Abdul Qadeer Khan trains as a metallurgist in Europe, then walks out of his Dutch employer with stolen blueprints for uranium enrichment centrifuges and hands them to Pakistan's nuclear program. The film traces how that theft turns Khan into the architect of Pakistan's bomb and, after the 1998 test, into a national hero with his face on murals and textbooks. It follows the parallel investigation building against him: CIA and MI6 officers piecing together a black-market network selling enrichment technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, using intercepted shipments and defector testimony as evidence. The case closes in on Khan through his own middlemen and front companies rather than through the reactor itself. In 2004, under pressure from Washington and London, President Pervez Musharraf places Khan under house arrest, where the film leaves him, a scientist treated at home as a patriot and abroad as the man who put nuclear weapons within reach of some of the world's most volatile regimes.