Nov 11 - Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons - NY Times

[johnkarls]

The New York Times

Trust Us: So What About The Nukes
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: November 11, 2007
WASHINGTON

TWO years ago, when Gen. Pervez Musharraf still seemed secure in his rule over Pakistan, he was asked a question that is now urgently coursing through Washington: Are his country’s nuclear weapons safe from Islamic radicals?

Pakistan’s nuclear protections “are already the best in the world,” he said then, in an interview. He launched into a detailed description of the controls he had put in place. Chief among them was that only a small group of top officials — General Musharraf and men he trusts — hold the keys to moving or using a weapon.

He also talked about new physical controls over Pakistan’s many nuclear facilities, including the laboratories that were once the playground of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the national hero who established Pakistan as the hub of the biggest proliferation network in nuclear history. The leaking of much of the technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, starting in the late 1980s, often coincided with times of political turmoil when Pakistan’s leadership was weak and its attention elsewhere.

That precedent was driving much of the fear in Washington last week as General Musharraf clung to power by declaring a state of emergency and trying to quell political demonstrations and near-rioting in the streets — the fear that leaks would resume and that Pakistan might even lose control over a nuclear arsenal of uncertain size — estimated at from 55 to 115 weapons.

General Musharraf dismissed such possibilities in 2005. “There is no doubt in my mind that they can ever fall in the hands of extremists,” he said, relaxed and confident, as he was filmed for a New York Times documentary, “Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” But over the years he has said many things that turned out to be too optimistic, including a declaration at the White House that Osama bin Laden was probably dead.

So Bush administration officials have quietly begun debating — along with the new leaders of France and Britain — just how bad things could get in a country whose nuclear controls are just seven years old and have never been tested by chaos, street turmoil or a violent government overthrow.

“We just don’t have any idea how this is going to unfold,” one senior administration official conceded late Friday. With that uncertainty, the nuclear problem took on at least two dimensions.

If General Musharraf is overthrown, no one is quite sure what will happen to the team he has entrusted to safeguard the arsenal. There is some hope that the military as an institution could reliably keep things under control no matter who is in charge, but that is just a hope.

“It’s a very professional military,” said a senior American official who is trying to manage the crisis and insisted on anonymity because the White House has said this problem will not be discussed in public. “But the truth is, we don’t know how many of the safeguards are institutionalized, and how many are dependent on Musharraf’s guys.”

Even if it never comes to a loss of control over weapons or their components, the crisis carries another level of danger. Administration officials say privately that if the chaos in the streets worsens, or Al Qaeda exploits the moment, Pakistan’s government could become distracted from monitoring scientists, engineers and others who, out of religious zeal or plain old greed, might see a moment to sell their knowledge and technology.

Dr. Khan did just that. Some of his most profitable moments, including sales of centrifuge technology to Iran that the International Atomic Energy Agency is still investigating, took place at moments of great government weakness in Pakistan.

Mr. Khan’s global nuclear manufacturing and sales network was shut down only three years ago, after international pressure on Pakistan intensified, and after General Musharraf consolidated enough political leverage to take down Dr. Khan — a man who is still a hero to Pakistani nationalists.

The administration says it hopes to put Pakistan on a path to democracy. But Washington’s actions show it does not want to go so fast that nuclear control becomes a casualty. So President Bush was on the phone to General Musharraf on Wednesday to press for the patina of a return to democracy: He said General Musharraf must shed his title as army chief, hold parliamentary elections early next year, and find a way to work with Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader with whom the United States has urged him to share power. The general promised to hold elections by February, but the crisis was far from over.

“The nightmare scenario, of course, is what happens if an extremist Islamic government emerges — with an instant nuclear arsenal,” said Robert Joseph, a counterproliferation expert who left the administration this year. John R. Bolton, the former United Nations representative who has accused Mr. Bush of going soft on proliferation, said more bluntly that General Musharraf’s survival was critical. “While Pervez Musharraf might not be a Jeffersonian democrat,” Mr. Bolton said, “he is the best bet to secure the nuclear arsenal.”

Americans might feel better about the arsenal if they knew how big it was — or even where the weapons were stored. Pakistan has done its best to keep that information secret.

There are also more than a dozen nuclear facilities, from fuel fabrication plants to laboratories that enrich uranium and produce next-generation weapons designs, that Al Qaeda and other terror groups have eyed for years. How safe are they?

Last year, the Pakistanis sent Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, whom General Musharraf had put in charge of nuclear security, to Washington. In briefings for officials and reporters, he maintained that the era of A. Q. Khan was “closed.”

On paper, the relatively new system he described looks impressive: weapons are kept separate from delivery systems, nuclear cores from their detonators. The people who run the system are screened, presumably for both mental stability and latent sympathies with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Other Pakistani officials have described ways they protect nuclear material as it is trucked around the country or tinkered with in the laboratory still named for Dr. Khan.

But some former and current American officials are skeptical: They remember General Musharraf’s assurances five years ago that no nuclear technology was leaking. New histories of the Khan network, notably “The Nuclear Jihadist,” by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, detail how well Dr. Khan in fact worked the Pakistani system, cutting some military officials into the deals, and using the air force to deliver nuclear goods.

In retrospect, it is clear that Dr. Khan’s proliferation business thrived when Pakistan’s leadership was at its weakest and most corrupt.

His relationship with Iran flourished in the chaos that followed the death of President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in a suspicious plane crash in 1988; the first deliveries of centrifuges to Iran took place in 1989, and there are competing accounts about whether it was done behind the back of Ms. Bhutto, who says she opposed any such nuclear trade. But she helped cut the first missile deals with North Korea. And the Khan network started doing business with Libya in 1997, just as Islamabad was consumed with political jockeying that involved the generals and Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister whom Mr. Musharraf overthrew two years later.

“The diffusion of domestic political power among the troika of the president, prime minister and the army chief,” said a major study of the Khan network published earlier this year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, “obscured the command and control authority over the covert nuclear weapons program.”

It was General Musharraf who finally confronted Dr. Khan — after he had consolidated power, and, conveniently for the Pakistani military, after Pakistan itself had become a nuclear power.

Some experts say they think the institutions Mr. Musharraf built starting around 2000 will prove durable because they rely on Pakistan’s strongest institution, the military. “The military realized that they didn’t have the sophisticated command and control they needed,” said Neil Joeck, a Pakistan expert at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He says the military’s protections are strong and the labs “very professional.”

Still, figuring out what to do if Pakistan’s weapons or nuclear material fall into the wrong hands has been the subject of many Pentagon simulations. Earlier this year, a participant concluded a description of them this way:

“Once you’ve figured out the weapon is gone, it’s probably too late.”