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Pakistan’s initial drive to develop nuclear weapons was meant to counter India, but under its chief architect Abdul Qadeer Khan, the programme evolved into an “Islamic bomb” aimed at spreading nuclear technology to other Muslim nations, including Iran, according to former CIA officer Richard Barlow. In an interview with ANI, Barlow, who served as a counterproliferation officer during Pakistan’s covert nuclear build-up in the 1980s, said Khan’s network supplied Iran with critical gas centrifuge technology, and possibly nuclear weapons blueprints, in the early 1990s, advancing Tehran’s atomic programme by decades. Barlow explained that while Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions were triggered by India’s 1974 nuclear test, they soon took on a broader ideological dimension. “Pakistan’s primary motive for developing nuclear weapons was to counter India. But it was also very clear from AQ Khan and the generals’ perspective that it was not just the Pakistani bomb; it was the Islamic bomb, the Muslim bomb,” he said, adding that the aim was to share nuclear capability with other Islamic countries. He claimed that Iran’s current nuclear infrastructure rests on Pakistani assistance, saying, “There is no way that Iran could ever have developed gas centrifuges without the centrifuges that Khan and Pakistan provided them in the early 1990s.” Barlow also criticised Washington for ignoring Pakistan’s proliferation network for decades, alleging that U.S. administrations “did nothing” about Islamabad’s nuclear dealings for more than 20 years.
