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Guarding Pakistan's nuclear
estate
By Kaushik Kapisthalam
Even as media and public attention in
the United States and South Asia has focused on
the issue of nuclear-capable F-16 fighter
jets going to Pakistan, there has been a
series of interesting developments within the
US regarding policy toward Pakistan's nuclear program.
Public nonchalance
Publicly,
Bush administration officials have been remarkably
guarded, and even nonchalant, about Pakistan's
leaky nuclear program, even as one revelation
after another came out regarding nuclear
proliferation from Pakistan to Iran, Libya, North
Korea and other unnamed countries. After exerting
pressure behind the scenes on Pakistani President
General Pervez Musharraf, the US has quietly
accepted his explanation that all
proliferation acts were the responsibility of one
man, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's
atomic bomb, and lent its blessings to Khan being
pardoned and kept under house arrest in Pakistan.
The
official Washington spin is that the administration of President
George W Bush has persuaded Pakistan to end
its nuclear trade once and for all and that it is
better to move forward than dwell on the past.
Despite this public posture, many experts
and former government officials in Washington and
elsewhere are not so sanguine. Virtually every
report on nuclear security from major US and Western
think-tanks, such as the Carnegie Endowment,
the Monterrey Institute and the Cato Institute,
consistently raise the issue of the leaky
nature of Pakistan's nuclear assets. The Congressional
Research Service, the advisory arm of
the US Congress, has issued numerous reports on Pakistan's
nuclear program highlighting the need to
do something. However, until recently, Bush administration
officials had in effect
stonewalled on this issue and avoided talking
about it on or off the record, other than a few
cryptic remarks on occasion.
That has
slowly begun to change.
The curtain
lifts?
In testimony to the Senate on March
17, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, who is the
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, spoke
at length about the fragility of Pakistan. After
the usual platitudes about Musharraf's virtues,
Jacoby noted in his submitted statement, "Our
assessment remains unchanged from last year. If
Musharraf were assassinated or otherwise replaced,
Pakistan's new leader would be less pro-US. We are
concerned that extremist Islamic politicians would
gain greater influence."
Interestingly, it was former presidential candidate
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts who was one of the
first to talk about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal openly.
In a January 2004 debate with other contenders
from his Democratic Party, Kerry said that if
he were elected president, he would get
tough with Pakistan on nuclear safety, noting
that past Pakistani leaders had lied to him and the
US quite blatantly on the nuclear issue. Kerry
added that failing to protect Pakistan's nuclear
weapons from falling into the wrong hands was "one of
the most glaring weaknesses in this
[Bush] administration's entire foreign policy". More curious,
Kerry said the US should work with India to make a
plan for taking out Pakistan's nukes in case of
an emergency. Another Democratic senator,
Barack Obama of Illinois, went a step further and
said the US should launch surgical strikes on
Pakistan in a nuclear leak eventuality.
After the re-election of Bush, it was Kerry
who once again raised the issue. During the Senate
hearing to confirm Bush's appointment of
Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Kerry had
a fiery exchange with Rice, which needs to be
quoted in full for readers to appreciate its
significance.
Kerry: And what about
any initiatives or discussions with President
Musharraf and the Indians with respect to
fail-safe procedures in the event - I mean,
there have been two attempts on President
Musharraf's life. If you were to have a
successful coup in Pakistan, you could have,
conceivably, nuclear weapons in the hand of a
radical Islamic state automatically, overnight.
And to the best of my knowledge, in all of the
inquiries that I've made in the course of the
last years, there is now no failsafe procedure
in place to guarantee against that weaponry
falling into the wrong hands.
Rice: Senator, we have noted
this problem, and we are prepared to try to deal
with it. I would prefer not in open session to
talk about this particular
issue.
Kerry:Okay. Well, I
raise it again. I must say that in my private
briefings as the nominee I found the answers
highly unsatisfactory. And so, I press on you
the notion that, without saying more, that we
need to pay attention to that.
