Who is Dr Abdul qader?

 Dr Abdul qader

Abdul Qadeer Khan NI HI FPAS  April 1936  10 October 2021. known as A. Q. Khan was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer who is colloquially known as the father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program.

metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase transitions of metallic alloys uranium metallurgy and isotope separation based on gas centrifuges. After learning of India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974. Khan joined his nation's clandestine efforts to develop atomic weapons when he founded the Khan Research Laboratories KRL in 1976 and was both its chief scientist and director for many years.\

In January 2004 Khan was subjected to a debriefing by the Musharraf administration over evidence of nuclear proliferation handed to them by the Bush administration of the United States. Khan admitted his role in running a nuclear proliferation network  only to retract his statements in later years when he leveled accusations at the former administration of Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1990 and also directed allegations at President Musharraf over the controversy in 2008.

Khan was accused of selling nuclear secrets illegally and was put under house arrest in 2004. After years of house arrest Khan successfully filed a lawsuit against the Federal Government of Pakistan at the Islamabad High Court whose verdict declared his debriefing unconstitutional and freed him on 6 February 2009. The United States reacted negatively to the verdict and the Obama administration issued an official statement warning that Khan still remained a "serious proliferation risk".

After his death on 10 October 2021. He was given a state funeral at Faisal Mosque before being buried at the H 8 graveyard in Islamabad.

Early life and education

Abdul Qadeer Khan was born on 1 April 1936 in Bhopal. A city then in the erstwhile British Indian princely state of Bhopal State and now the capital city of Madhya Pradesh. He is a Muhajir of Urdu-speaking Pashtun origin. His father Abdul Ghafoor was a schoolteacher who once worked for the Ministry of Education and his mother Zulekha was a housewife with a very religious mindset. His older siblings along with other family members had emigrated to Pakistan during the bloody partition of India splitting off the independent state of Pakistan in 1947. Who would often write to Khan's parents about the new life they had found in Pakistan.

After his matriculation from a local school in Bhopal in 1952 Khan emigrated from India to Pakistan on the Sind Mail train partly due to the reservation politics  254  at that time and religious violence in India during his youth had left an indelible impression on his world view. Upon settling in Karachi with his family Khan briefly attended the D. J. Science College before transferring to the University of Karachi where he graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Science BSc in physics with a concentration on solid state physics.

From 1956 to 1959 khan was employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation city government as an Inspector of weights , measures and applied for a scholarship that allowed him to study in west Germany. In 1961 Khan departed for West Germany to study material science at the Technical University in West Berlin. Where he academically excelled in courses in metallurgy. But left West Berlin when he switched to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1965.

In 1962 while on vacation in The Hague he met Hendrina Henny Reternik  a British passport holder who had been born in South Africa to Dutch expatriates. She spoke Dutch and had spent her childhood in Africa before returning with her parents to the Netherlands where she lived as a registered foreigner. In 1963 he married Henny in a modest Muslim ceremony at Pakistan's embassy in The Hague. Khan and Henny together had two daughters Dina Khan  who is a doctor, and Ayesha Khan.

In 1967 Khan obtained an engineer's degree in materials technology  an equivalent to a Master of Science MS offered in English speaking nations such as Pakistan  and joined the doctoral program in metallurgical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He worked under Belgian professor Martin J. Brabers at Leuven University. Who supervised his doctoral thesis which Khan successfully defended, and graduated with a DEng in metallurgical engineering in 1972. His thesis included fundamental work on martensite and its extended industrial applications in the field of graphene morphology.

Career in Europe

In 1972 Khan joined the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory or in Dutch FDO an engineering firm subsidiary of Verenigde Machinefabrieken VMF based in Amsterdam from Brabers's recommendation. The FDO was a subcontractor for Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland of the British German Dutch uranium enrichment consortium URENCO which was operating a uranium enrichment plant in Almelo and employed gaseous centrifuge method to assure a supply of nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants in the Netherlands. Soon after khan left FDO when URENCO offered him a senior technical position initially conducting studies on the uranium metallurgy.

Uranium enrichment is an extremely difficult process because uranium in its natural state is composed of just 0.71% of uranium 235 U235. Which is a fissile material 99.3% of uranium 238 U238. Which is non fissile  and 0.0055% of uranium 234 U234. A daughter product which is also a non fissile. The URENCO Group utilised the Zippe type of centrifugal method to electromagnetically separate the isotopes U234, U235 and U238 from sublimed raw uranium by rotating the uranium hexafluoride UF6 gas at up to 100,000 revolutions per minute  49  Khan, whose work was based on physical metallurgy of the uranium metal. 87  eventually dedicated his investigations on improving the efficiency of the centrifuges by 1973,74.14