April 28, 2021 • 53 mins
As World War II drew to a close, nations across the planet scrambled to take stock, to recover, to rebuild and survive. But the looming spectre of nuclear technology continued to grow -- the US went against allies and enemies alike to keep its military edge. So how did countries traditionally considered enemies of the US gain nuclear technology? In many cases, the conspiracy goes down to a single man: AQ Khan. Terrified by what India's Smiling Buddha test might mean for the future of Pakistan, he worked furiously to get Pakistan the bomb -- and eventually began selling his expertise to the highest bidder.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Nol. They call me Ben.
Our compatriot Matt will be rejoining us in the future
when we are joined as always with our super producer
Paul mission Controled decond. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know in a way today's episode, well, it's
(00:46):
for all of us as always, but it is also
for a specific person, a person who is a hero
to some uh, an international criminal, a bond level criminal
to others, and a person who is still very much
free it still very much alive. We've talked about we've
talked about some nuke stuff in the in the recent past.
Nuclear weapons are so incredibly dangerous and if you think
(01:10):
about it, yes, human beings have created other kinds of
technology that could eventually end life as we know it, right,
like fossil fuel technology is terrible for the environment, right, Yeah,
But the problem with nukes is that nuclear technology has
the highest possibility of ending life as we know it
(01:32):
in the shortest amount of time, right, I mean, you know,
we it's it's easy to kick the can down the
road when it comes to like destroying the environment. You know,
if you're doing it like death by a thousand cuts style, right,
But like a nuke, a nuclear incident, a nuclear catastrophe.
Often you know, the word holocaust is attached to it.
(01:52):
We see what that's like, you know, in science fiction
and like Mad Max type scenarios and UH anime for example,
things like a Kira But yeah, it's UH mutually assured destruction. Yes,
and I'm very glad you brought that up at the top.
Nal mutually a short destruction is this belief in international
affairs that if two countries have nukes or have a
(02:18):
certain threshold of nuclear weapons, they'll be much less likely
to use them. So the idea, it's weird. The the
idea is almost to very much oversimplify it. The old
school idea of mad was that the more countries that
have nukes, the safer overall the world is from nuclear annihilation,
which is pretty crazy, and you can see the policymakers
(02:41):
don't believe that's true. Really clearly not. I mean, it's
such a counterintuitive thing to think that, like, the more
of this absolutely deadly, uh dangerous thing that exists, the
safer we are. That just as completely counterintuitive just to
like normal logic. But it makes sense from like a
geopolitical standpoint, because the concept of mutually assured destruction is
(03:04):
that if we launch at you and you know that
we're doing it, you're going to launch a counter strike
against us, and then we're both excuse my French, Uh yeah,
well the French come into play here, or at least
the French language. Mutually assured destruction is often credited with
preventing the Cold War from turning hots. But you know,
(03:25):
there are other people say this is this is a
really dumb idea. Should we bet the global farm on it?
But the idea is like, you know, if you fire something,
you know, the instant retaliation, it's not going to stop
your border. It could be you know, the end of
huge squaws of civilization. Yeah, you would think twice that
part is logical. But pretty much since the discovery of
(03:47):
nuclear weapons, of this technology, millions of people, dozens of
huge institutions, nonprofits, other countries, you name it, have all
begged the human species to step back from the precipice.
That's where we get to today's question. If all of
this is true, which it is, how did we end
(04:07):
up with so many nukes? How did we proliferate this
world ending technology? Why do so many countries have them today?
Because it's probably more than you think. Here are the facts.
It is certainly more than I thought. Uh not gonna lie.
Multiple countries currently have access to nuclear weapons, and understandably,
(04:31):
based on the conversation we're about to half the day,
many many more countries want a seat at that nuke table. Um.
Nine countries currently have these things. The United States, the
United Kingdom, France. There they are Israel unofficially, UM, Pakistan, Russia, India, China,
and North Korea. UM. And in that group again back
(04:53):
to that Cold War UH scenario, the United States and
Russia have by far the most Oh yeah, yeah, there,
there's still the big dogs in the game. UM. But
we have to remember that each one of those other
seven countries has tremendously dangerous capabilities here and it affects
(05:14):
a ton of their interactions in the global sphere. We're
talking with a superproducer Paul Mission controlled decad about this
before we went on the air, and it's something I
think we can all acknowledge. Countries with nuclear capability in
this manner simply get treated differently. And that's part of
the reason that so many countries that don't have nukes
(05:37):
want them, and there's so many countries that do have
nukes that kind of control the current world order are
going to fight tooth and nail to prevent other people
from having access to that technology. For some of us,
uh in the crowd today, that might be the right
and necessary thing. Right, it's a moral good, But for
other folks, it's um an imperialistic mechanism of controlling people
(06:02):
in just a new way they couldn't do before. And
every year, every single year, various groups call for what's
what's known as global nuclear disarmament. Let us take our
radioactive swords and turn them into plowshares, and every year, uh,
not not much happens in this regard. I mean, the
(06:24):
global arsenals on decline. But you know, we're centophiles here.
This reminds me of that trope in so many action
movies where there are two people and they have a gun,
they have guns. Each have a gun, They're pointed each
other and what I'm saying, all right, put it down,
and the other one's like, no, you put your gun
down first, then I'll put mind down. That's the situation
(06:46):
where on a global scale, like what would you do?
What would you do if Russia said, we'll get rid
of all the nuclear weapons in our arsenal? We we
will legally agree to do this as long as every
other country goes for Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of like
that story. We we talked about this in an episode
of Ridiculous History recently of the history of the expression
(07:09):
eating crow, and I'm not fully remembering all the details
what it had to do with an encounter between a
British soldier and an American soldier. And the British soldier
I believe, took the American soldier's gun from him, or
he kind of gave it to him for some dumb reason,
like he needed it was it wasn't working or so,
(07:29):
I can't quite remember. The point is he took it
from him, he held it on him, and he forced
him to eat a dead crow carcass that he had
just killed with said gun. Um Again, I'm getting the
details a little hazy. Then, of course the he gives
a back to him, which seemed crazy to me. And
then what happens. The American soldier holds the gun on
the British soldier and makes him eat a piece of
(07:50):
that crow too. Uh. That's just how people are, and
governments often mimic the worst and basest instincts of people
on a grand scale. Yeah, the big assumption of international
affairs is that the state is a rational actor. But
being rational does not necessarily imply anything about morality or
(08:12):
being good, right, It's just what seems to be the
most reasonable cost benefit at the time. And that's where
we're at. You know, we want to be careful in
this episode not too seem like we are overly propagandizing
for the US or for another country in particular. This
this is the issue. These are world enders. They could
(08:35):
also potentially be very clean technology when it works safely.
And so since the end of the Second War, every
single major country has considered pursuing nukes to one degree
or another. Some of them never got past that idea,
that discussion in a boardroom, and they signed stuff like
the MPT, the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, but if you
(09:00):
go back, if you go back to um the forties,
you can see some pretty amazing and disturbing stories about
how the so called Allies raced against one another to
get the bomb. I mean, the these folks were aware
that Germany had an atomic or nuclear program during World
War Two. It's just very lucky for history that the
(09:23):
Nazis weren't successful. And as soon as the Nazi Party fell, everybody,
the Soviet Union, the US, the UK, France, uh, it
was no longer one for all, all for one. They
were snatching people totally. But it was a very speculative
history question. If the Nazis would have won and gotten
(09:44):
a hold of nuclear weapons, let's just say, I'm like
an alternate timeline. Do you think they would have like
nuke whole swaths of the world that they were unhappy
with to start from scratch and rebuild like in their
own image. I think it's quite possible. Um, they were
very res We're poor for a lot of the war,
which is, you know, I think one of the things
(10:05):
powering some of their strategies. But they would have been
kind of in the situation that the US was in
post World War Two when they were doing those experiments
on the Marshall Islands, they would have been saying, let's
test this amidst more isolated or vulnerable people. So I
(10:26):
think if they saw some if they saw an area
with people that they didn't consider human and that also
didn't have resources they wanted, like good farmland or something
like that, they would bomb them. But then also, um,
and this is entirely speculative history, but if if Adolf
Hitler's administration had had nuclear capability, they absolutely would have
(10:49):
used it. Um. So, so you're right, like it is
a philosophical conversation in that respect, right, like do you
play by the rules if even if only the rules
are well, I'm not gonna blow you up, because then
you'll blow me up. Um. But there is some kind
of moral core at work here, it seems, you know,
I mean, but it's also like largely out of self preservation.
(11:12):
It's it's interesting, But I guess what we're getting into
today is this moral idea of we have them and
we deserve them, but you shouldn't have them, you don't
deserve them whether because and that's not what's said obviously,
but that is the implication. Wouldn't wuldn't you say, yeah, absolutely,
And it's a question that becomes a little bit complicated,
(11:33):
a little more quickly than you might think. We know
that in our thread of the multiverse, in our timeline,
in our version of reality, the US did emerge the
victor from this race. There were there were other like
we all know about Operation paper Clip, where the U
S spirited away German scientists. There was a Soviet equivalent
(11:56):
called Operation oh Sylvia Coum, which is essentially their paper
clip or also Russian also the Soviet also which was
our code name for that operation in the West. They
were stealing these people because they were stealing their expertise.
