The source of the article is as surprising as the assertion is fantastic. In a commentary in the adults magazine Playboy, Joshua Pollack, a US policy wonk who has done work on nuclear proliferation, says India may have been the secret, unnamed “fourth country” — after Iran, Libya and North Korea — to which AQ Khan “provided the shortcut to a nuclear weapon.”

Pollack offers little credible evidence to back the contention, other than to point similarities between the centrifuges India uses in its uranium-enrichment program and Pakistan’s own centrifuges engineered by Khan. He also cites South African court documents claiming that a member of the so-called “Khan network” supplied India’s centrifuge program with specialized equipment (mainly flow meters), starting in the late 1980s.