Asia Times: How safe are Pakistan's nukes?


	November 1, 2001	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

How safe are Pakistan's nukes?
By Marc Erikson

On September 15, as Pakistan was debating whether it should collaborate with the US in the war on terrorism, former army chief Gen Mirza Aslam Beg told reporters that Pakistan caould not afford to allow the US to use its facilities for attacks on Afghanistan. If the government took such a decision, he said, the nation would reject it and rise against it. He also warned that there was a serious threat to Pakistan's nuclear installations.

President Pervez Musharraf quickly denied that his country's nuclear facilities and arsenal might be at risk or fall into the wrong hands and on October 5, his spokesman, Maj Gen Rashid Qureshi, reiterated that, "I'm quite, quite confident that Pakistan is capable of doing that [ensuring the security of its nuclear weapons]." American officials weren't that sure then and are less sure now after two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists were taken into custody last week for questioning about their pro-Taliban sentiments and activities and alleged ties to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

US officials conducted a detailed review of the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear program prior to military action in Afghanistan which included options for improving surveillance at sensitive sites, sharing devices to disable weapons and evaluating the reliability of essential personnel and security in the event weapons must be transported. Whether specific recommendations were made to Pakistan or collaborative efforts have been implemented is not known at this time. But there exist US special forces units specifically trained and equipped to deal with nuclear weapons and installations security issues and it is reasonable to assume that such units are attached to regionally deployed US military forces.

In late September, the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterrey, California, considered four scenarios regarding Pakistani nuclear safety: (1) the potential impact of political instability in Pakistan, (2) the likelihood of nuclear terrorism, (3) the possibility of rogue military commanders or units gaining access to nuclear warheads or fissile material, and (4) the consequences of any temporary loss of centralized control over nuclear storage sites. After analyzing each of those scenarios in detail, the center's report concludes that public concerns about the security of Pakistan's fissile material installations and safe custody of its strategic weapons might be overstated. But that was before former senior Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission officials Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chawdry Abdul Majid were taken into detention in Lahore on October 23.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan has said the two scientists drew attention for contacting a non-governmental organization working "to help the Afghans with charity work and projects in the welfare area", but were "absolutely not" suspected of passing nuclear secrets to Afghanistan: "There is neither suspicion, nor was the situation related to that." Presidential spokesman Qureshi explained that Mahmood had not been directly involved in nuclear weapons work, but been in charge of a nuclear power reactor.

To anyone knowing a few things about Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, such statements can only add to the suspicion that something serious was afoot. The nuclear reactor Mahmood was in charge of until two and a half years ago and of which he was the chief designer is the heavy-water moderated Khushab reactor in the Punjab west of Lahore near the Sargodha air and ballistic missile base. Designed and built with Chinese assistance, it first went critical in early 1998, is rated at 40-50 MWth (megawatt thermal) and produces any number of things, but no electrical power to speak of.

Mahmood himself explained in an article he co-authored in 1999 with another nuclear scientist, Muhammad Nasim, in opposition to Pakistani (Nawaz Sharif) government moves to signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that the Khushab reactor was playing a critical role in the production of "boosted thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb". The plutonium and tritium produced at Khushab are also essential in the manufacture of compact nuclear warheads readily fitted onto even smaller ballistic missiles. Khushab also houses Pakistan's only heavy-water production plant.

Mahmood then, rather than being just an ordinary nuclear scientist concerned with power production, was in fact one of the key Pakistani weapons scientists until his resignation from the PAEC in 1999 in protest to government intentions to enter into the CTBT. Prior to his role at Khushab, he had been in charge of the enriched-uranium production program at Pakistan's second weapons material reactor at Kahuta.

Opposition to the CTBT became a holy cause for several religious parties and organizations in 1999, among them Jami'yat Ulama-e-Islami and Jama'at-e-Islami. A mouthpiece for this cause ("signing the CTBT would be betrayal of Allah") was the Urdu language newspaper Nawa-e-Waqt; its two key protagonists Mahmood and former ISI chief Gen Hameed Gul (now campaigning against Pakistani collaboration with the US). Ties with this religious opposition to the CTBT (which also sees CTBT signing as "an act of total submission and surrender to the new globalist world order, the IMF and the WTO") introduced the deeply religious Mahmood into Taliban-related circles and eventually - through his relief work with the NGO Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah), an affiliate of the Al-Rasheed Trust - to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network (See Terrorist' NGO has nuclear weapons connection and THE ROVING EYE: Anatomy of a 'terrorist' NGO).

Scientists of the knowledge and background of Mahmood are eminently capable of identifying the type (and location) of fissile materials that could be used in a radiological device which does not by itself constitute a nuclear weapon, but in conjunction with conventional explosives could produce the effect of a major, Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor incident if released over a city. Mahmood and other scientists of his persuasion, even if they didn't conspire to divert nuclear materials from Pakistani installations, would also have ample knowledge through their covert efforts over decades to secure materials and equipment for Pakistan's then-secret weapons program, of where and how to source weapons-grade fissile products and to evaluate their potential effectiveness.

In a 1999 interview with ABC TV, Osama bin Laden said he considered the quest for weapons of mass destruction his "religious duty". Whether his own sense of "religious duty" has persuaded Mahmood to assist in that quest is an open question, but one to be resolved with utmost urgency. The possibility that oppositionist Pakistani military leaders might take possession of nuclear weapons and pass them to terrorists may correctly be viewed by Musharraf government and US officials and experts as a remote possibility. That Mahmood could have played a role in making fissile material available to Al-Qaeda cannot be ruled out. Philiosophically, he is a fatalist. In a book, Cosmology and Human Destiny, published by the Holy Quran Research Foundation in Islamabad, he goes on at length to explain how sunspot activity determines human behavior.

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