So the Soviet and US nuclear weapons programs and the
(12:18):
US rocketry program are built off uh Nazi science. They're
built off at least those researchers were being supported by
the Nazi government at the time. But the US won
the race that part of it. And if the government
of the US at that time had its way, just
(12:38):
like you were saying, no, the U S would still
be the world's only nuclear power today, because they say,
you know, because again the analogy is something like, well,
even if I don't want guns, feminar room with you know,
a hundred nineties something other people and there's one gun,
(13:00):
I wouldn't be the person who has it, sure, which
is understandable from like a just a you know, logical
perspective in terms of like protecting our borders and protecting
our citizens and all that. But then it gets much
more muddy, not to mention the fact that the reason
that the USSR has nuclear capabilities is because they were
spying on the US Manhattan Project, you know when that
(13:21):
was underway, um, which is you know, literally what what
led to the development of the atomic bomb in the
United States. Um. So the USSR wouldn't have had that
if they hadn't have been spying on us in the
first place. Um. And then some of the United Kingdoms
earlier were collaborating with the US, you know, during their
(13:41):
times as allies obviously still allies, but working more closely
in an active war effort. Uh. It got to a
point where the US started being very cautious about what
information was available, what was what they left on the table,
you know, so to speak for anyone to see right right,
your your roommate at the lab is getting real cag
(14:05):
now about what they're working on and what they have discovered,
because there's no longer that common purpose of World War
two nineteen them and ultimately many of the countries who
are amidst the nine nuclear ring races we just named,
got where they got by relentlessly spying on each other,
(14:27):
ruthlessly breaking international norms, stealing absolutely whatever they could, setting
up get this clandestine networks which is going to be
somewhat ironic later in this episode. What are we talking about?
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. We've
(14:51):
returned to a lot of casual observers. There's this kind
of weird dichotomy in the world of nuclear weapons. Some
of the countries, if you just look at the list
that have nuclear weapons or we're close to attaining those
in the past, like Libya, were often considered enemies of
the West. These would be countries like Iran's nuclear capabilities,
(15:14):
or Pakistan or North Korea and UH. To be clear,
Iran does not, as far as we know, have nuclear weaponry,
but the guess is that they're working on it despite
their statements. So how did how did these countries which
are not particularly wealthy, managed to succeed where so many
other countries failed? UH? It turns out, folks, that the
(15:38):
world of nuclear weapons has a literal black market, and
it's one that's on the danger of booming. Here's where
it gets crazy. Yeah, it does sound like something out
of a Bond film. Uh you may it may have
been in a Bond film, if not a Bond film. Definitely,
things like clear and present danger. A lot of these
(15:58):
like Tom clam See type, you know, speculative kind of
like fiction, you know, based around history and geopolitics and
all of that. Right, um, certainly seeing the shady you know,
plutonium deals going down, even like Back to the Future.
Right remember how Doc Brown uh spoiler alert for Back
to the Future gets killed by these terrorists quote unquote
(16:22):
who he either stole the plutonium from or bought it
from the deal went wrong. So it's definitely a thing
you hear about people trying to buy enriched uranium on
the black market and stuff, and you think, okay, maybe
that's based in some grain of reality, but you don't
really think of it as being a huge, you know,
specter looming over everything every day. But it turns out
(16:44):
it very much is, and it's based on a very
real thing. And and this market, this black market you
speak of, um could very well be in danger of
getting worse. And it all goes back to this one
very very very successful UH signists and black market nuclear
operative by the name of a Q kN oh Man. Yes,
(17:07):
this is true. A lot of times in the course
of reporting the news media outlets will just latch onto
one person as an example of a larger systemic issue,
right because it humanizes it, it simplifies it, it it makes
it easier to understand. That's usually inaccurate, but in this
case it is very true. It goes down to one guy.
(17:30):
His name is Abdul Kadir Khan, and he didn't start
out as what some people would call an international science
criminal today, the man known as the father of Pakistan's
nuclear bomb uh. You know, it might surprise some of
his fans to know that he started out as a
pretty a pretty smart but bookish nuclear physicist metallurgist. He
(17:57):
was born in India five but he relocated to Pakistan
in nineteen fifty one, and part of the reason that
he relocated had to be at least politically motivated, because
his older siblings and some members of his family had
moved to Pakistan during the partition of India in nineteen
(18:21):
forty seven when Pakistan was split off into an independent state,
and they would write to Khan and his folks about
how they had these new better lives there. So he
was becoming a nationalist in a way for Pakistan. So
it made sense that he moved there. Uh. And he
was a smart guy who was a smart guy, and
he became a globe trotter just on the basis of
(18:43):
his intellect. He was a brilliant student. Yes, Khan was
born in India in nineteen thirty five, but moved to
Pakistan in nineteen fifty one, and he eventually got a
very illustrious scholarship where he was paid to study abroad
in West Germany. Uh. And that led to him moving
to the Netherlands, which is what led him to working
(19:05):
for an engineering firm in Amsterdam, where he developed a
very specific set of skills. So the the company he
worked for is pretty important. It was called the Physics
Dynamics Research Laboratory. And that in itself is you know,
it's a solid gig. It's good work if you can
(19:25):
get it, but it's not. It's not our smoking gun here. Uh.
The The connection is that this laboratory was a subcontractor
for something with the unfortunate name of the Urinco group.
Do they make fake p for like passing the urine screens? Maybe?
They seem to do several things. One of the things
(19:47):
they did was operated new uranium enrichment plant. And so
Colin is kind of like a nuclear physicist version of Drake,
but for real, he started from the bottom, and so
he's worked his way up and now because his colleagues
and his bosses and his professors speak so highly of him,
(20:09):
he is seen as a total non security risk. Right,
let's see how the radioactive sausage is made. He learns
uh and and requires knowledge of the specific steps needed
to enrich radioactive material to weapons grade states. Uh. And
we know this because the techniques that he has expanded
(20:32):
upon are very specifically things that he would have picked
up during this time period. So it's, um, it's kind
of like you know how when you say it's not
even the subtle really, but you know how, you're listening
to a musician you say, oh, I can hear influences
of this earlier musician. You know, that's one of my
(20:53):
favorite things in the world. Then uh, as a as
a giant music. Yeah, it's great. I mean, you know
in certain certain musicians you know, don't want to wear
those influences like on their sleeve. Um, they might be
a little more subtle about it, but you know, you're
enriching uranium is a pretty specific influence. It's really hard.
It's hard to be subtle about it, right, right, and
(21:13):
the p one centerfuge is a pretty pretty specific Yeah. So, um,
it's so good on good on con at least for
not saying I totally made that up myself. But but
so this is the thing at this point, no matter
what you think about the person, uh, he's just he's
(21:33):
another physicist, and he's a smart researcher. He's good at
his job. He has a lot of insight. Um, and
yet he may have some very nationalistic feelings for his
adopted home country. But a lot of people have stuff
like that, you know what I mean. Just because somebody
is a very patriotic you can say, doesn't need to
(21:56):
affect their day job. And he might have just can
tinued his career as a researcher in Europe for a
long time. But there was one thing. It was an
event that changed his life in nineteen seventy four, he
learned about something. Yeah, that's what you might consider like
the twist or the pivot in the story. Right. In
(22:17):
May of nineteen seventy four, he learned about a secret
nuclear program that was being carried out in India. UM
and their surprise nuclear test known as Smiling Buddha. What
a great name. It's good, it's very good. I almost
we were talking about Bond villains and I was the
(22:38):
Smiling Buddha kind of like what was that? The Manchurion, No,
the Mandarin, you know in in in the Marvel world.
I think the Smiling Buddha is pretty good because it's
like it's, on the one hand, sort of innocuous, like
names for these types of programs often try to be.
But I also find it kind of creepy. Oh, it's
very creepy. The government of India when they admitted this,
(23:01):
this surprise nuclear test, uh, they verbatim described it as
a peaceful nuclear explosion. Oh cool, oh good, Yeah, peaceful
and that everyone's dead afterwards. That's nothing more peaceful than
you know, complete annihilation. The Buddha was smiling. Yeah. It's
it's interesting because you know, we know that other countries
(23:24):
were picking up on signals about this blake. Back in
the nineties sixties, India's government had contact of Westinghouse Electric
and he said, Hey, build our first nuclear power plant here.
So of course Uncle Sam is going to know about that.
A spoiler alert. Not to be two fingers on the
(23:44):
hand about connections, but yeah, Westinghouse, at least it's leaders
are chummy with the US, and I'm sure that they
have each other's phone numbers and have all kinds of
off the record conversations. Hang. Their sisters were best friends
and you know, growing up and stuff, right right, They
both went to Choke Nail, which is a prep school.
(24:07):
I made up. It's a horrible name for prep. It's
it really it reads. You said that, and I immediately
knew what you're talking about, thank you. So when he
learned of Smiling Buddha of this surprise nuclear test, this
set him upon the path he currently travels NOL. Did
you ever see the television show Fringe? Yeah, for sure.
(24:31):
I definitely didn't like watch every single episode, but I
followed it pretty regularly up front, and then I think
I fell off once it got into a little bit
more of the timy winmey stuff. I kind of got
a little confused and stopped watching it, but that's probably
on me, and there's some really great things in it.
Very X Files. He quite quite enjoyed the show. Yeah,
I agree with you on all points there. I've I've
(24:53):
complained about this in the past. I hope it's not unwarranted.
