Libya made plutonium says IAEA
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Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadhafi is looking for acceptance in the international community.
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(CNN) -- Libya produced a small amount of plutonium as part of a secret program aimed at developing a nuclear weapon, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has said.
An International Atomic Energy Agency report says that the plutonium was produced using secretly imported enriched uranium.
"Libya imported nuclear material, sensitive equipment and technology, and documents related to enrichment and the design and fabrication of nuclear weapons," the report says.
Plutonium and highly enriched uranium are used in the warhead of a nuclear bomb.
The failure of Libya to report its nuclear activities beginning in the 1980s -- including its acquisition of nuclear weapon designs -- is of the "utmost concern," the IAEA said.
The document has been distributed to member states and will formally be presented at a meeting of the IAEA board of governors on March 8.
The program relied heavily on the support of other countries, the report says, but does not specify where Libya received its nuclear components from.
In recent weeks, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, confessed to supplying Libya with enriched uranium and gas centrifuge parts as part of a sophisticated nuclear black market.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf subsequently pardoned Khan.
In another development, Malaysian police said a businessman named B.S.A. Tahir has confessed to being a middleman for Khan.
According to Friday's police report, Tahir said enriched uranium and centrifuge units were sent directly by air from Pakistan to Libya in 2001 and 2002. (Man 'confesses')
"It is evident already that a network has existed whereby actual technological know-how originates from one source, while the delivery of equipment and some of the materials have taken place through intermediaries," the IAEA report says.
"The agency's investigation is continuing with a view to ensuring that the sensitive nuclear technologies and equipment found in Libya have not proliferated further."
The report says Libya told inspectors that it managed to separate plutonium "in very small quantities," a key step in making a bomb.
It also says Libya acknowledged it "received documentation to nuclear weapon design and fabrication from a foreign source."
Those documents included a series of engineering drawings relating to nuclear weapon components and notes -- many of them handwritten -- on how to fabricate such components.
At the same time, the report says Libya claims it did not act further on the weapon designs and stated that it "would have asked the supplier for help in the event it had opted to take further steps to develop a nuclear weapon."
"Additional analytical and field activities will be necessary before the (IAEA) is able to assess, whether, as declared, Libya had not taken any concrete steps in connection with the information on weapon design," the report says.
Last December, Libya, working with the United States and Britain, agreed to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs in an effort to lift U.S. sanctions and forge better relations with the international community.
To that end, the IAEA highly praises Tripoli.
"Libya stated that it has adopted a policy of full transparency and has decided to provide the agency with a full picture of all of its nuclear activities."
Libya has now acknowledged receiving enriched uranium shipments in 1985, 2000 and 2001, and receiving uranium compounds in 1985 and 2002, it says.
In addition, Libya said it placed an order for 10,000 centrifuges -- devices that began arriving in "large quantities" in December 2002. Most of the units were casings rather than complete centrifuges, according to the report.
Libya also said all centrifuge components were manufactured outside of the country.
The report goes on to say the IAEA will "take the necessary steps to ensure that information known to it is brought to the attention of relevant national authorities as appropriate, and that the lessons learned are shared with the international community."
