Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Abdul Qadeer Khan

Abdul Qadeer Khan (Urdu: ڈاکٹر عبد القدیر خان ; born: April 1, 1936), also respectively known in Pakistan as Mohsin-e-Pakistan (in Urdu: محسن پاکِستان; lit: Savior of Pakistan), FPAS, DEng, ScD, HI, NI (twice); more widely known as Dr. A. Q. Khan, is a Pakistani nuclear scientist and a metallurgical engineer, colloquially regarded as the founder of HEU based Gas-centrifuge uranium enrichment programme for Pakistan's integrated atomic bomb project. Founded and established the Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL) in 1976, he was both its senior scientist and the Director-General until his retirement in 2001, and was an early and vital figure in other science projects. Apart from participating in atomic bomb project, he made major contributions in morphology, physical martensite, and its integrated applications in condensed and material physics.

Abdul Qadeer Khan was one of Pakistan's top scientists, and was involved in the country's various scientific programmes until his debriefing. On January 2004, Khan was officially summoned for a debriefing on his suspicious activities in other countries after the United States provided evidences to the Pakistan Government, and confessed it a month later. However, these activities turned out to be ordered and supervised by government and the allegedly the military, although both have denied the accusations sharply. After years of debriefing, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on 6 February 2009 declared Abdul Qadeer Khan to be a free citizen of Pakistan, allowing him free movement inside the country. The verdict was rendered by Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Aslam. In September 2009, expressing concerns over the Islamabad High Court’s decision to end all security restrictions on Khan, the United States warned that Khan still remains a "serious proliferation risk".

Early Life
Khan was born in 1936 in the Bhopal State of India (then part of the British Indian Empire). His father Dr. Abdul Ghafoor Khan was an academic who served in the Education Ministry of the British Indian Government and after retirement in 1935, settled permanently in Bhopal State. In 1947, after the partition, the family migrated from India to Pakistan, and settled in West-Pakistan. Khan studied in Saint Anthony's High School of Lahore, and then enrolled at the D.J. Science College of Karachi. There, he took B.Sc. in Physics and B.A. in Mathematics under the supervision of Suparco physicist Dr. Bashir Syed. In 1956, he attended Karachi University and obtained a B.S. degree in Metallurgy in 1960. To support the fees of his education, Khan was employed at Siemens Engineering where he worked as a practical trainee (junior engineer).

After graduation, he was employed by the Karachi Metropolitan Government and worked as an Inspector of weight and measures in Karachi, Pakistan. In 1961, he went to West Berlin to study Metallurgical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1967, Khan obtained an engineer's degree (in Technology), an equivalent of Master of Science, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and a Doctor of Engineering degree in Metallurgical engineering under the supervision of Martin Brabers from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1972. Khan's doctoral dissertations were written in fluent German. His doctoral thesis dealt and contained the fundamental work in Martensite, and its extended industrial applications to the field of Morphology, a field that studies the shape, size, texture and phase distribution of physical objects.

From : www.wikipedia.org