But I'm one of those people who gets irritated board
disinterested when I see a story descend into television rules
or soap opera rules where they'll say, oh, you know
what this really was. We're secretly related or we're destined
(25:14):
to be in lover This explains so much because you're
actually my brother. Yeah, it's like, not everybody needs to
be in one family because that's uh anyway, it's not
not just to have our little pop culture gripe corner
for a second. It's kind of the same thing that
happened with X Files. Whereas I know the people on
(25:34):
varying sides of this, but like, I like that show
best when it was a Monster of the Week episodic situation. Uh,
and then they tried a little too hard to grow
the red thread of that universe, and to me, that's
when I got a little much. That's how I felt
about friends too. But I know that you and Matt
uh do enjoy some of the larger X Files world,
you know, storylines. Sure, I dig it, but I feel
(25:57):
you like it's not a good story. He does not
ultimately have to be the story of a member of
a family dying or a member of a family being born,
producted by aliens right right, right, or repeatedly abducted by
aliens in the very definition of a tease. But Chekhov's
gun aside, we we know that for critics of a
(26:23):
Q con, I'm trying to be very fair here, he
is kind of like a fringe Monster of the Week,
but has been for decades. Um fringes Monster of the
Week episodes often concerned. They're pretty often concerned evil scientists,
scientists who had used the power of their intelligence and
(26:45):
their design ability to create things for nefarious or misdirected purposes,
you know what I mean. Like somebody builds a time
machine that he has to embed in his body to
travel back in time and try to save his wife
from a car accident, right right, There's always that trigger
moment that like sets them on a path of either
righteousness or you know, revenge against everyone that wronged them exactly.
(27:11):
And so that's what happened with a Q Kahan, And
we can dive into his career, but it gets it
gets complicated really quickly. So what we can say is
that he began making connections. He began he was the
number it was one of the number one drivers of
(27:32):
Pakistan's nuclear program. He didn't get along with everybody, there
were a lot of ins and outs, but he is
a huge reason that Pakistan's a nuclear armed country today.
And it's you know, it's if you think about it,
given the incredible, the incredibly tense relationship between Pakistan and India, Uh,
(27:52):
it's no surprise that he is. A Pakistani man could
have seen a nuclear powered India as an existential threat.
So he probably saw him. He probably sees himself because
he's still alive, as someone doing a right, just a
noble thing. But two agencies like the I e. A E.
(28:14):
Which monitors nuclear proliferation, this guy is a criminal. He's
public enemy number one, and by nineteen seventy nine, suspicions
of his role in illegal nuclear proliferation reached a fever pitch,
and his old country that he lived in during college
investigated him. It's really interesting, man. We talked about this
(28:35):
at the top of the show. I just wanted to
point this out here. I mean, you know, Pakistan has
a GDP of two d and seventy eight billion U
S dollars or at least in twenty nineteen it did,
and Iran has a g d P uh or had
of of almost six hundred billion dollars UM. And it's
just when we were talking about that list at the
top of the show. And this is no disparagement on
(28:57):
any country or saying that like you're only worth something
if you're worth a lot of money, but in terms
of like the idea of a developed nation and that
being the credentials required to have these kinds of weapons
or something, or to come by it, in terms of
like having all this cash to go into development, it
seemed like Pakistan was low on that list and compared
(29:17):
to some of the other countries um. And this is why,
because it turns out that it was not a natural
progression of technological investment that led to this. It was
a very specific intervention by a very specific dude. Yeah yeah,
who clearly is motivated by the belief that he is
(29:39):
doing what he sees as the right thing. And I
love the point you're bringing up there about GDP because
it's going to lead to our our other conversation, which
is who gets to say, who gets to say who
deserves the thing right or who has a right to this.
The Dutch government launched an investigation into con for nuclear espionage,
(30:01):
and the problem is that they couldn't find anything that
felt like really strong in arguable proof, so they dismissed
it due to a lack of evidence. But later in
a in a local court, he's found guilty. There's another
Dutch court and he sentenced in absentia to four years
(30:22):
in prison. But he sees them and he says, like
the most baller physics nerd thing you could say. He says, Look,
any information that I may have shared with anyone, I'm
not admitting that I did anything wrong. Whatever I might
have shared with whomever is freely available to people who are,
(30:43):
you know, maybe unlike you, smart enough to know what
they're looking for, and they'll just read the magazines that
are publicly available, or the trade journals, or the lectures
in undergraduate halls across your country. So he was pretty
much you've pled not guilty and strongly implied that the
(31:03):
people accused him were idiots, which I thought was a
baller move. It absolutely, it is a baller move. Um.
And you know, you we wed we alluded at the
top of the show to the fact that this guy
in Pakistan is absolutely revered, uh perhaps in the rest
of the international community. Um reviled right. Um. But there's
(31:26):
this really great article if you want to read up
some more on on some of the minutia of this
story in these very complicated relationships in the Atlantic that
has the fabulous name of the Wrath of Khan um
And and they specifically talk about how he is essentially
looked at as like a demigod um in in the
country and in Pakistan, second only to the founder of
(31:48):
the Nation of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jannah. And apparently the
guy's a bit of a pill, like you said, I mean,
you can imagine like he's he seems to take matters
into his own hands. But the article, the Atlantic article
talks about how he has developed quite the ego um
and uh, you know, flexes this demigod status pretty regularly. Yeah,
(32:12):
And it's not as if he isn't the father of
Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. There are multiple articles. I saw another
one also from the Atlantic called the Point of No
Return that is about the adulation, specifically that adoration. And
there were people who Um knew the guy before he
(32:36):
started this network who had a different take on him.
And interestingly, one person of former school Chum said that
cons seemed to behave like an addict of sorts as
he was starting this network that he wasn't able to
get It's like a scientist looking for that rush of
validation realization, and he wasn't able to get it from
(32:59):
his activity these when he returned to Pakistan, and that's
why he went rogue. Well that's the phrase they use
because the big one of the big arguments about this
is whether or not the government of Pakistan knew about
the proliferation network and helped him out for a cut,
you know what I mean, or whether he was doing
(33:21):
this for money or for something ideological. We're gonna pause
for a word from our sponsor and we'll be back
to talk a little bit about the network, a little
bit about as possible motivations, and then perhaps most importantly,
the bigger philosophical picture. So we're back. No, this is
(33:46):
one thing, um, we should we should probably clarify we
say nuclear proliferation network. We're not just talking about somebody
shipping over fully armed, fitted out, kitted out nuclear warheads.
Were like, this could be as small as PDFs of
a design. Here's how you make the center fugere. Yeah,
that's right. And and that's largely what uh, what con
(34:10):
stole and provided was designs right that he had kind
of uh you know, squirreled away from his time working
around that centerfuge Yeah. Yeah, And and these were also
designs that he had improved upon himself. Like one example,
so what what example would be Iraq? Before the Gulf War,
(34:32):
there was a there's a high likelihood that Han and
his network we're going to help make Iraq a nuclear
Howard nation, for nuclear capable nation, and then the war
in the Middle East or that version of it would
have gone very differently. But the Gulf War occurred before
they could really get to work on this. And the
(34:54):
kind of things that he supplied that were found after
the fall of the government, where things like very specific,
very necessary things like here is how you mold uranium
into the specific sphere you'll need for the thing you're
trying to do, Like that's that's the kind of detail
that a lot of people you wouldn't recognize the importance
(35:17):
of that if you were shifting through a bunch of papers, right,
you'd almost have to be a physicist, wouldn't you. Oh
of course. And then my question too about all this men,
and and forgive me if this is obvious, but it's
my understanding that you know, even with Iran, now, for example,
we know they have nuclear power, it's all about refining
it and enriching their uranium to a point where it
(35:39):
can be used as a nuclear weapon, and that technology
supposedly they're not quite there yet. So is that literally
what he was providing with the improvements to the centrifuge
is how to be able to enrich this product to
a weaponized state. Yeah, he was selling the ability, he
was selling the pieces the abilities to make nuclear weapons,
(36:02):
not just to have nuclear power. And the difference really
is a matter of degree of rinse and repeat and
the materials used. So it's it's dual use technology, which
is difficult for international observers. Iran can have the same
any country really, absolutely any country can have uh types
(36:25):
of centerfuges and a material that they're enriching up to
a certain amount. And that's totally that's it. That's nuclear power.
That's what's supposed to do. But then if you do
the same thing past a certain threshold, then you get
into the idea of making weapons grade materials. And really,
you know, the big difference between quote unquote nuclear power
(36:48):
and quote unquote a nuclear weapon is that in a
nuclear reactor, the energy is generated over some period of
time weeks, months, years, and these fission fragments are holding
up the whole time the reactors working. But in a
nuclear weapon, all of it comes out at once. That's
the that's the difference. It's just the same thing delivered
(37:09):
a different way, like when you get a case adia
instead of a burrito, exactly exactly. But people. But the
thing is, you know, people die in the burrito situation here.
I don't know why I chose the burrito as the bomb. Man,
I'm sorry, I'm just not well. We all know how
you feel. Well, you all know you're much more pro
case idia than I've never thought of. He was anti
burrito until this moment. Man, I'm gonna they cannot proliferate
(37:32):
apparently not, but proliferate they did. Uh, you know, the
real world burritos in this case, which is nuclear weapons,
directly because of the influence of this man um and
this network that he kind of established, right. Yeah, for
over twenty years, this underground nuclear conspiracy, this nuclear ring
(37:54):
operated out of more than a dozen countries. It's weird
because international servers see that somewhere along the line the
network flipped, like it started when he was back in
Pakistan and he was getting supplies he needed from other countries.
