INDIA: Dr Abdul Qader Khan is a national hero for testing Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme to counter India's five years ago. Hospitals bear the name of the 66-year-old Pashtun metallurgist who considers himself a pacifist.
"Some people have the impression that because I built a nuclear bomb, I'm some sort of cruel person," he once told a Pakistani journalist. "I built a weapon of peace, which seems hard to understand until you realise Pakistan's nuclear capability is a deterrent to aggressors. There has not been a war in the last 30 years and I don't expect one in the future." The stakes were too high, he added.
Dr Khan was born in the central Indian town of Bhopal in 1936, 11 years before independence. He was educated locally and soon after left for Islamic Pakistan that was formed by the colonial administration five years earlier.
After various degrees abroad and in Pakistan, Dr Khan was offered a job with FDO Engineering in the Netherlands as a senior metallurgist. FDO Engineering was closely associated with URENCO, the biggest European research organisation, jointly sponsored by the US, Germany and the Netherlands in researching the enrichment of uranium through the centrifuge system.
Dr Khan was in Belgium during the third India-Pakistan war in 1971 which led to East Pakistan, one half of his country divided by the British, breaking away to become Bangladesh.
India's first nuclear explosion followed in 1974. Dr Khan's response was that to survive as an independent nation, Pakistan had to go nuclear. He said as much in a letter to Pakistan's prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who invited him to return home and take charge of the country's nuclear programme.
Successive heads of government lent their total support. Above all, the army took charge of and supported the nuclear programme as it wanted to achieve military parity with India having been to war with it three times since independence in 1947 and losing each time.
At Bhutto's insistence, the Eastern Research Laboratory was established for Dr Khan at Kahuta, near the garrison town of Rawalpindi adjoining Islamabad in 1976. Later President Zia renamed it after Dr Khan.
The scientist has visited North Korea at least 13 times.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, an anti-nuclear activist and MIT-trained physicist who teaches at university in Islamabad, told the Los Angeles Times recently that Dr Khan was not considered an Islamic radical.
"He is not a fundamentalist, though he is nationalist - and sometimes nationalism and religion get mixed up in Pakistan."