they can get a steady supply of fuel without enriching it themselves.

They're taking steps toward creating a multinational fuel cycle—something like an international gas station.

Russia is building an international nuclear fuel depot on its border with Kazakhstan, and last year the US Congress matched a $50 million donation by Warren Buffett to help pay for a multilateral fuel bank. Most recently, in February 2008, German officials proposed that the IAEA oversee an enrichment plant and fuel bank that would be built on international soil.

"There has to be some way for countries to feel confident about their supply of low enriched uranium," says Dr. Frank von Hippel, a nuclear physicist and professor at Princeton who received the MacArthur Award in 1993 for his work on arms control.

The problem is that countries bent on developing nuclear weapons could skip the fuel bank and build their own enrichment plants, a right that's guaranteed to countries party to the Nonproliferation Treaty. It's even legal to enrich uranium to 90 percent or above, points out Tariq Rauf, head of Verifications and Security Policy Coordination for the IAEA—"but it has to be used only for a peaceful purpose."

Detecting whether uranium is being enriched for a peaceful purpose—to fuel a research reactor or a power plant—or for a bomb has been the central challenge since Dwight Eisenhower launched the "Atoms for Peace" initiative. It lies at the core of the current tension with Iran, whose claims about developing nuclear energy run counter to Bush administration claims that the country's ultimate aim is to build bombs.

Ideally, all enrichment facilities would be under the control of a multinational agency like the IAEA, says Rauf. "That way, if a country has its own facilities, we can ask legitimate questions why," he says. "But we are still many years away from that situation."