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ISLAMABAD: The nuclear black market had roots in Europe and nuclear technology was pouring out despite national export control efforts to contain it.

An article in the International Herald Tribune by Craig S. Smith states that though Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan has been criticized in the West for selling atomic secrets and equipment around the world, but the trade began in Europe, not Islamabad, according to experts who monitor proliferation.

Industry scientists and Western intelligence agencies have known for decades that nuclear technology was pouring out of Europe.

Suppliers and Middlemen

The paper reports that many of the names that have turned up among suppliers and middlemen who fed equipment, materials and knowledge to nuclear programs in Pakistan and other aspiring nuclear nations are well-known players in Europe's uranium enrichment industry, a critical part of many nuclear weapons programs.

Some have been convicted of illegal exports before. The proliferation has its roots in Europe's own post-war eagerness for nuclear independence from the United States and its lax security over potentially lethal technology.

It was abetted, critics say, by competition within Europe for lucrative contracts to bolster state-supported nuclear industries.

"It was an economic consideration," said Paul Stais, a former Belgian member of the European Parliament who lobbied unsuccessfully for tighter export controls at the time.

Urs Tinner

One name to emerge from the international investigations into nuclear trade was that of Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer who monitored production of centrifuge parts at a factory in Malaysia. The parts were intended for Libya.

Tinner's father, Friedrich Tinner, also an engineer, came under scrutiny by the U.S. Defense Department in the 1970s and again by Swiss export control authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the last decade, because he was involved in exports to Pakistan and Iraq of technology used in uranium enrichment.

Backdrop

In the 1970s, Friedrich Tinner was in charge of exports at Vakuum-Apparate-Technik, or VAT, when that company was identified by the Defense Department as shipping items with possible nuclear-related uses.

He later set up his own company, now called PhiTec AG, which was investigated by the Swiss authorities in 1996 for trying to ship valves for uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. The Tinners were never found to have broken any laws.

"Most of these people were heavily investigated in the 1970s, '80s and '90s," said Mark Hibbs, the European editor of the technical journal Nucleonics Week, published by McGraw-Hill. Hibbs has tracked the proliferation for years.

Treaty of Almelo

The problem began with the 1970 Treaty of Almelo, under which Britain, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to develop centrifuges to enrich uranium jointly, ensuring their nuclear power industry a fuel source independent of the United States.

Urenco, or the Uranium Enrichment Company, was established the next year with its primary enrichment facility at Almelo, the Netherlands.

Security at Urenco was by most accounts slipshod. The consortium relied on a network of research centers and subcontractors to build its centrifuges, and top-secret blueprints were passed out to companies bidding on tenders, giving engineers across Europe an opportunity to appropriate designs.

German Intelligence

A German intelligence investigation determined that Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea had obtained uranium melting know-how stolen from Urenco in 1984, Hibbs reported in Nucleonics Week several years later.

Urenco Subcontractor

In 1989, two engineers, Bruno Stemmler and Karl Heinz Schaab, who had worked for Germany's MAN New Technology, another Urenco subcontractor, sold complete plans for advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. They traveled to Baghdad to help solve technical problems in making the equipment work.

In 1991, after the first Gulf war, international inspectors were stunned to discover the extent of Saddam Hussein's hidden program. Schaab was later convicted of high treason but only served a little more than a year in jail. Stemmler died before he could be tried.

David Albright

David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he helped retrieve a full set of the blueprints from Iraq after the major combat operations ended last year.

US inspectors have not found evidence that Saddam had restarted his nuclear program, but Albright said there were still drawings unaccounted for. "It's an unnerving issue," said Albright, who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "A lot of nuclear weapons design stuff could be missing in Iraq."

As recently as last year, German customs agents seized high-tensile-strength aluminum tubes made by a German company and bound for North Korea.

The Tubes

The tubes matched the specifications for the housings of Urenco's uranium-enriching centrifuges.

Many names of nuclear traders came to light again recently after Iran granted new access to its nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Henk Slebos

One name on a list of suppliers to Iran was Henk Slebos, who studied at Delft Technological University in Leuven, Belgium, in the late 1960s. Frits Veerman at the Urenco subcontractor, recalls meeting Slebos in the FDO laboratory in the mid-1970s.

In the early 1980s, Slebos was arrested for shipping an oscilloscope, used in testing centrifuges. He was convicted and sentenced to a brief prison term in 1985. Slebos declined to comment for this article.