Urgent Worries About Pakistani Nuclear Material

Friday, November 2, 2001

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut: Policymakers in Washington are casting a wary eye toward their troubled, nuclear-armed ally Pakistan.

In an article in The New Yorker, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reports that elite U.S. and Israeli units are being trained to "take out Pakistan's nuclear weapons to make sure that the warheads do not fall into the hands of renegades" if Pervez Musharraf is toppled by Islamist opponents.

Washington insiders believe that such a coup is now more likely than ever. But in their view an even bigger threat is the risk that fissile material in Pakistan could be stolen and used for crude terror devices. Pakistani leaders have said repeatedly that their country's nuclear assets are safe. But a former senior U.S. official says helping Pakistan to strengthen its nuclear security at potentially vulnerable sites is "perhaps our most urgent threat reduction priority in South Asia."

Pakistan's military is evidently serious about protecting its nuclear arsenal of some 25 weapons - enough for strategic parity with a much bigger India. Robert Einhorn, a nonproliferation expert in the U.S. government for nearly 30 years who recently joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Pakistan's military has done a respectable job in securing its nuclear assets.

"But," he adds, "I am not entirely confident about fissile material" - the highly enriched uranium and plutonium used to make the bomb core.

Doubts about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear program center on the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratory in Kahuta. The lab is named after Abdul Qadir Khan, the self-proclaimed father of the Pakistani bomb. U.S. intelligence has noted visits to the lab in May 1999 by senior Saudi and United Arab Emirates officials, and deals between the lab and North Korea.

Saudi officials deny any interest in acquiring nuclear weapons from Pakistan, but the United States worries about the possible implications of the May 1999 visit.

The Khan Research Laboratory is known to have imported North Korean missile technology for Pakistan's Ghauri missile program. The worry is that in exchange for such technology North Korea may have been provided with vital know-how or fissile material for its own suspected nuclear armory.

Of greater concern is the possibility of fissile material being pilfered by sympathizers of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan among the lab's scientists. Still, this year American pressure prompted General Musharraf to remove Mr. Khan from the institution bearing his name. The recent detention of two senior scientists from the lab is the result of growing U.S. concern about these individuals' fundamentalist connections. One of them, Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood, is a former director of the Kahuta Enrichment Project who took early retirement to establish an organization promoting science and technology in Islamic countries.

"My sense," says George Perkovich, author of "India's Nuclear Bomb," "is that the problem of an insider or insiders making off with fissile material is probably greater than somebody making off with an actual weapon."

Designing a simple, gun-type device using highly-enriched uranium is not difficult, once the enriched uranium is at hand. With relatively little effort, a small amount (as little as three kilograms) of highly enriched uranium could be turned into a weapon of nearly half the power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. "The most likely danger is that with any kind of radioactive material you just add dynamite or a high explosive and blow it up and poison people," Mr. Perkovich says. The delivery weapon for such a device could be as simple as a truck driven across the border into India.

How to prevent such theft, and the killing of tens of thousands of people? The dire prospect calls for upgrading existing regulations.

The United States should offer assistance to ensure the physical protection of nuclear assets such as vaults, sensors, alarms, tamper-proof seals and labels, and other means of protecting sensitive assets. Pakistan and India, too, can benefit from American procedures and methods to ensure personnel reliability, prevention of unauthorized activities and secure transport of sensitive items.

The writer is director of publications at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. With Strobe Talbott, he is co-editor of the forthcoming book "The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11." He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.