Abdul Qadeer Khan

1 April 1936), known as A. Q. Khan, is a Pakistani nuclear physicist and a metallurgical engineer, who founded the uranium enrichment program for Pakistan's atomic bomb project. Khan founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, serving as both its senior scientist and Director-General until he retired in 2001. Khan was also a figure in other Pakistani national science projects, making research contributions to molecular morphology, the physics of martensite alloys, condensed matter physics, and materials physics.

In January 2004, the Pakistani government summoned Khan for a debriefing on his active role in nuclear weapons technology proliferation in other countries after the United States provided evidence of it to the Pakistanis. Khan formally admitted his responsibility for these activities a month later. The Pakistani government dismisses allegations that Pakistani authorities sanctioned Khan's activities.
After years of official house arrest during and following his debriefing, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on 6 February 2009 declared Abdul Qadeer Khan to be a free citizen of Pakistan, allowing him free movement inside the country. The verdict was rendered by Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Aslam.In September 2009, concerned because the decision also ended all security restrictions on Khan, the United States warned that Khan still remained a "serious proliferation risk"

Early Life

Khan was born in 1936 in Bhopal, British India, into an Urdu-speaking family who were originally ethnic Pashtun.His mother, Zulekha (née Begum), was a housewife. His father, Abdul Ghafoor, was an alumnus of Nagpur University and an academic who served in the Indian Education ministry then permanently settled the family in Bhopal State after he retired in 1935^. After the partition of India in 1947, his family emigrated from India to Pakistan in 1952, and settled in Karachi, Sindh. Briefly attending the D.J. Science College, he enrolled at Karachi University in 1956 to study physics. In 1960, he graduated with a degree in physics with a minor in mathematics, while his degree concentration was in solid-state physics.

For a short time, Khan worked for the city government as an inspector of weights and measures. In 1961, he went to Germany to study metallurgy at the Technical University in Berlin but made a transfer to Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1965^.. At Delft, he obtained an engineer's degree in technology (equivalent to MS) in 1967 and joined the Catholic University of Leuven for his doctoral studies. Supervised by Dr. Martin Brabers at Leuven University, Khan received a D.Eng. degree in metallurgical engineering in 1972. His doctoral thesis dealt and contained fundamental work on martensite and its extended industrial applications to the field of morphology


to be countinued...........