Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory

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In May 1998, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a Western-educated nuclear physicist, was cheered by throngs gathered in the narrow cobblestone streets of Islamabad. They set off fireworks and wielded large placards emblazoned with his likeness. As the powerful chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Mahmood developed nuclear power plants with the help of Canada and other Western nations. At the direction of the Pakistani government, Mahmood and others co-opted this technology and developed nuclear weapons; and that May their first atom bomb was successfully tested to counter a nuclear test by their archenemy, neighboring India. A joyous national celebration in Mahmood's and the other nuclear scientists' names ensued, a celebration rivaling Pakistan's independence day holiday. Mahmood was a national hero.

In 2002, he was under twenty-four-hour house arrest and his assets were frozen.

The clean-shaven, moderately religious nuclear engineer, educated in Britain in the early 1970s, had drifted toward hard-line Islamic views by the mid-1990s. The snow-white-haired Mahmood became a bona fide religious extremist. He began fortune telling by reading people's palms and grew a long, unkempt beard. Urging Pakistan to adopt neighboring Afghanistan's Taliban way of life, his writings stressed the sacredness of keeping beards, the correlation between natural catastrophes and places of immoral behavior, and hidden scientific knowledge from Allah contained in the Koran. After he obstreperously opposed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in favor of a vigorous bomb-testing program, an apprehensive Pakistani leadership forced Mahmood out of the atomic energy program.

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