Where did the idea of an ‘Islamic bomb’ come from?

Media revelations about Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan also helped to spur interest. In 1975, Khan had stolen uranium enrichment centrifuge blueprints from the URENCO plant in the Netherlands. These ended up providing the technical basis for Pakistan’s bomb program.

Khan’s theft – and the genuine conspiracy that was Pakistan’s international nuclear purchasing project – led to conspiracy theories. Despite being a Pakistani nationalist, the Guardian newspaper stated that “Dr. Khan Stole the Bomb for Islam”. His act was seen not as the actions of one man, but as part of a wider “Islamic” conspiracy.

In 1979, media institutions including West Germany’s ZDF, the UK’s BBC, and the US’s CBS all popularized the concept. On little evidence, it became accepted that this was a project designed to benefit the entire Muslim world. But despite the genuine Pakistani-Libyan connections, there was simply never a unified Islamic nuclear quest.

Conspiracy theory
Through the 1980s and 1990s, countries as diverse and mutually antagonistic as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Niger and Pakistan were all tied together by the Western fear of an Islamic bomb. Prominent commentators such as Jack Anderson and William Safire consistently deployed the term; politicians as diverse as Tam Dalyell, Edward Kennedy, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan all talked about it in fearful terms. All were off-base.

After Khan’s international proliferation network was exposed in 2004, there duly appeared a slew of books on the subject, more than a few of which posited that there was an international “Islamic” conspiracy to acquire “the bomb”. Khan was portrayed as a “nuclear jihadist” bent on righting perceived wrongs inflicted by the West on the world’s Muslims.

Again, a genuine conspiracy became tied up with conspiracy theory. Yes, Khan did proliferate centrifuge technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea – but he was motivated by money, power and prestige, not religion.

Today, the specter of the Islamic bomb haunts certain corners of the internet. From the Huffington Post to Breitbart and the Washington Times, the term crops up again and again, always used to imply that nations such as Iran harbor ambitious ideological motives for their nuclear ambitions.

It’s true that prominent Muslim figures from Bhutto to bin Laden spoke rhetorically about a “bomb for the ummah”. But this was never more than rhetoric. Leaving aside all nuclear matters, internecine and sectarian differences and conflict mean that global Islamic political unity is unlikely in the extreme.

The Islamic bomb has always been a convenient device with which to elide complex problems of religion, politics, and nuclear weapons. And sadly, it still is. Those who still casually bandy the term about would do well to think about where it really comes from.

Malcolm M. Craig is Lecturer in History, Liverpool John Moores University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).