U. S. nuclear component reaches Pakistan via China
"Conspirators used licences of legitimate customers"
Pakistan is circumventing matters of legality and geopolitical complexities in the procurement process for nuclear components.
This may well be the conclusion reached in the case of Qiang Hu, a
Chinese national who has been charged in Massachusetts with “conspiracy
for violating U.S. export controls by allegedly selling thousands of
pressure transducers to unnamed customers through his position of sales
manager at MKS Instruments Shanghai Ltd. in China”.
Among the list of nations that use pressure transducers to measure the
gas pressure inside centrifuge cascades in nuclear plants is Pakistan.
The list reportedly includes Iran and possibly North Korea, but
Pakistan, according to experts at the Washington-based Institute for
Science and International Security, is among those nations that “use a
considerable quantity of the equipment in their centrifuge plants and
have regularly sought them through surreptitious means as used in this
alleged scheme”.
That Islamabad was a likely final customer of Mr. Hu’s deceptions cannot
be ruled out. According to a report published by ISIS on this case, “Hu
and his co-conspirators allegedly arranged their unlawful export to
unauthorised Chinese end-users or to other, unnamed country end-users”.
The report’s authors, David Albright and Andrea Stricker, told The Hindu
that while recent case studies or evidence of Pakistani procurements of
pressure transducers may not be available, Pakistan is “likely
procuring them, assuming they don’t have enough in their centrifuge
plants or haven’t made them themselves”.
With the general assumption here that illicit procurement of components
is quite a common practice experts are now urging that the U.S. ought to
designate China a ‘Destination of Diversion Concern’, an action that
would then require companies there to apply for special licences to
import controlled or sensitive U.S. goods on account of the high risk
that they may be diverted to rogue nuclear powers.
Nuclear screws may indeed be tightened on China in the second Obama term
as the Hu case also suggested acute embarrassment for U.S. law
enforcement agencies. The Federal Bureau Investigation’s complaint in
the matter, for example, cited “deception” that Mr. Hu and his
co-conspirators resorted to, in order to procure export licences.
Two ways of deception
The complaint argues that they used two primary means of deception to
export the pressure transducers. First, “the conspirators used licences
issued to legitimate MKS business customers to export the pressure
transducers to China and then caused the parts to be delivered to other
end-users who were not themselves named on the export licences or
authorised to receive the parts”, the FBI said, adding that the
conspirators then “obtained export licences in the name of a front
company and then used these fraudulently obtained licences to export the
parts to China, where they were delivered to the actual end-users”.
However, MKS Instruments itself was not a target of the government’s
investigation into these matters, the FBI noted, adding that Mr. Hu
remained in custody and faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal
prison, to be followed by up to three years of supervised release, and a
$1 million fine.
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