Rice:
We're very aware of the problem,
Senator, and we have had some discussions. But I
really would prefer not to discuss
that. In essence, Kerry noted that
as a presidential candidate, the US "secret
plan" for Pakistan's nukes as conveyed to him was
unsatisfactory. But Rice hinted that while the
plan might not be perfect, the administration was
working on it. There are some signs that this may
already be happening.
Follow the money
In Washington it is said that all plans
stay on paper until Congress appropriates funds
for them. There are a variety of agencies and
bureaus in the US government that deal with
various aspects of the nuclear cycle. One such
agency is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC).
The official budget presented by
the NRC for the upcoming 2006 fiscal year includes
US$800,000 for "initiatives supporting nuclear
safety cooperation with India and Pakistan". One
Washington insider noted that while the NRC's
cooperation with India was in the realm of
providing advice on emergency procedures, fire
safety issues and the safety of ageing plants, as
well as collaborative nuclear research, the
initiatives with Pakistan were likely focused on
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its safety.
"American non-proliferation laws and
international treaty commitments may severely
restrict direct assistance to the safety of
Pakistan's warheads and fissile material, you can
wager good money that the Bush administration is
not going to let global treaties to compromise
American security interests," noted the insider.
The source insisted that it is highly likely
that such cooperation is already under way
behind the covers, but the NRC budgeting makes it
possible on a larger scale with congressional
oversight. One possible option is the provision of
Permissive Action Links (PALs). A PAL is basically
a box with sophisticated cryptography electronics
inside that prevents unauthorized access to a
nuclear weapon by disarming or disabling the
triggering mechanism if the wrong code is entered
or if the box is tampered with in any manner. PAL
locks could make a nuclear warhead unusable in the
wrong hands.
Interestingly, after
the two successive assassination attempts on
Musharraf in December 2003, NBC News reported that the
US had installed PAL locks on Pakistani
nuclear warheads. The report quoted former US ambassador
to Pakistan Robert Oakley confirming the
cooperation behind the scenes. About this time
Bush was asked in a press conference whether Pakistan's
nukes were secure. Bush replied, "Yes, they are
secure," and changed the subject immediately.
However, not everyone agrees that
providing PAL locks to Pakistan is a wise choice.
Leonard Weiss, a prominent non-proliferation
expert and former Senate staffer who helped author
many US non-proliferation laws, feels that it is a
"hoary idea" and compared it to "providing clean
needles to drug addicts, thereby making
proliferators seem like helpless victims of
uncontrollable physiological appetites". He
cautions that PALs may make it easier for a
Pakistani leader to consider using a nuclear
weapon. Despite this, the Washington insider tells
Asia Times Online that PALs and other safety
devices are likely to be in the cards for guarding
Pakistan's nuclear weapons, if they are not in
place already.
Damage control
It is a known fact that foreign
governments use seminars and sponsored studies by private
and quasi-government think-tanks to explain
or elaborate on their country's policies. In
recent months, many serving and retired
Pakistani military officials and diplomats have launched
a seemingly coordinated campaign in the US
and Western strategic-policy circles. The goal of this
campaign seems to be to reassure the power brokers
and academics who often go on to become key
players in the US and Western governments that
Pakistan's nuclear estate is safe and that
Pakistan will take its nuclear non-proliferation
commitments seriously, after the Khan scandal.
One such effort was by retired
Pakistani army Major-General Mahmud Ali Durrani at the
Sandia Labs in New Mexico. It is to be noted that
Sandia Labs is owned by defense contractor
Lockheed Martin and is affiliated with the US
Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security
Administration. Durrani states in his report
titled "Pakistan's Strategic Thinking and the Role
of Nuclear Weapons" that he was able to tour many
sensitive Pakistani nuclear facilities and found
the safety procedures to be credible, though there
was room for improvement in certain security
aspects.