So it it started as an import network, and then
Pakistan successfully launched their nuclear weapons program, but it didn't
(38:18):
stop for calling. It evolved into an export network. So
this is where like you were saying, oh, this is
where they started exporting stuff to Iran, to Libya, to
North Korea. And uh, those three cases, by the way,
are solidly proven, not conspiracy theories. That's how the nukes
got there, that is why they were there today, except
(38:38):
in the case of Libya when Muhamar Gadaffi agreed to
step back from his nuclear program and was rewarded with
the fall of his regime. And while we're doing an
info dump, I guess i'll just say it for anybody's
wondering why the Gadaffi regime was finally brought down. When
it was brought down, part of it was that they
would not have a nuclear deterrent. But the bigger part,
(39:01):
the big motivation was France, which wanted to control the
currency at the time. Gaddafi was moving away to an
African dinar kind of like an African euro and France
didn't want it because they controlled the franc that was
used in that area. But then I have to ask
if CON's network was supplying, uh, you know, stuff to
(39:23):
Iran and Libya, why don't they have nukes. Well, yeah,
Libya walked back their program through international agreement. Uh. And
Iran is like the one of the number one worries
for the West and Israel. So Iran has more eyes
on them and more punishments through the forms of sanctions
(39:45):
and stuff. They have nuclear capability. But also if you
ask the government of Iran, they would say they don't
want nuclear weapons, right, But but I guess, yeah, that's
that's a really good point in terms of like the
optics of it all. But yeah, that's what they say.
It is clear though to me that Pakistan was Khan's
major concern. He literally wanted to save the country because
(40:07):
they had lost so many wars, you know, against India
for example, or conflicts, and they felt he felt that
they were like under the thumb of this other country,
and he wanted to bring them up and lift them
up out of that and give them a seat at
the table. And that's why he's revered there because he's
he's looked at as like a savior type figure. Yeah, exactly,
nailed it. So suppliers contractors for the network came from
(40:30):
countries all across Europe. There were some contractors in Malaysia.
The big question for international observers is was this in
fact a private network run by private entities with one
guy Khan having connections with a state level entity, that
being the country of Pakistan, or was the government of
(40:53):
Pakistan actively assisting him because some of the flights, some
of the equipment flights that have been traced happened on
planes owned by the government of Pakistan. So I feel
like facets or factions of the of the government were
at least assisting him, even without even if without the
government's overall knowledge. And then there's one other thing that
(41:15):
we should mention. Uh, we're not in any way saying
stuff that is untrue to CON's reputation, and we're not
leveling accusations at him because he publicly admitted that he
has done this multiple times. And this is scary to
a lot of people who like the current nuclear world
(41:36):
order because it means first you can do this and
get away. Canas eighty five years old as we record,
he's a freeman. Many people have affiliated with this network
never saw a day in jail, or never saw a
year in jail at least, and they're fine. In many cases.
They're not just free, they're very wealthy. Uh. Secondly, it
looks like some of these regulatory bodies can be powerless. Thirdly,
(41:58):
there don't seem to be a lot of smart controls.
But I would say no. Most importantly, that's something you
and Paul and I were talking about before we rolled.
Who gets to decide right who? Who has there? We
know there is no like ancient right to decide because
nuclear weaponry didn't exist until very recently. So who gets
(42:19):
to be the master of the toys here? Whoever's got
the most of them? I would assume, uh, you know
who who holds the keys? To the Kingdom of nuclear weaponry.
And I mean I think the United States would fancy
it as that being US. Uh, and certainly flexes that
muscle plenty in the form of sanctions, in the form
(42:41):
of trying to you know, international agreements are kind of
leading the charge in these conversations. Um, but hell, we're
not going to dismantle our nukes. You're kidding you, Stay
away from our nukes. We're the we're the good guys.
Have you seen our our our hats and we're all
in Uncle Sam costumes at this point totally. Um. It's
(43:02):
a good point because it looks all countries in some
shape or form, except maybe like Sweden, and I take
that back, have some level of corruption, you know, whether
they're corrupt to the core, you know, that's all a
matter of debate, you know, but I think we all know,
like we said, governments and governing bodies being sort of
(43:24):
the like, you know, organizational personification of the dark heart
of man, right. Uh, it's sort of unavoidable that there's
gonna be some rot in these in these countries, and
there certainly is. The United States. I think we maybe
have a little more faith in our processes or whatever
that maybe we you know, we have some restraint and
(43:44):
we're like some kind of Bellweather of the economy. Whatever.
All that stuff is again totally up for debate, but
I think we would argue there are countries that should
not have this stuff because they are corrupt to the core, right. Yeah,
And then there are questions too about guide ee ide all.
So one of the things that got hammered into my
head by by some professors was that certain countries could
(44:09):
never have nuclear weapons because they were considered theocracies. And
one of the big things they would say, like one
I'm not going to name names here, but one of
the examples that that I heard pretty frequently was somebody saying, look,
you don't want Saudi Arabia having a nuclear bomb because
it is a kingdom that is governed by a very
(44:30):
specific type of Islam. And they were saying, you know,
the belief in Islam is not the problem, but a
government steered by a religion with nuclear weapons is the problem.
And then I guess, in an attempt to look less Islamophobic,
this same professor would say, and by that, I mean
I would never want Vatican City to have a nuke.
(44:52):
The Pope should not have nuclear warheads, which I thought
was a fair argument. You know, the pope is like
specialized in other things, I imagine, but that that's their argument. Like,
but what it's missing is that there is a note
of imperialism right when we are saying when a nuclear
powered country that, by the way, is the only country
(45:14):
to deploy nuclear weapons in the field of war, knowing
that a country still considers itself like the moral as
you said, bell Weather, it's it's got some questions. You know,
there's some holes to poke there, because I'm not sure
you can square some of the imperialistic actions that the
country has taken over the past centuries with that kind
(45:37):
of that kind of belief, you know what I mean
that that was it called sometimes American exceptionalism. Yeah, manifest
destiny means the way you know, well, I mean I
just think those things are kind of related, right, this
idea of striving for this like you know, let's take
it as far as we can possibly go, you know,
and that's sort of Uh, one could argue the seeds
(45:58):
of megalomania and uh, a kind of psychosis of never
being satisfied. It's it's a question that we don't have
the answer for and a lot of people don't have
the answer right now either. Now, sure there's a clear
argument to be made. I think that, uh, there are
some countries that probably shouldn't have nuclear weapons. But then
(46:22):
there's also the argument to be made that asks should
any country have a nuclear weapon? We can't close the
door on this one, you know what I mean. The
radioactive horses have left the barn. Nuclear weapons are going
to be a reality now and with that comes this
kind of black market. A q CON through this conspiracy,
proved that with enough motivation and know how, you can't
(46:45):
really stop other countries from learning about this stuff. So
before we end, we should we should give you an
update on Con today. Like like we said earlier, he
is a live he is in his mid eighties, he's
living in Pakistan still. Uh, he is not in jail.
(47:07):
He's in good terms with the government. He's super popular,
actually domestically with the conservative sides. It's crazy, man. I
just had to add. You know, we talked briefly about
how he sort of embraced this demigod status um and
he did it in the most open manner possible. He
didn't act like a criminal. He acted like a king
Um and he you know, would uh speak publicly and
(47:31):
do you know, seminars and talk about everything from you know,
science to history, pontificate on things like poetry. He was
a huge fan of of poetry. Apparently again this is
a from this Atlantic article of the Wrath of Khan Um.
He he did a really interesting thing. Um. We we
talked about kind of the the idea of political corruption
(47:53):
and and there's no secret that Pakistan has a very
rife history of of political corruption. And it's a little
too complex to go into right here, but apparently they
have a lot of I guess you could call them
civilian governments, these kind of little mini governments throughout in
different kind of for lack of a better term, townships
or areas or villages or whatever. And there's a lot
(48:14):
of palm greasing that goes on, and understandably a lot
of people of power get away with a lot of
stuff pretty openly, right. And the thing that con did
was he built a weekend house that illegally drained into
the drinking water of rawal Pindi, which is um the
capital of the rawal Pindi Division. Again, like the the
(48:38):
townships and principalities and the idea of the regions in
uh Pakistan are not fully known to me. I don't
have a good grasp of it, but a pretty prominent place.
It's in the Punjab area of Pakistan. Um and he
built this lake illegally draining into like waste into rawal
(49:00):
Pindi's water supply. Um. He did it as a flex,
saying look at me, Look how much power I have.
I can do this and no one's gonna stop me.
And you think that people living there would have a
problem with that and be like, yo, you thought we
thought you were a guy. Why are you pooping in
our drinking water? But it turns out they loved him
for it and thought it was an awesome flex and
(49:20):
respected the balls that he had it took him to
do that. There's also some editorializing in that Atlantic article,
and they did they consider him when they're talking about
that this house in particular, they do one of those
things where they try to slip in character character notes
based on descriptions of physical appearance. They call them like
(49:42):
a soft banquet fed man or something like that. Okay,
that it felt a little little tilting the scales, but
wrath of colon and the other one we mentioned the
Point of No Return are really good articles for further insights. Obviously,
Wrath of Cain has a lot of a lot more
biograph tical details. It feels a story like it really
(50:02):
does kind of give you a movie cinematic kind of
view of this guy's life, which is larger than life,
you know, right right, And uh, this, this maybe gives
us something we can end on here. So he thought
it is crucial to point out that he did feel
he did feel like he was doing the right thing, like,
(50:23):
at least in the beginning, he was on kind of
this one man mission to save Pakistan from India because
he thought India wanted Pakistan's demise. Uh. And along the
way he had some mission creep because selling nukes to
selling nuclear capabilities to North Korea doesn't really help you
(50:43):
protect yourself from India unless you just need the cash,
and that would have to be a lot of cash.
But this is the one thing that got got me.
People said he was abrasive, maybe single minded. Some people
said he was a little meglomaniacal. But was he right
about Pakistan? I think he was. I think they would
have been destroyed. You think so? I say that that
(51:04):
seems to be somewhat of a consensus at least of people.
You know, they're familiar with these conflicts that you know,
they likely would have tried to snuff them out, absorb them,
or just you know, annihilate them or subjugate them into
a vassal state or something like that. It's a I mean,
it's a complex question. We want to hear from you.
