Khan Research Laboratories
[6] It is globally known for its research in gas centrifuges to produce the enriched uranium; and in past, it has competed with the PINSTECH on wide variety of weapon designs but it is now have focused in civilian missions, including the national security, fusion science and supercomputing.[8] In 1976, the difficulties encountered in preliminary studies under Mahmood on understanding the equation of state of uranium indicated the need for a dedicated laboratory solely to that purpose.[8] Work on establishing the laboratory was initiated by the army's Engineer-in-Chief who selected Brigadier Zahid Ali Akbar to conduct the topographic survey.[9][10] Because the experiments were deemed too dangerous to conduct in a major city, the need for the operations to be moved in an isolated and remote mountainous areas was felt by Brig.[12][13] More broadly, the ERL was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the weapon design with the second lab in Nilore running under the PAEC's contract.: 245–246 [8][17] In 1996, the Clinton administration accused China of approving the tender released for the KRL on the acquisition of specially-made magnetic rings for special suspension bearings mounted at the top of rotating centrifuge cylinders.: 5 [18] In 1999, a visit by the Saudi dignitaries accompanied by the Sharif administration personnel to the laboratory also garnered further negative publicity at the Western media that raised fears of proliferation in the middle east.[19] In 2003, the Pakistani nuclear physicist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was accused of (and later pardoned) for mishandling the classified information on the designs of the gas centrifuges to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and China in 1980s that were taken from the lab's computers.[29] From 1976 till 1978, the lab depended heavily on the Urenco Group's method on developing the gas centrifuge, which it says to be suffering due to incomplete mechanical parts and differential equation problems involving rotational dynamics on a fixed axis.