But not everyone who
read the Durrani study was convinced. One
former US security official, who did not want
to be identified, told Asia Times Online that
he had more questions about Pakistan's
nuclear safety procedures after reading the Durrani
report than before. He noted that Durrani
highlighted the claim that Pakistan has a "three-man
rule" for nuclear-weapon safety that it claims is
superior to the "two-man rule" in practice in the US.
What that means in essence is that three people
are supposed to enter codes before a nuclear
weapon can be deployed, but he pointed out that the
three people can sometimes be at a lower level in
the military hierarchy, such as the base commander
and unit commander. He wondered whether that was really a
safe procedure, given that Pakistan has already
acknowledged that al-Qaeda has penetrated lower
levels of the military forces.
The expert also highlighted that the Durrani
report's stated exception to the "three-man rule" is in
the case of a Pakistani air force pilot who can
solely be given the full weapon-arming code in
certain situations. "This is not comforting to anyone [who]
does not know what those 'special situations' are
and what if any fail-safes are there to prevent a
rogue pilot from taking off with a nuclear
weapon," the expert cautioned. It is to be noted
that the Durrani report includes a sobering note
about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear
installations, while dismissing the possibility of
Islamist radicals being on the inside. "There is
an urgent need to improve the technical skills of
personnel charged with the security of
[Pakistan's] nuclear installations and develop an
institutional security culture," the report warns.
Coming from a Pakistani insider, this must be
alarming to some within the US government, the
expert surmised.
Making the
plan
Soon
after September 11, 2001, American
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker
magazine of a supposed secret US-Israeli plan
to take control of Pakistan's nuclear facilities in
the case of an Islamist coup there. In
a book by Washington Post's Bob Woodward, President Bush
is quoted as telling Musharraf that "Seymour Hersh
is a liar" after the Hersh story came out.
Whether the US had a secret plan for Pakistan's nukes
in 2001 or not, there is evidence that the
US government and Congress are beginning to
accept the reality that a US military action plan
is needed to prepare for taking over and managing
a state-failure situation in a country
that possesses mass-destruction weapons.
In
a public hearing in March conducted by the
US Senate's Armed Services Committee on plans for
the US Army's transformation, Senator Joe Lieberman
of Connecticut raised the question of whether the
US military was ready for a "contingency"
situation in Pakistan or Iran. In response, General
Richard A Cody, the US Army's vice chief of staff,
said that such questions were the ones US Army
leaders "grapple with every day", without going
into details. The timeframe for these plans
mentioned a requirement to be ready by as early as
2007.
The US Military Force
Structure Review Act of 1996 directed the secretary
of defense to conduct a Quadrennial Defense
Review (QDR) of the strategy, force structure,
force modernization plans, infrastructure and
other elements of the defense program and policies
with an intent of establishing a revised defense
program. It is therefore interesting to note that
the next QDR, planned to be released this autumn,
reportedly includes plans for scenarios such as a
rogue commander getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal. "The more the scenarios hit a nerve ...
the more I know I am onto something," a Pentagon
official working on the QDR 2005 was quoted as
saying in the Wall Street Journal recently.
The significance of these hearings and the
QDR plans is that the normally secretive US
Defense Department does not make its ideas public
for the purposes of public relations. These plans
are made public to pressure Congress into
releasing massive funds to the US military to be
able to realize the plans. They also signify that
the US considers the eventualities being planned
for in the QDR to be realistic enough to happen in
the next four years. Previous QDRs had plans for a
conventional combat operation against the likes of
Iraq. It may very well turn out that the US State
Department, always sensitive to Pakistan's
concerns, steps in to force the Pentagon to omit
any references to Pakistan in the public QDR
version, but if the Pentagon wants debate on the
matter, a well-timed leak could do the trick.
Islamabad must be watching these
developments with a wary eye, but any
protestations it might choose to express are
unlikely to deter the US from making plans to
slowly yet deliberately cast a net around
Pakistan's nuclear estate.
Kaushik
Kapisthalam is a freelance defense and
strategic affairs analyst based in the United
States. He can be reached at contact@kapisthalam.com.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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