(51:26):
Will the new illegal nuclear trade ever be stopped? Will
it continue the way that the red market Oregon trade
continues apace in the modern day? Let us know. We
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(51:49):
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(52:10):
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(52:30):
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(53:01):
want you to know is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to
(00:25):
the show. My name is Nol. They call me Ben.
Our compatriot Matt will be rejoining us in the future
when we are joined as always with our super producer
Paul mission Controled decond. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know in a way today's episode, well, it's
(00:46):
for all of us as always, but it is also
for a specific person, a person who is a hero
to some uh, an international criminal, a bond level criminal
to others, and a person who is still very much
free it still very much alive. We've talked about we've
talked about some nuke stuff in the in the recent past.
Nuclear weapons are so incredibly dangerous and if you think
(01:10):
about it, yes, human beings have created other kinds of
technology that could eventually end life as we know it, right,
like fossil fuel technology is terrible for the environment, right, Yeah,
But the problem with nukes is that nuclear technology has
the highest possibility of ending life as we know it
(01:32):
in the shortest amount of time, right, I mean, you know,
we it's it's easy to kick the can down the
road when it comes to like destroying the environment. You know,
if you're doing it like death by a thousand cuts style, right,
But like a nuke, a nuclear incident, a nuclear catastrophe.
Often you know, the word holocaust is attached to it.
(01:52):
We see what that's like, you know, in science fiction
and like Mad Max type scenarios and UH anime for example,
things like a Kira But yeah, it's UH mutually assured destruction. Yes,
and I'm very glad you brought that up at the top.
Nal mutually a short destruction is this belief in international
affairs that if two countries have nukes or have a
(02:18):
certain threshold of nuclear weapons, they'll be much less likely
to use them. So the idea, it's weird. The the
idea is almost to very much oversimplify it. The old
school idea of mad was that the more countries that
have nukes, the safer overall the world is from nuclear annihilation,
which is pretty crazy, and you can see the policymakers
(02:41):
don't believe that's true. Really clearly not. I mean, it's
such a counterintuitive thing to think that, like, the more
of this absolutely deadly, uh dangerous thing that exists, the
safer we are. That just as completely counterintuitive just to
like normal logic. But it makes sense from like a
geopolitical standpoint, because the concept of mutually assured destruction is
(03:04):
that if we launch at you and you know that
we're doing it, you're going to launch a counter strike
against us, and then we're both excuse my French, Uh yeah,
well the French come into play here, or at least
the French language. Mutually assured destruction is often credited with
preventing the Cold War from turning hots. But you know,
(03:25):
there are other people say this is this is a
really dumb idea. Should we bet the global farm on it?
But the idea is like, you know, if you fire something,
you know, the instant retaliation, it's not going to stop
your border. It could be you know, the end of
huge squaws of civilization. Yeah, you would think twice that
part is logical. But pretty much since the discovery of
(03:47):
nuclear weapons, of this technology, millions of people, dozens of
huge institutions, nonprofits, other countries, you name it, have all
begged the human species to step back from the precipice.
That's where we get to today's question. If all of
this is true, which it is, how did we end
(04:07):
up with so many nukes? How did we proliferate this
world ending technology? Why do so many countries have them today?
Because it's probably more than you think. Here are the facts.
It is certainly more than I thought. Uh not gonna lie.
Multiple countries currently have access to nuclear weapons, and understandably,
(04:31):
based on the conversation we're about to half the day,
many many more countries want a seat at that nuke table. Um.
Nine countries currently have these things. The United States, the
United Kingdom, France. There they are Israel unofficially, UM, Pakistan, Russia, India, China,
and North Korea. UM. And in that group again back
(04:53):
to that Cold War UH scenario, the United States and
Russia have by far the most Oh yeah, yeah, there,
there's still the big dogs in the game. UM. But
we have to remember that each one of those other
seven countries has tremendously dangerous capabilities here and it affects
(05:14):
a ton of their interactions in the global sphere. We're
talking with a superproducer Paul Mission controlled decad about this
before we went on the air, and it's something I
think we can all acknowledge. Countries with nuclear capability in
this manner simply get treated differently. And that's part of
the reason that so many countries that don't have nukes
(05:37):
want them, and there's so many countries that do have
nukes that kind of control the current world order are
going to fight tooth and nail to prevent other people
from having access to that technology. For some of us,
uh in the crowd today, that might be the right
and necessary thing. Right, it's a moral good, But for
other folks, it's um an imperialistic mechanism of controlling people
(06:02):
in just a new way they couldn't do before. And
every year, every single year, various groups call for what's
what's known as global nuclear disarmament. Let us take our
radioactive swords and turn them into plowshares, and every year, uh,
not not much happens in this regard. I mean, the
(06:24):
global arsenals on decline. But you know, we're centophiles here.
This reminds me of that trope in so many action
movies where there are two people and they have a gun,
they have guns. Each have a gun, They're pointed each
other and what I'm saying, all right, put it down,
and the other one's like, no, you put your gun
down first, then I'll put mind down. That's the situation
(06:46):
where on a global scale, like what would you do?
What would you do if Russia said, we'll get rid
of all the nuclear weapons in our arsenal? We we
will legally agree to do this as long as every
other country goes for Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of like
that story. We we talked about this in an episode
of Ridiculous History recently of the history of the expression
(07:09):
eating crow, and I'm not fully remembering all the details
what it had to do with an encounter between a
British soldier and an American soldier. And the British soldier
I believe, took the American soldier's gun from him, or
he kind of gave it to him for some dumb reason,
like he needed it was it wasn't working or so,
(07:29):
I can't quite remember. The point is he took it
from him, he held it on him, and he forced
him to eat a dead crow carcass that he had
just killed with said gun. Um Again, I'm getting the
details a little hazy. Then, of course the he gives
a back to him, which seemed crazy to me. And
then what happens. The American soldier holds the gun on
the British soldier and makes him eat a piece of
(07:50):
that crow too. Uh. That's just how people are, and
governments often mimic the worst and basest instincts of people
on a grand scale. Yeah, the big assumption of international
affairs is that the state is a rational actor. But
being rational does not necessarily imply anything about morality or
(08:12):
being good, right, It's just what seems to be the
most reasonable cost benefit at the time. And that's where
we're at. You know, we want to be careful in
this episode not too seem like we are overly propagandizing
for the US or for another country in particular. This
this is the issue. These are world enders. They could
(08:35):
also potentially be very clean technology when it works safely.
And so since the end of the Second War, every
single major country has considered pursuing nukes to one degree
or another. Some of them never got past that idea,
that discussion in a boardroom, and they signed stuff like
the MPT, the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, but if you
(09:00):
go back, if you go back to um the forties,
you can see some pretty amazing and disturbing stories about
how the so called Allies raced against one another to
get the bomb. I mean, the these folks were aware
that Germany had an atomic or nuclear program during World
War Two. It's just very lucky for history that the
(09:23):
Nazis weren't successful. And as soon as the Nazi Party fell, everybody,
the Soviet Union, the US, the UK, France, uh, it
was no longer one for all, all for one. They
were snatching people totally. But it was a very speculative
history question. If the Nazis would have won and gotten
(09:44):
a hold of nuclear weapons, let's just say, I'm like
an alternate timeline. Do you think they would have like
nuke whole swaths of the world that they were unhappy
with to start from scratch and rebuild like in their
own image. I think it's quite possible. Um, they were
very res We're poor for a lot of the war,
which is, you know, I think one of the things
(10:05):
powering some of their strategies. But they would have been
kind of in the situation that the US was in
post World War Two when they were doing those experiments
on the Marshall Islands, they would have been saying, let's
test this amidst more isolated or vulnerable people. So I
(10:26):
think if they saw some if they saw an area
with people that they didn't consider human and that also
didn't have resources they wanted, like good farmland or something
like that, they would bomb them. But then also, um,
and this is entirely speculative history, but if if Adolf
Hitler's administration had had nuclear capability, they absolutely would have
(10:49):
used it. Um. So, so you're right, like it is
a philosophical conversation in that respect, right, like do you
play by the rules if even if only the rules
are well, I'm not gonna blow you up, because then
you'll blow me up. Um. But there is some kind
of moral core at work here, it seems, you know,
I mean, but it's also like largely out of self preservation.
(11:12):
It's it's interesting, But I guess what we're getting into
today is this moral idea of we have them and
we deserve them, but you shouldn't have them, you don't
deserve them whether because and that's not what's said obviously,
but that is the implication. Wouldn't wuldn't you say, yeah, absolutely,
And it's a question that becomes a little bit complicated,
(11:33):
a little more quickly than you might think. We know
that in our thread of the multiverse, in our timeline,
in our version of reality, the US did emerge the
victor from this race. There were there were other like
we all know about Operation paper Clip, where the U
S spirited away German scientists. There was a Soviet equivalent
(11:56):
called Operation oh Sylvia Coum, which is essentially their paper
clip or also Russian also the Soviet also which was
our code name for that operation in the West. They
were stealing these people because they were stealing their expertise.
