New York: Pakistan has emerged as the intellectual and trading hub of a loose network of hidden nuclear proliferators, a media report said today (Jan 4, 2004) quoting experts.

The Pakistani leaders who denied for years that scientists at the country's secret A Q Khan Research Laboratories were peddling advanced nuclear technology must have been averting their eyes from a most conspicuous piece of evidence; the laboratory's own sales brochure, quietly circulated to aspiring nuclear weapons states and a network of nuclear middlemen around the world, the report said.

The cover, the 'New York Times' says, bears an official-looking seal that says "Government of Pakistan" and a photograph of the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. It promotes components that were spin-offs from Pakistan's three-decade-long project to build a nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium, set in a drawing that bears a striking resemblance to a mushroom cloud.

In other nations, such sales would be strictly controlled. But "Pakistan has always played by its own rules," the 'Times' said.

As investigators unravel the mysteries of the North Korean, Iranian and now the Libyan nuclear projects, the paper says, "Pakistan, and those it empowered with knowledge and technology, they are now selling on heir own, has emerged as the intellectual and trading hub of a loose network of hidden nuclear proliferators."

That network is global, stretching from Germany to Dubai and from China to South Asia, and involves many middlemen and suppliers. But what is striking about a string of recent disclosures, experts say, is how many roads appear ultimately to lead back to the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, where Pakistan's own bomb was developed.

In 2002, the United States was surprised to discover how North Korea had turned to the Khan laboratory for an alternative way to manufacture nuclear fuel, after the reactors and reprocessing facilities it had relied on for years were "frozen" under a now shattered agreement with the Clinton administration, the 'Times' said.

Last year (2003), international inspectors and Western intelligence agencies were surprised again by the central role Pakistan played in the initial technology that enabled Iran to pursue a secret uranium enrichment programme for 18 years.

The sources of Libya's enrichment programme are still under investigation, but those who have had an early glance say they see "interconnections" with both Pakistan and Iran's programmes and Libyan financial support for the Pakistani programme that stretches back three decades.

Until two weeks ago, Pakistani officials had long denied that any nuclear technology was transferred from their laboratories. But now that story has begun to change, the Pakistani authorities, under pressure, began interrogating scientists from the laboratory about their assistance to other nuclear aspirants.