these efforts, it is claimed Khan Research Laboratories suffered setbacks until PAEC provided technical assistance. Although, A.Q. Khan disputes it and counter claims that PAEC is merely trying to take credit for KRL's success and that PAEC hindered progress at KRL after the two programs had been separated by Bhutto in 1976. In any case, KRL achieved modest enrichment of Uranium by 1978 and was ready to detonate an HEU uranium bomb by 1984. In contrast PAEC was unable to enrich any Uranium or produce weapons grade fissile material until 1998. The uranium program proved to be a difficult, challenging and most enduring approach to scale up to industrial levels to military-grade. Producing HEU as a fissile material is even more difficult and challenging than extracting plutonium and Pakistan experimented with HEU as an implosion design as contrary to other nuclear states. Little and rudimentary knowledge was available of gas centrifuges at that time, and HEU fissile material was only known to the world for nuclear power usage; its military applications for HEU were non-existent. Commenting on the difficulty, mathematician Tasneem Shah; who worked with A.Q. Khan, was quoted in the book Eating Grass that "hydrodynamical problem in centrifuge was simply stated, but extremely difficult to evaluate, not only in order of magnitude but in detailing also." Many of Khan's fellow theorists were unsure about the feasibility of the enriched uranium on time despite Khan's strong advocacy. One scientist recalled his memories in Eating Grass: "No one in the world has used the [gas] centrifuge method to produce weapon grade material.... [T]his was not going to work, he [A.Q. Khan] is simply wasting time." Despite A.Q. Khan having difficulty getting his peers to listen to him, he aggressively continued his research and the program was made feasible in the shortest time possible. His efforts won him praise from Pakistan's politicians and military science circles, and he was now debuted as the "father of the uranium" bomb. On 28 May 1998, it was the KRL's HEU that ultimately created the nuclear chain reaction which led the successful detonation of boosted fission devices in a scientific experiment codenamed Chagai-I. Plutonium In July 1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan told leading Pakistani politicians that the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) was completely incapable of meeting a deadline of December of that year for producing enough plutonium for a nuclear weapon. Shortly thereafter, he was placed