So the Soviet and US nuclear weapons programs and the
(12:18):
US rocketry program are built off uh Nazi science. They're
built off at least those researchers were being supported by
the Nazi government at the time. But the US won
the race that part of it. And if the government
of the US at that time had its way, just
(12:38):
like you were saying, no, the U S would still
be the world's only nuclear power today, because they say,
you know, because again the analogy is something like, well,
even if I don't want guns, feminar room with you know,
a hundred nineties something other people and there's one gun,
(13:00):
I wouldn't be the person who has it, sure, which
is understandable from like a just a you know, logical
perspective in terms of like protecting our borders and protecting
our citizens and all that. But then it gets much
more muddy, not to mention the fact that the reason
that the USSR has nuclear capabilities is because they were
spying on the US Manhattan Project, you know when that
(13:21):
was underway, um, which is you know, literally what what
led to the development of the atomic bomb in the
United States. Um. So the USSR wouldn't have had that
if they hadn't have been spying on us in the
first place. Um. And then some of the United Kingdoms
earlier were collaborating with the US, you know, during their
(13:41):
times as allies obviously still allies, but working more closely
in an active war effort. Uh. It got to a
point where the US started being very cautious about what
information was available, what was what they left on the table,
you know, so to speak for anyone to see right right,
your your roommate at the lab is getting real cag
(14:05):
now about what they're working on and what they have discovered,
because there's no longer that common purpose of World War
two nineteen them and ultimately many of the countries who
are amidst the nine nuclear ring races we just named,
got where they got by relentlessly spying on each other,
(14:27):
ruthlessly breaking international norms, stealing absolutely whatever they could, setting
up get this clandestine networks which is going to be
somewhat ironic later in this episode. What are we talking about?
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. We've
(14:51):
returned to a lot of casual observers. There's this kind
of weird dichotomy in the world of nuclear weapons. Some
of the countries, if you just look at the list
that have nuclear weapons or we're close to attaining those
in the past, like Libya, were often considered enemies of
the West. These would be countries like Iran's nuclear capabilities,
(15:14):
or Pakistan or North Korea and UH. To be clear,
Iran does not, as far as we know, have nuclear weaponry,
but the guess is that they're working on it despite
their statements. So how did how did these countries which
are not particularly wealthy, managed to succeed where so many
other countries failed? UH? It turns out, folks, that the
(15:38):
world of nuclear weapons has a literal black market, and
it's one that's on the danger of booming. Here's where
it gets crazy. Yeah, it does sound like something out
of a Bond film. Uh you may it may have
been in a Bond film, if not a Bond film. Definitely,
things like clear and present danger. A lot of these
(15:58):
like Tom clam See type, you know, speculative kind of
like fiction, you know, based around history and geopolitics and
all of that. Right, um, certainly seeing the shady you know,
plutonium deals going down, even like Back to the Future.
Right remember how Doc Brown uh spoiler alert for Back
to the Future gets killed by these terrorists quote unquote
(16:22):
who he either stole the plutonium from or bought it
from the deal went wrong. So it's definitely a thing
you hear about people trying to buy enriched uranium on
the black market and stuff, and you think, okay, maybe
that's based in some grain of reality, but you don't
really think of it as being a huge, you know,
specter looming over everything every day. But it turns out
(16:44):
it very much is, and it's based on a very
real thing. And and this market, this black market you
speak of, um could very well be in danger of
getting worse. And it all goes back to this one
very very very successful UH signists and black market nuclear
operative by the name of a Q kN oh Man. Yes,
(17:07):
this is true. A lot of times in the course
of reporting the news media outlets will just latch onto
one person as an example of a larger systemic issue,
right because it humanizes it, it simplifies it, it it makes
it easier to understand. That's usually inaccurate, but in this
case it is very true. It goes down to one guy.
(17:30):
His name is Abdul Kadir Khan, and he didn't start
out as what some people would call an international science
criminal today, the man known as the father of Pakistan's
nuclear bomb uh. You know, it might surprise some of
his fans to know that he started out as a
pretty a pretty smart but bookish nuclear physicist metallurgist. He
(17:57):
was born in India five but he relocated to Pakistan
in nineteen fifty one, and part of the reason that
he relocated had to be at least politically motivated, because
his older siblings and some members of his family had
moved to Pakistan during the partition of India in nineteen
(18:21):
forty seven when Pakistan was split off into an independent state,
and they would write to Khan and his folks about
how they had these new better lives there. So he
was becoming a nationalist in a way for Pakistan. So
it made sense that he moved there. Uh. And he
was a smart guy who was a smart guy, and
he became a globe trotter just on the basis of
(18:43):
his intellect. He was a brilliant student. Yes, Khan was
born in India in nineteen thirty five, but moved to
Pakistan in nineteen fifty one, and he eventually got a
very illustrious scholarship where he was paid to study abroad
in West Germany. Uh. And that led to him moving
to the Netherlands, which is what led him to working
(19:05):
for an engineering firm in Amsterdam, where he developed a
very specific set of skills. So the the company he
worked for is pretty important. It was called the Physics
Dynamics Research Laboratory. And that in itself is you know,
it's a solid gig. It's good work if you can
(19:25):
get it, but it's not. It's not our smoking gun here. Uh.
The The connection is that this laboratory was a subcontractor
for something with the unfortunate name of the Urinco group.
Do they make fake p for like passing the urine screens? Maybe?
They seem to do several things. One of the things
(19:47):
they did was operated new uranium enrichment plant. And so
Colin is kind of like a nuclear physicist version of Drake,
but for real, he started from the bottom, and so
he's worked his way up and now because his colleagues
and his bosses and his professors speak so highly of him,
(20:09):
he is seen as a total non security risk. Right,
let's see how the radioactive sausage is made. He learns
uh and and requires knowledge of the specific steps needed
to enrich radioactive material to weapons grade states. Uh. And
we know this because the techniques that he has expanded
(20:32):
upon are very specifically things that he would have picked
up during this time period. So it's, um, it's kind
of like you know how when you say it's not
even the subtle really, but you know how, you're listening
to a musician you say, oh, I can hear influences
of this earlier musician. You know, that's one of my
(20:53):
favorite things in the world. Then uh, as a as
a giant music. Yeah, it's great. I mean, you know
in certain certain musicians you know, don't want to wear
those influences like on their sleeve. Um, they might be
a little more subtle about it, but you know, you're
enriching uranium is a pretty specific influence. It's really hard.
It's hard to be subtle about it, right, right, and
(21:13):
the p one centerfuge is a pretty pretty specific Yeah. So, um,
it's so good on good on con at least for
not saying I totally made that up myself. But but
so this is the thing at this point, no matter
what you think about the person, uh, he's just he's
(21:33):
another physicist, and he's a smart researcher. He's good at
his job. He has a lot of insight. Um, and
yet he may have some very nationalistic feelings for his
adopted home country. But a lot of people have stuff
like that, you know what I mean. Just because somebody
is a very patriotic you can say, doesn't need to
(21:56):
affect their day job. And he might have just can
tinued his career as a researcher in Europe for a
long time. But there was one thing. It was an
event that changed his life in nineteen seventy four, he
learned about something. Yeah, that's what you might consider like
the twist or the pivot in the story. Right. In
(22:17):
May of nineteen seventy four, he learned about a secret
nuclear program that was being carried out in India. UM
and their surprise nuclear test known as Smiling Buddha. What
a great name. It's good, it's very good. I almost
we were talking about Bond villains and I was the
(22:38):
Smiling Buddha kind of like what was that? The Manchurion, No,
the Mandarin, you know in in in the Marvel world.
I think the Smiling Buddha is pretty good because it's
like it's, on the one hand, sort of innocuous, like
names for these types of programs often try to be.
But I also find it kind of creepy. Oh, it's
very creepy. The government of India when they admitted this,
(23:01):
this surprise nuclear test, uh, they verbatim described it as
a peaceful nuclear explosion. Oh cool, oh good, Yeah, peaceful
and that everyone's dead afterwards. That's nothing more peaceful than
you know, complete annihilation. The Buddha was smiling. Yeah. It's
it's interesting because you know, we know that other countries
(23:24):
were picking up on signals about this blake. Back in
the nineties sixties, India's government had contact of Westinghouse Electric
and he said, Hey, build our first nuclear power plant here.
So of course Uncle Sam is going to know about that.
A spoiler alert. Not to be two fingers on the
(23:44):
hand about connections, but yeah, Westinghouse, at least it's leaders
are chummy with the US, and I'm sure that they
have each other's phone numbers and have all kinds of
off the record conversations. Hang. Their sisters were best friends
and you know, growing up and stuff, right right, They
both went to Choke Nail, which is a prep school.
(24:07):
I made up. It's a horrible name for prep. It's
it really it reads. You said that, and I immediately
knew what you're talking about, thank you. So when he
learned of Smiling Buddha of this surprise nuclear test, this
set him upon the path he currently travels NOL. Did
you ever see the television show Fringe? Yeah, for sure.
(24:31):
I definitely didn't like watch every single episode, but I
followed it pretty regularly up front, and then I think
I fell off once it got into a little bit
more of the timy winmey stuff. I kind of got
a little confused and stopped watching it, but that's probably
on me, and there's some really great things in it.
Very X Files. He quite quite enjoyed the show. Yeah,
I agree with you on all points there. I've I've
(24:53):
complained about this in the past. I hope it's not unwarranted.
But I'm one of those people who gets irritated board
disinterested when I see a story descend into television rules
or soap opera rules where they'll say, oh, you know
what this really was. We're secretly related or we're destined
(25:14):
to be in lover This explains so much because you're
actually my brother. Yeah, it's like, not everybody needs to
be in one family because that's uh anyway, it's not
not just to have our little pop culture gripe corner
for a second. It's kind of the same thing that
happened with X Files. Whereas I know the people on
(25:34):
varying sides of this, but like, I like that show
best when it was a Monster of the Week episodic situation. Uh,
and then they tried a little too hard to grow
the red thread of that universe, and to me, that's
when I got a little much. That's how I felt
about friends too. But I know that you and Matt
uh do enjoy some of the larger X Files world,
you know, storylines. Sure, I dig it, but I feel
(25:57):
you like it's not a good story. He does not
ultimately have to be the story of a member of
a family dying or a member of a family being born,
producted by aliens right right, right, or repeatedly abducted by
aliens in the very definition of a tease. But Chekhov's
gun aside, we we know that for critics of a
(26:23):
Q con, I'm trying to be very fair here, he
is kind of like a fringe Monster of the Week,
but has been for decades. Um fringes Monster of the
Week episodes often concerned. They're pretty often concerned evil scientists,
scientists who had used the power of their intelligence and
(26:45):
their design ability to create things for nefarious or misdirected purposes,
you know what I mean. Like somebody builds a time
machine that he has to embed in his body to
travel back in time and try to save his wife
from a car accident, right right, There's always that trigger
moment that like sets them on a path of either
righteousness or you know, revenge against everyone that wronged them exactly.
