Bhutto detached the work from PAEC by making Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan its chief scientist in 1976. The uranium program was moved to Kahuta where the project was established as the Engineering Research Laboratories (ERL). According to Dr. Khan, materials were imported from Europe with the help of two procurement officers; one of them was Engineer Ikramul Haq Khan, deputed to KRL via Major-General Ali Nawab, Hilal-i-Imtiaz (Military) 1979. Wanting a capable civil engineer to supervise the construction, Bhutto asked the Chief of Army Staff for the selection, and the Engineer-in-Chief chose Brigadier Zahid Ali Akbar to lead the program. Because the experiments were deemed too dangerous to conduct in a major city, the operations were moved in a remote mountainous northern areas of Pakistan. The entire site and Kahuta was rebuilt in the 1980s by the Corps of Engineers under Lieutenant-General Zahid Ali Akbar, with logistics provided by the Military Engineering Service. Conducting classified research, the facility was heavy secured by both the Pakistan Army and the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). All employees needed badges to pass a checkpoint, and the laboratories are electronically fenced and guarded. The ERL was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the weapon design at PAEC. Some renowned scientists, Dr. G. D. Alam (theoretical physicist) from PAEC had joined the ERL and enriched the uranium at Kahuta while Dr. T. M. Shah (a mathematician) and Anwar Ali (a physicist) and some other scientists also supported him. The site quickly installed thousands of gas centrifuges, using the Zippe method, to run at about 65,000 revolutions per minute (rpm) for an average of 10 years. The Uranium-235 (U235) containing only ~0.7% enriched material is brought to more than 90.0% through three stages of enrichment, leaving the original material depleted from 0.7% to 0.2%, which then now at both civilian and military-grade. In the 1970s, ERL heavily depended on URENCO's method but lessened the dependence in 1979 after local methods were developed with efforts studied and learned by Dr. G. D. Alam and Dr. T. M Shah. Unverified claims were made by KRL in 1983–84 of conducting weapon design tests. After visiting the site in May 1981, President Zia-ul-Haq renamed ERL as the Khan Research Laboratory (KRL) in honor of its founder and senior scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. The KRL established a system of computer numerical control to control the ultracentrifuges in 1983. By 1986,