Pakistan's instability fuels rogue nuclear fears (News Feature)

By Nadeem Sarwar Apr 7, 2010, 6:06 GMT

Islamabad - Alarm bells rang around the world early last year as the Taliban reached within 100 kilometres of Islamabad, triggering fears about the safety of Pakistan's estimated 100 nuclear weapons.

Moving quickly to defend their capital, thousands of Pakistani troops pushed back the Islamist insurgents from the mountainous region of Buner and neighbouring areas in a difficult battle that routed the Taliban and killed hundreds of them.

That unprecedented show of strength and determination from Pakistani military against Islamist militants seemed to defuse worries that the Taliban could take over Pakistan and seize a complete nuclear weapon. After all, Pakistan has over half a million professional soldiers.

But there is a more insidious nuclear threat emanating from within the country's infrastructure itself - from state institutions like the very same Pakistan Army, where Islamism was deliberately nurtured over the decades as it backed Afghanistan's jihad against Soviet forces in late 1970s.

'We know that within the Army establishment there are rogues who successfully conspired to kill their colleagues,' said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a well-known Pakistani nuclear physicist and a sponsor of Bulletin Atomic Scientists.

'If rogues manage to infiltrate the nuclear system, it could be extremely dangerous,' Hoodbhoy added.

This and other nuclear security worries will be considered Monday and Tuesday at a Washington summit, when Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will be among leaders from 47 countries debating the way forward in keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists and rogue criminals.

Apart from stealing a complete weapon, al-Qaeda could equally benefit from having access to nuclear materials, particularly highly enriched uranium that could be used to make a crude bomb. That would give a huge boost to al-Qaeda and its allies whose sole ambition is to terrorize the world.

Pakistani authorities claim their nuclear arsenal is as safe as that of any other country. Around 10,000 soldiers working under the newly formed Strategic Plans Division guard the nuclear facilities and stockpiles, spread around the country at known and unknown locations.

Since 2001, Pakistan has covertly received a 100-million-dollar annual grant from the United States to put in place safety measures like keeping the weapons in partially disassembled form; using electronic locks and permissive action links (PALs); and enhancing perimeter security.

Either way, weapons or nuclear fossils and related technologies are only as safe as the men who handle them. The case of the country's disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan exposed the loopholes in this regard, at least in the past.

Khan, who founded Pakistan's nuclear program which exploded its first bomb in 1997, confessed in 2004 to running a black market ring that sold technology and designs for centrifuges - building blocks for a nuclear-arsenal - to states like Libya, North Korea and Iran.

Since then, Pakistan claims, it has enforced a stringent mechanism of psychological screening of personnel.

Even if this is true, nuclear materials and weapons remain a threat within Pakistan, faced as it is with the regular prospect of political turmoil and sudden bursts of countrywide protests over ever-rising power-shortages, food inflation, unemployment and unbearable poverty.

Al-Qaeda and its local Islamist collaborators are likely waiting in the wings for such an opportunity, experts worry - however remote that might look from the outside. And there's little doubt among observers that they would hesitate to use it, whether as a weapon or a crude bomb.

'By engineering a nuclear catastrophe in some Western city, Osama bin Laden and his disciples dream of provoking a nuclear response from the US against Muslim holy sites, Cairo, Teheran, and Islamabad,' said Hoodbhoy, a professor at prestigious Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

This, in their minds, would hasten an apocalyptic event. The provoked response would be interpreted as Dajjal, a mythological one-eyed man who is sort of an anti-Christ. The advent of such a monster would bring about the professed descent of the Isa (Jesus Christ) to lead the Islamic army to an ultimate victory against Dajjal and all non-Islamic forces, explained Hoodbhoy.