(27:11):
And so that's what happened with a Q Kahan, And
we can dive into his career, but it gets it
gets complicated really quickly. So what we can say is
that he began making connections. He began he was the
number it was one of the number one drivers of
(27:32):
Pakistan's nuclear program. He didn't get along with everybody, there
were a lot of ins and outs, but he is
a huge reason that Pakistan's a nuclear armed country today.
And it's you know, it's if you think about it,
given the incredible, the incredibly tense relationship between Pakistan and India, Uh,
(27:52):
it's no surprise that he is. A Pakistani man could
have seen a nuclear powered India as an existential threat.
So he probably saw him. He probably sees himself because
he's still alive, as someone doing a right, just a
noble thing. But two agencies like the I e. A E.
(28:14):
Which monitors nuclear proliferation, this guy is a criminal. He's
public enemy number one, and by nineteen seventy nine, suspicions
of his role in illegal nuclear proliferation reached a fever pitch,
and his old country that he lived in during college
investigated him. It's really interesting, man. We talked about this
(28:35):
at the top of the show. I just wanted to
point this out here. I mean, you know, Pakistan has
a GDP of two d and seventy eight billion U
S dollars or at least in twenty nineteen it did,
and Iran has a g d P uh or had
of of almost six hundred billion dollars UM. And it's
just when we were talking about that list at the
top of the show. And this is no disparagement on
(28:57):
any country or saying that like you're only worth something
if you're worth a lot of money, but in terms
of like the idea of a developed nation and that
being the credentials required to have these kinds of weapons
or something, or to come by it, in terms of
like having all this cash to go into development, it
seemed like Pakistan was low on that list and compared
(29:17):
to some of the other countries um. And this is why,
because it turns out that it was not a natural
progression of technological investment that led to this. It was
a very specific intervention by a very specific dude. Yeah yeah,
who clearly is motivated by the belief that he is
(29:39):
doing what he sees as the right thing. And I
love the point you're bringing up there about GDP because
it's going to lead to our our other conversation, which
is who gets to say, who gets to say who
deserves the thing right or who has a right to this.
The Dutch government launched an investigation into con for nuclear espionage,
(30:01):
and the problem is that they couldn't find anything that
felt like really strong in arguable proof, so they dismissed
it due to a lack of evidence. But later in
a in a local court, he's found guilty. There's another
Dutch court and he sentenced in absentia to four years
(30:22):
in prison. But he sees them and he says, like
the most baller physics nerd thing you could say. He says, Look,
any information that I may have shared with anyone, I'm
not admitting that I did anything wrong. Whatever I might
have shared with whomever is freely available to people who are,
(30:43):
you know, maybe unlike you, smart enough to know what
they're looking for, and they'll just read the magazines that
are publicly available, or the trade journals, or the lectures
in undergraduate halls across your country. So he was pretty
much you've pled not guilty and strongly implied that the
(31:03):
people accused him were idiots, which I thought was a
baller move. It absolutely, it is a baller move. Um.
And you know, you we wed we alluded at the
top of the show to the fact that this guy
in Pakistan is absolutely revered, uh perhaps in the rest
of the international community. Um reviled right. Um. But there's
(31:26):
this really great article if you want to read up
some more on on some of the minutia of this
story in these very complicated relationships in the Atlantic that
has the fabulous name of the Wrath of Khan um
And and they specifically talk about how he is essentially
looked at as like a demigod um in in the
country and in Pakistan, second only to the founder of
(31:48):
the Nation of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jannah. And apparently the
guy's a bit of a pill, like you said, I mean,
you can imagine like he's he seems to take matters
into his own hands. But the article, the Atlantic article
talks about how he has developed quite the ego um
and uh, you know, flexes this demigod status pretty regularly. Yeah,
(32:12):
And it's not as if he isn't the father of
Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. There are multiple articles. I saw another
one also from the Atlantic called the Point of No
Return that is about the adulation, specifically that adoration. And
there were people who Um knew the guy before he
(32:36):
started this network who had a different take on him.
And interestingly, one person of former school Chum said that
cons seemed to behave like an addict of sorts as
he was starting this network that he wasn't able to
get It's like a scientist looking for that rush of
validation realization, and he wasn't able to get it from
(32:59):
his activity these when he returned to Pakistan, and that's
why he went rogue. Well that's the phrase they use
because the big one of the big arguments about this
is whether or not the government of Pakistan knew about
the proliferation network and helped him out for a cut,
you know what I mean, or whether he was doing
(33:21):
this for money or for something ideological. We're gonna pause
for a word from our sponsor and we'll be back
to talk a little bit about the network, a little
bit about as possible motivations, and then perhaps most importantly,
the bigger philosophical picture. So we're back. No, this is
(33:46):
one thing, um, we should we should probably clarify we
say nuclear proliferation network. We're not just talking about somebody
shipping over fully armed, fitted out, kitted out nuclear warheads.
Were like, this could be as small as PDFs of
a design. Here's how you make the center fugere. Yeah,
that's right. And and that's largely what uh, what con
(34:10):
stole and provided was designs right that he had kind
of uh you know, squirreled away from his time working
around that centerfuge Yeah. Yeah, And and these were also
designs that he had improved upon himself. Like one example,
so what what example would be Iraq? Before the Gulf War,
(34:32):
there was a there's a high likelihood that Han and
his network we're going to help make Iraq a nuclear
Howard nation, for nuclear capable nation, and then the war
in the Middle East or that version of it would
have gone very differently. But the Gulf War occurred before
they could really get to work on this. And the
(34:54):
kind of things that he supplied that were found after
the fall of the government, where things like very specific,
very necessary things like here is how you mold uranium
into the specific sphere you'll need for the thing you're
trying to do, Like that's that's the kind of detail
that a lot of people you wouldn't recognize the importance
(35:17):
of that if you were shifting through a bunch of papers, right,
you'd almost have to be a physicist, wouldn't you. Oh
of course. And then my question too about all this men,
and and forgive me if this is obvious, but it's
my understanding that you know, even with Iran, now, for example,
we know they have nuclear power, it's all about refining
it and enriching their uranium to a point where it
(35:39):
can be used as a nuclear weapon, and that technology
supposedly they're not quite there yet. So is that literally
what he was providing with the improvements to the centrifuge
is how to be able to enrich this product to
a weaponized state. Yeah, he was selling the ability, he
was selling the pieces the abilities to make nuclear weapons,
(36:02):
not just to have nuclear power. And the difference really
is a matter of degree of rinse and repeat and
the materials used. So it's it's dual use technology, which
is difficult for international observers. Iran can have the same
any country really, absolutely any country can have uh types
(36:25):
of centerfuges and a material that they're enriching up to
a certain amount. And that's totally that's it. That's nuclear power.
That's what's supposed to do. But then if you do
the same thing past a certain threshold, then you get
into the idea of making weapons grade materials. And really,
you know, the big difference between quote unquote nuclear power
(36:48):
and quote unquote a nuclear weapon is that in a
nuclear reactor, the energy is generated over some period of
time weeks, months, years, and these fission fragments are holding
up the whole time the reactors working. But in a
nuclear weapon, all of it comes out at once. That's
the that's the difference. It's just the same thing delivered
(37:09):
a different way, like when you get a case adia
instead of a burrito, exactly exactly. But people. But the
thing is, you know, people die in the burrito situation here.
I don't know why I chose the burrito as the bomb. Man,
I'm sorry, I'm just not well. We all know how
you feel. Well, you all know you're much more pro
case idia than I've never thought of. He was anti
burrito until this moment. Man, I'm gonna they cannot proliferate
(37:32):
apparently not, but proliferate they did. Uh, you know, the
real world burritos in this case, which is nuclear weapons,
directly because of the influence of this man um and
this network that he kind of established, right. Yeah, for
over twenty years, this underground nuclear conspiracy, this nuclear ring
(37:54):
operated out of more than a dozen countries. It's weird
because international servers see that somewhere along the line the
network flipped, like it started when he was back in
Pakistan and he was getting supplies he needed from other countries.
So it it started as an import network, and then
Pakistan successfully launched their nuclear weapons program, but it didn't
(38:18):
stop for calling. It evolved into an export network. So
this is where like you were saying, oh, this is
where they started exporting stuff to Iran, to Libya, to
North Korea. And uh, those three cases, by the way,
are solidly proven, not conspiracy theories. That's how the nukes
got there, that is why they were there today, except
(38:38):
in the case of Libya when Muhamar Gadaffi agreed to
step back from his nuclear program and was rewarded with
the fall of his regime. And while we're doing an
info dump, I guess i'll just say it for anybody's
wondering why the Gadaffi regime was finally brought down. When
it was brought down, part of it was that they
would not have a nuclear deterrent. But the bigger part,
(39:01):
the big motivation was France, which wanted to control the
currency at the time. Gaddafi was moving away to an
African dinar kind of like an African euro and France
didn't want it because they controlled the franc that was
used in that area. But then I have to ask
if CON's network was supplying, uh, you know, stuff to
(39:23):
Iran and Libya, why don't they have nukes. Well, yeah,
Libya walked back their program through international agreement. Uh. And
Iran is like the one of the number one worries
for the West and Israel. So Iran has more eyes
on them and more punishments through the forms of sanctions
(39:45):
and stuff. They have nuclear capability. But also if you
ask the government of Iran, they would say they don't
want nuclear weapons, right, But but I guess, yeah, that's
that's a really good point in terms of like the
optics of it all. But yeah, that's what they say.
