Pakistan Nuclear Sites Under Threat

TERRORISTS have attacked three of Pakistan’s military nuclear facilities in the past two years and there is a serious danger that they will gain access to the country’s atomic arsenal, according to a journal published by the US Military Academy at West Point.

The report, written by Shaun Gregory, a security specialist at Bradford University, comes amid mounting fears that the Taliban and al-Qa’ida will breach Pakistan’s military nuclear sites — most of which are in or near insurgent strongholds in the north and west of the country.

The most serious attack was a strike by two suicide bombers on the Wah cantonment ordnance complex, thought to be one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly plants, about 32km northwest of Islamabad, in August last year. The incident, which claimed 70 lives, was widely reported but little mention was made of the nuclear risk.

Other attacks included the suicide bombing of a nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha, in central Punjab, in November 2007 and a suicide attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra, near Wah, on December 10, 2007.

The Pentagon, however, yesterday expressed satisfaction with security at the facilities. Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “comfortable with the security measures the Pakistani government and the Pakistani military have in place to ensure that their nuclear arsenal is safeguarded”, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday.

In the Counter Terrorism Centre Sentinel, Professor Gregory wrote that the attacks illustrated “a clear set of weaknesses and vulnerabilities” in Pakistan’s nuclear security regime.

The strikes occurred as Pakistan sought to ramp up its nuclear capability — and as US special forces formulated contingency plans in the event of the country falling to insurgents.

A US Defence Intelligence Agency document revealed in 2004 that Pakistan had a nuclear arsenal of 35 weapons, a figure it planned to more than double by 2020.

In June, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an al-Qa’ida commander in Afghanistan, suggested that the group would show no hesitation in using nuclear weapons. “God willing … the mujaheddin would take them and use them against the Americans,” he told al-Jazeera television.

Pakistan’s security regime is modelled on the American system and includes the separation of warheads from detonators, which are stored in underground bunkers staffed by highly vetted personnel. Many details of the country’s nuclear program — including the location of many warheads and their exact number — remain unknown.

Because the threat of an invasion by India was seen as a greater danger than Islamic militancy spreading from Afghanistan, the military “chose to locate much of its nuclear weapons infrastructure to the north and west of the country”.

That meant that today, “most of Pakistan’s nuclear sites are close to or even within areas dominated by Pakistani Taliban militants and home to al-Qa’ida”.

There were also concerns that vetting programs may not identify Islamist sympathisers, whose influence extends far up Pakistan’s military hierarchy.

According to Professor Gregory, Islamist militants with ties to the country’s intelligence community have demonstrated that “they have good intelligence about the movement of security personnel”, including military, intelligence and police forces, all of whom have been routinely targeted.

“There is already the well-known case of two senior Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission scientists, Sultan Bashirrudin Mahmood and Chaudhry Abdul Majeed, who travelled to Afghanistan in 2000 and again shortly before 9/11 for meetings with Osama bin Laden himself, the content of which has never been disclosed.”

A US intelligence official told the CQPolitics blog that none of the attacks posed a real threat to the security of the nuclear installations, much Bless the weapons inside. “These are large facilities. It’s not clear that the attackers knew what these bases might have contained,” he said on condition of anonymity.

“In addition, the mode of attack was curious. If they were after something specific, or were truly seeking entry, you’d think they might use a different tactic, one that’s been employed elsewhere — such as a bomb followed by a small-arms assault.” By Rhys Blakely, Mumbai