To help spread the word about his laboratory’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, Pakistani engineer A.Q. Khan produced a marketing video that he sent to potential clients around the world.

One of these promotional videos turned up at a pipe factory warehouse in South Africa. When police raided the warehouse in 2004, they also found a stack of shipping containers marked for export to Libya—inside were machine parts that would have given the Libyans the ability to process enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs. It turned out the warehouse was part of an international network—directed by Khan—supplying bomb-building materials to anyone who could pay the price.

CIR obtained a five-minute audio excerpt of that marketing video. In this portion, a narrator explains how and why Khan created Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal—prompted, he says, by the nuclear weapons program launched in neighboring India. And A.Q. Khan himself promotes his own success, saying he promised Pakistan’s president that the country could “detonate a nuclear device on a week’s notice.”

>> Listen to the audio from Khan’s tape in a CIR web exclusive.

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Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.