It is clear though to me that Pakistan was Khan's
major concern. He literally wanted to save the country because
(40:07):
they had lost so many wars, you know, against India
for example, or conflicts, and they felt he felt that
they were like under the thumb of this other country,
and he wanted to bring them up and lift them
up out of that and give them a seat at
the table. And that's why he's revered there because he's
he's looked at as like a savior type figure. Yeah, exactly,
nailed it. So suppliers contractors for the network came from
(40:30):
countries all across Europe. There were some contractors in Malaysia.
The big question for international observers is was this in
fact a private network run by private entities with one
guy Khan having connections with a state level entity, that
being the country of Pakistan, or was the government of
(40:53):
Pakistan actively assisting him because some of the flights, some
of the equipment flights that have been traced happened on
planes owned by the government of Pakistan. So I feel
like facets or factions of the of the government were
at least assisting him, even without even if without the
government's overall knowledge. And then there's one other thing that
(41:15):
we should mention. Uh, we're not in any way saying
stuff that is untrue to CON's reputation, and we're not
leveling accusations at him because he publicly admitted that he
has done this multiple times. And this is scary to
a lot of people who like the current nuclear world
(41:36):
order because it means first you can do this and
get away. Canas eighty five years old as we record,
he's a freeman. Many people have affiliated with this network
never saw a day in jail, or never saw a
year in jail at least, and they're fine. In many cases.
They're not just free, they're very wealthy. Uh. Secondly, it
looks like some of these regulatory bodies can be powerless. Thirdly,
(41:58):
there don't seem to be a lot of smart controls.
But I would say no. Most importantly, that's something you
and Paul and I were talking about before we rolled.
Who gets to decide right who? Who has there? We
know there is no like ancient right to decide because
nuclear weaponry didn't exist until very recently. So who gets
(42:19):
to be the master of the toys here? Whoever's got
the most of them? I would assume, uh, you know
who who holds the keys? To the Kingdom of nuclear weaponry.
And I mean I think the United States would fancy
it as that being US. Uh, and certainly flexes that
muscle plenty in the form of sanctions, in the form
(42:41):
of trying to you know, international agreements are kind of
leading the charge in these conversations. Um, but hell, we're
not going to dismantle our nukes. You're kidding you, Stay
away from our nukes. We're the we're the good guys.
Have you seen our our our hats and we're all
in Uncle Sam costumes at this point totally. Um. It's
(43:02):
a good point because it looks all countries in some
shape or form, except maybe like Sweden, and I take
that back, have some level of corruption, you know, whether
they're corrupt to the core, you know, that's all a
matter of debate, you know, but I think we all know,
like we said, governments and governing bodies being sort of
(43:24):
the like, you know, organizational personification of the dark heart
of man, right. Uh, it's sort of unavoidable that there's
gonna be some rot in these in these countries, and
there certainly is. The United States. I think we maybe
have a little more faith in our processes or whatever
that maybe we you know, we have some restraint and
(43:44):
we're like some kind of Bellweather of the economy. Whatever.
All that stuff is again totally up for debate, but
I think we would argue there are countries that should
not have this stuff because they are corrupt to the core, right. Yeah,
And then there are questions too about guide ee ide all.
So one of the things that got hammered into my
head by by some professors was that certain countries could
(44:09):
never have nuclear weapons because they were considered theocracies. And
one of the big things they would say, like one
I'm not going to name names here, but one of
the examples that that I heard pretty frequently was somebody saying, look,
you don't want Saudi Arabia having a nuclear bomb because
it is a kingdom that is governed by a very
(44:30):
specific type of Islam. And they were saying, you know,
the belief in Islam is not the problem, but a
government steered by a religion with nuclear weapons is the problem.
And then I guess, in an attempt to look less Islamophobic,
this same professor would say, and by that, I mean
I would never want Vatican City to have a nuke.
(44:52):
The Pope should not have nuclear warheads, which I thought
was a fair argument. You know, the pope is like
specialized in other things, I imagine, but that that's their argument. Like,
but what it's missing is that there is a note
of imperialism right when we are saying when a nuclear
powered country that, by the way, is the only country
(45:14):
to deploy nuclear weapons in the field of war, knowing
that a country still considers itself like the moral as
you said, bell Weather, it's it's got some questions. You know,
there's some holes to poke there, because I'm not sure
you can square some of the imperialistic actions that the
country has taken over the past centuries with that kind
(45:37):
of that kind of belief, you know what I mean
that that was it called sometimes American exceptionalism. Yeah, manifest
destiny means the way you know, well, I mean I
just think those things are kind of related, right, this
idea of striving for this like you know, let's take
it as far as we can possibly go, you know,
and that's sort of Uh, one could argue the seeds
(45:58):
of megalomania and uh, a kind of psychosis of never
being satisfied. It's it's a question that we don't have
the answer for and a lot of people don't have
the answer right now either. Now, sure there's a clear
argument to be made. I think that, uh, there are
some countries that probably shouldn't have nuclear weapons. But then
(46:22):
there's also the argument to be made that asks should
any country have a nuclear weapon? We can't close the
door on this one, you know what I mean. The
radioactive horses have left the barn. Nuclear weapons are going
to be a reality now and with that comes this
kind of black market. A q CON through this conspiracy,
proved that with enough motivation and know how, you can't
(46:45):
really stop other countries from learning about this stuff. So
before we end, we should we should give you an
update on Con today. Like like we said earlier, he
is a live he is in his mid eighties, he's
living in Pakistan still. Uh, he is not in jail.
(47:07):
He's in good terms with the government. He's super popular,
actually domestically with the conservative sides. It's crazy, man. I
just had to add. You know, we talked briefly about
how he sort of embraced this demigod status um and
he did it in the most open manner possible. He
didn't act like a criminal. He acted like a king
Um and he you know, would uh speak publicly and
(47:31):
do you know, seminars and talk about everything from you know,
science to history, pontificate on things like poetry. He was
a huge fan of of poetry. Apparently again this is
a from this Atlantic article of the Wrath of Khan Um.
He he did a really interesting thing. Um. We we
talked about kind of the the idea of political corruption
(47:53):
and and there's no secret that Pakistan has a very
rife history of of political corruption. And it's a little
too complex to go into right here, but apparently they
have a lot of I guess you could call them
civilian governments, these kind of little mini governments throughout in
different kind of for lack of a better term, townships
or areas or villages or whatever. And there's a lot
(48:14):
of palm greasing that goes on, and understandably a lot
of people of power get away with a lot of
stuff pretty openly, right. And the thing that con did
was he built a weekend house that illegally drained into
the drinking water of rawal Pindi, which is um the
capital of the rawal Pindi Division. Again, like the the
(48:38):
townships and principalities and the idea of the regions in
uh Pakistan are not fully known to me. I don't
have a good grasp of it, but a pretty prominent place.
It's in the Punjab area of Pakistan. Um and he
built this lake illegally draining into like waste into rawal
(49:00):
Pindi's water supply. Um. He did it as a flex,
saying look at me, Look how much power I have.
I can do this and no one's gonna stop me.
And you think that people living there would have a
problem with that and be like, yo, you thought we
thought you were a guy. Why are you pooping in
our drinking water? But it turns out they loved him
for it and thought it was an awesome flex and
(49:20):
respected the balls that he had it took him to
do that. There's also some editorializing in that Atlantic article,
and they did they consider him when they're talking about
that this house in particular, they do one of those
things where they try to slip in character character notes
based on descriptions of physical appearance. They call them like
(49:42):
a soft banquet fed man or something like that. Okay,
that it felt a little little tilting the scales, but
wrath of colon and the other one we mentioned the
Point of No Return are really good articles for further insights. Obviously,
Wrath of Cain has a lot of a lot more
biograph tical details. It feels a story like it really
(50:02):
does kind of give you a movie cinematic kind of
view of this guy's life, which is larger than life,
you know, right right, And uh, this, this maybe gives
us something we can end on here. So he thought
it is crucial to point out that he did feel
he did feel like he was doing the right thing, like,
(50:23):
at least in the beginning, he was on kind of
this one man mission to save Pakistan from India because
he thought India wanted Pakistan's demise. Uh. And along the
way he had some mission creep because selling nukes to
selling nuclear capabilities to North Korea doesn't really help you
(50:43):
protect yourself from India unless you just need the cash,
and that would have to be a lot of cash.
But this is the one thing that got got me.
People said he was abrasive, maybe single minded. Some people
said he was a little meglomaniacal. But was he right
about Pakistan? I think he was. I think they would
have been destroyed. You think so? I say that that
(51:04):
seems to be somewhat of a consensus at least of people.
You know, they're familiar with these conflicts that you know,
they likely would have tried to snuff them out, absorb them,
or just you know, annihilate them or subjugate them into
a vassal state or something like that. It's a I mean,
it's a complex question. We want to hear from you.
(51:26):
Will the new illegal nuclear trade ever be stopped? Will
it continue the way that the red market Oregon trade
continues apace in the modern day? Let us know. We
try to be easy to find online. Yep, you can
definitely find us online. We are conspiracy stuff on Facebook
and Twitter, and we're conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram. Um.
(51:49):
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(52:10):
that phone number one eight three s T T W
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(52:30):
not a three minute story, never ever since to yourself,
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