Science Quote by Abdul Qadeer Khan

Pride is an easy word to say and a difficult one to audit, and Abdul Qadeer Khan’s line leans hard on that gap. “I am proud of my work for my country” is built like a moral shield: it frames the speaker’s actions as service, not self-interest, and it asks the listener to judge outcomes through the lens of national necessity rather than global consequence. The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost civics-textbook simple, because simplicity travels well in moments of scandal. You can repeat it on television; you can carve it into a legacy.

The context makes the sentence do double duty. Khan is widely credited as the architect of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, a role that, domestically, can read as deterrence and survival in a hostile regional balance. Internationally, the same story includes allegations of proliferation networks and technology transfers that rattled the nonproliferation regime. In that collision between hero narrative and pariah narrative, “my country” becomes the central rhetorical device: it shrinks an ethical debate about nuclear risk into a loyalty test.

The subtext is less “judge me” than “judge the world that forced this.” Pride here is also grievance. It implies that powerful nations get to call their arsenals stability while others are condemned for pursuing parity. By claiming pride, Khan doesn’t argue details; he asserts motive. It’s a scientist’s version of patriotic immunity, and it works because nationalism can launder complexity into a single, emotionally legible credential: allegiance.