The greatest nuclear proliferator in history

Many people have been responsible for illegally selling nuclear bomb secrets to the wrong people in the last 80 years. Traitors in Britain and the US revealing bomb secrets to the Soviets and Chinese Americans giving away classified nuclear technology to China. Their names are written into the history books of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. But no one in all of these decades has been more responsible for unlawfully spreading nuclear know-how around the world than Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's most famous and notorious nuclear scientist described lovingly and adoringly by the prime minister and people of Pakistan as the father of the Islamic nuclear bomb. He has died of Covid-19 at the age of 85. But as we all know he not only created and developed the nuclear bomb for his own country he, mostly off his own bat, passed on his nuclear secrets to some of the most unstable and potentially dangerous nations in the world. Namely, Iran, North Korea and Libya. Sometimes, it seems, he got the approval of the then Pakistan leader General Zia-ul-Hak, but on other occasions he just did it himself and today North Korea has a pile of nuclear bombs, Iran is not far off having the capability to do so and Libya would probably have had the bomb by now but for some nifty intelligence work by an MI6 officer that persuaded Colonel Gaddafi not to go down that route. So thank you Abdul Khan, through your Machiavellian exploits you made the world a helluva lot more dangerous. For Pakistan you may always be the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb but for the rest of us you will always be the greatest nuclear proliferator of all time.