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01/03/2008
Security of Pakistan's Stockpile
[Next update posted Jan. 15]
In light of recent events in Pakistan, I turn to a September 2007
report put out by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Matthew Bunn
of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University.
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Matthew Bunn
Far less information is publicly available concerning security and
accounting for nuclear material and nuclear weapons in Pakistan.
Pakistan has a relatively modest nuclear stockpile, which is
thought to be distributed among only a small number of
locations. Pakistan has sites where nuclear weapons exist
(reportedly stored in partially disassembled form) and sites with
HEU (highly enriched uranium) or separated plutonium
(particularly the main HEU production facility at Kahuta, but
also including, among others, a research reactor with a small
amount of U.S.-supplied HEU). Pakistan’s nuclear facilities are
believed to be heavily guarded, though they probably are not
equipped with state-of-the-art physical protection and material
control and accounting technologies.
If, as the Pakistani government claims, A.Q. Khan’s exports of
sensitive nuclear technology were completely unauthorized, then
his activities over a 20-year period represent an immense security
failure. In particular, entire centrifuges were removed from the
Khan Research Laboratories – the centerpiece of Pakistan’s
nuclear weapons complex – and shipped off to foreign countries,
in some cases in Pakistani military aircraft.
Pakistani officials insist that they have taken a broad range of
steps to beef up security and ensure that nothing comparable can
ever happen again, but have offered virtually no specifics.
Pakistan has reportedly established a security division headed by
a two-star general under Pakistan’s new Nuclear Command
Authority; the division is reported to have 1,000 personnel
(though this unit is to provide security against a broad range of
threats, especially espionage, not just ensuring against theft of
nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials). But
Pakistan remains a society with a massive and deep-rooted
problem of corruption, and this raises the same worrisome
possibilities for short-circuiting security systems that exist in
Russia. While Pakistan reportedly now has extensive personnel
screening and monitoring procedures in place, it is unlikely that
the nuclear enterprise can be entirely immune from the endemic
problems facing the country.
Clearly, either state collapse or the rise of an extremist Islamic
government in Pakistan – neither of which can by any means be
ruled out – could pose severe dangers of nuclear assets becoming
available to terrorists or hostile states. Even in the current
environment, however, both insider and outsider threats to
Pakistan’s stockpiles appear to be dangerously high.
Insider threats: Recent events highlight the danger that insiders in
Pakistan’s nuclear complex, motivated by money, sympathy to
extreme Islamic causes, or both, might help terrorists get a bomb
or bomb material from Pakistan’s stockpiles. First, the A.Q.
Khan network demonstrates the willingness of at least some
nuclear insiders to sell practically anything to practically anyone
– including not only centrifuges and related technologies but an
apparently Chinese-origin nuclear bomb design. Second, there is
the remarkable case described earlier, in which Osama bin Laden
and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri met at length with two senior
Pakistani nuclear weapons experts with extreme Islamic views
and pressed them both about nuclear weapons and about others
in Pakistan’s program who might be willing to help. Neither of
these Pakistani scientists were ever tried or imprisoned, though it
appears they remain under a loose form of house arrest. Bin
Laden may have been on the right track in asking for others who
could help: by one estimate from a Pakistani physicist, some
10% of Pakistan’s nuclear insiders are inclined to extreme
Islamic views. Third, Pakistani investigations of the
assassination attempts against President Musharraf in late 2003
suggest that they were carried out by military officers in league
with al Qaeda operative Abu Faraj al-Libbi, raising the
disturbing possibility that al Qaeda might also find people
willing to cooperate among the officers charged with guarding
nuclear stockpiles. In short, the danger that insiders might pass
material or weapons to al Qaeda, or facilitate an outsider attack,
appears to be very real.
Outsider threats: Similarly, the threat from a possible terrorist
attack on a Pakistani nuclear weapon depot appears dangerously
high. Armed remnants of al Qaeda and of the Taliban continue
to operate in the nearly lawless tribal zones on Pakistan’s border
with Afghanistan, and appear to be consolidating and
strengthening their operations. Indeed, some combination of al
Qaeda, Taliban, and Pakistani fighters were able to hold off
thousands of Pakistani regular army troops for days at a time in a
pitched battle in the tribal zones in early 2004. If 41 heavily
armed terrorists can strike without warning in the middle of
Moscow, how many might appear at a Pakistani nuclear weapon
storage site? Would the guards at the site be sufficient to hold
them off – and would the guards choose to fight or to cooperate?
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Source: The Nuclear Threat Initiative/ Securing the Bomb 2007;
nti.org
Brian Trumbore
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