WASHINGTON, Aug 26: The US State Department has said that President Pervez Musharraf’s confirmation of Dr A. Q. Khan’s involvement in supplying nuclear technology to North Korea does not alter Washington’s trust in the Pakistani leader.
“President Musharraf has said that his government and the military did not have knowledge of these shipments and we take him at his word,” department’s spokesman Sean McCormack told a briefing in Washington.
The president told Japan’s Kyodo news agency in Islamabad on Wednesday that Dr Khan had provided centrifuge machines and their designs to North Korea, but said these transfers did not help Pyongyang acquire a nuclear weapons capability.
President Musharraf’s confirmation of Dr Khan’s role in supplying nuclear technology to North Korea reignited the controversy with some groups once again demanding Dr Khan’s extradition, who has been placed under house arrest in Islamabad.
Some groups also demanded probing the Pakistani establishment’s alleged involvement with the Khan network.
The US State Department, however, put a damper on such demands by declaring that President Musharraf’s statement does not change the situation and that Washington has complete trust in him even on the nuclear issue.
Instead of seeing Gen Musharraf’s statement as a setback for US position in the six-party talks for forcing Pyongyang to give up its nuclear programme, the department’s spokesman said it would further strengthen the US position on this issue.
“We have, for some time, said that North Korea needs to dismantle its nuclear programmes and that means the plutonium-based programme as well as the highly-enriched uranium-based programme,” recalled Mr McCormack.
The United States, he said, had also discussed this issue with other members of the six-party talks that include Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, besides the US.
“So, I think that President Musharraf’s comments concerning provision of centrifuges, centrifuge parts, as well as feed stock for those centrifuges reinforce the idea that there is a highly enriched uranium programme.”
President Musharraf’s statement, he said, “(does not) really change anything from our perspective because we’ve always said they have a highly enriched uranium programme.”
