Pakistan's Nukes: A Mystery Inside An Enigma...
If there is one thing about nuclear weapons, you don’t want to guess where they are, how many the bad guys have and where the guy with the black bag with the codes is. Pakistan is one of the undeclared nuclear powers in the world with an estimated 20-60 nuclear weapons. And with the Taliban and its allies creating terrorist havoc in many Pakistani cities, it is understandable that not a few officials are concerned with the continued safety and security of Islamabad’s nukes.
Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, Pakistan’s increased security cooperation with the United States led David Albright, the head of the Institute for Science and International Security to worry that “instability in Pakistan could make its nuclear weapons and stocks of nuclear explosive material dangerously vulnerable to theft”. Just this month, two analysts at the Library of Congress, Paul Kerr and Mary Beth Nikitin wrote: “Pakistan reportedly stores its warheads unassembled with the fissile core separate from non-nuclear explosives, and these are stored separately from the delivery vehicles.”
In recent years, according to most experts with whom I spoke, strengthened export laws, improved personnel security and international security cooperation programs have improved the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons — at least that is what most experts believe, including the Pakistanis. The most worrisome problem is an “inside job”, the theft of nuclear devices or material from within Pakistan’s nuclear complex, including the second Khushab reactor where work may have recently been completed according to commercial imagery from DigitalGlobe taken January 30th, 2009.
Of critical concern, of course, was the ongoing work of an international “Nukes R’ US” commercial ring run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, one of Pakistan’s top nuclear scientists. The network exported two different things according to Henry Sokolski’s Non-Proliferation Policy Educational Center: know-how on uranium enrichment and weapons design, and centrifugation technology. Its clients were North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Three events changed the picture: the 1998 nuclear tests, the coup of 1999, the attacks of 9/11 and the aftermath. There was a progressive reorganization of Pakistan’s nuclear program between 1998 and 2001. The nuclear laboratories, which for a long time had a large operational and financial autonomy, were supposedly reined in. In 2004, the Bush administration helped shut down the Khan network.
However, while experts believe Pakistan no longer is in the business of exporting nuclear weapons technology, adding to their domestic stockpile of nuclear material doesn’t exactly make it easier to either track such stuff or keep it safe. Which brings us back to the beginning. While most experts claim the Pakistan nuclear complex is more secure than it was, they all end with a warning: “We really don’t know.” That’s not what you want to hear about nuclear weapons, anywhere.