The Next Nuclear War Starts Here!

A U.N. Khan Job

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
June 16, 2008

WMDs: Blueprints for a nuclear weapon compatible with the ballistic missiles of Iran, North Korea and other rogue states were found on computers of the notorious Khan smuggling ring. Will a complacent world wake up?

Read More: Iran | Global War On Terror

It's clear that it's getting easier to build and use a nuclear bomb. If civilized countries want to stop their biggest cities from becoming radioactive craters, they'd better implement a no-tolerance policy against nuclear proliferation.

It's unacceptable to find — four years after their seizure — that computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities housed sophisticated electronic designs for a Pakistani atomic bomb, in a form easy to reproduce.

David Albright, former chief arms inspector for the United Nations who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, will issue a report this week revealing that the designs were found on computers in the possession of Swiss smugglers linked to nuclear engineer Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is considered the father of Pakistan's bomb.

The computers were seized in 2006. Yet the geniuses at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reportedly had more trouble deciphering the more than 1,000 megabytes of information on the computers and finding the bomb plans than the Manhattan Project had building the first atom bomb in the 1940s.

Which raises a question: Why send hundreds of millions of dollars to Vienna, Austria, each year for IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei's budget? So he can win a Nobel Peace Prize while helping the Islamofascist Iranian regime stall for time while it builds a nuke?

The U.N. agency, which turned 50 last year, exists by law to make sure that nuclear energy "is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose." On winning his 2005 Peace Prize, ElBaradei said it was an "urgently required" step for the IAEA to "keep nuclear and radiological material out of the hands of extremist groups."

Khan's contacts with Tehran's revolutionary regime go back to the 1980s. The IAEA knew at least five years ago that Iran's centrifuge designs were Pakistani.

The IAEA should have been aggressively tracking down every tentacle of the Khan network for years.

Had it done so — who knows? — it might even have found Saddam Hussein was one of Khan's clients, something that may yet be in the cards and that would not enhance ElBaradei's reputation.

Switzerland's government announced that it destroyed 30,000 pages relating to the Khan nuclear plans so they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. But only a naif would conclude that Khan's plans aren't now in the hands of dozens of unsavory characters around the world, from Pyongyang to Damascus, and perhaps even in the caves of Waziristan.

A real international nuclear watchdog would be carrying out a relentless global manhunt for anyone who might have such instructions on how to kill a million innocent souls.

What we have instead in the IAEA is an incompetent, ideologically leftist bureaucracy that continually is making worse an already dangerous state of affairs.