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Nuke data known, U.S. says

Cause for alarm discounted

By Nicholas Kralev (Contact) | Wednesday, June 18, 2008

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The Bush administration rejected accusations Tuesday that it has failed to unravel the nuclear proliferation activities of Pakistan's Abdul Qadeer Khan network, saying that recently reported blueprints of sophisticated nuclear warheads linked to the network are no reason for concern.

The State Department dismissed a Monday report by former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright about the blueprints, which were found on the computers of Swiss businessmen with ties to the Khan ring. Mr. Albright said they might have been passed to Iran, North Korea or even terrorists.

"I'm not aware that anyone has raised any special concerns about the press reporting that's occurred over the last few weeks," department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters.

"I'm not aware of any information that would indicate that, as the director of central intelligence, the president and many other officials have said, that this network was active beyond the point which we knew," he said. "The most important thing is that A.Q. Khan's network is out of business and that it isn't in a position to engage in proliferation activities."

Mr. Albright challenged Mr. Casey's confidence, saying the public disclosure of the blueprints is an embarrassment for the administration.

"They have claimed for four years that they busted the network, but there are still serious unanswered questions," Mr. Albright, who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said in an interview.

"They didn't seem to know about these documents on the computers" when they first surfaced in 2006, and "they didn't want this stuff out," he said.

In his report, Mr. Albright said the uranium-based blueprints are significant because they are for a device much smaller than previously known designs sold by the Khan network, such as one being used by Libya.

Even though Mr. Albright said he learned about the Swiss discovery two years ago, as did the CIA, he deliberately refrained from disclosing it publicly until now.

"The CIA had a long time to get to the bottom of this, but they don't seem to have managed, and that's a problem," he said Tuesday.

He acknowledged there is no evidence that nuclear secrets were spread after the ring was shut down by the Pakistani government in 2004, but said the possibility cannot be ruled out.

Mr. Khan, known as the father the Pakistani nuclear bomb, who was pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf and has been under house arrest for four years, rejected Mr. Albright's report as "pure lies and nonsense."

"He has been writing against Pakistan for years, since we started our program," the Associated Press in Islamabad quoted Mr. Khan as saying of Mr. Albright.

In 2004, the Swiss authorities arrested engineer Friedrich Tinner and sons Marco and Urs on suspicion of trafficking nuclear secrets as part of the Khan network. Later, the sophisticated blueprints were found on their computers.

The tens of thousands of pages were supposed to be used against the Tinners, but last month, Swiss President Pascal Couchepin said they were destroyed in November so they do not fall into terrorist hands.

Mr. Albright and others have suggested that Urs Tinner was a CIA agent, and Mr. Couchepin said the Swiss government had blocked an investigation into charges that he had engaged in illegal actions for a foreign country.