Sir

Your Editorial about science reform and alleged sales of nuclear technology to Iran, “Good and bad in Pakistan” (Nature 427, 379; 2004), mentions both good and bad, but stops short of citing the ‘ugly’. Yet there are two ugly truths involved.

The first is the state of international politics, which keeps shifting its goalposts, and accordingly either ignores the obvious or sometimes searches for the obscure. Witness, for example, the newly discovered activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's former chief nuclear scientist. It beggars belief that a solo scientist would be capable of exchanging nuclear know-how for missiles without the active participation of the army, and hence the government. It is getting clearer now that key players in the international community, including the United States, knew a lot about these activities but chose to remain quiet (see, for example, the International Herald Tribune of 21 April 2003; http://www.iht.com/articles/93839.html).

The second ugly truth is the fact that Pakistan never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and therefore the International Atomic Energy Agency can do very little about Pakistan's proliferation activities in any case.

Your Editorial was perhaps too quick in predicting repercussions from these events on science in Pakistan, which has been making progress recently.

It is more probable than not that President Musharraf, in order to gain the confidence of the country's wider scientific community and to prove that the matter was nothing but an isolated incident, would continue to finance reforms.