Islamic Nuke

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Tick, Tick, Tick

The Atlantic Monthly | October 2004

Pakistan is a nuclear time bomb—perhaps the greatest threat to
American security today. Here's how to defuse it
by Graham Allison

.....

Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 have I been as
frightened by a single news story as I was by the revelation late
last year that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear-
weapons program, had been selling nuclear technology and services on
the black market. The story began to break last summer, after U.S.
and British intelligence operatives intercepted a shipment of parts
for centrifuges (which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs
as well as fuel) on its way from Dubai to Libya. The centrifuges
turned out to have been designed by Khan, and before long
investigators had uncovered what the head of the International Atomic
Energy Agency has called a "Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation"—
a decades-old illicit market in nuclear materials, designs,
technologies, and consulting services, all run out of Pakistan.

The Pakistani government's response to the scandal was not
reassuring. Khan made a four-minute televised speech on February 4
asserting that "there was never any kind of authorization for these
activities by the government." He took full responsibility for his
actions and asked for a pardon, which was immediately granted by
President Pervez Musharraf, who essentially buried the affair. Today
Pakistan's official position remains that no member of Mu-sharraf's
government had any concrete knowledge of the illicit transfer—an
assertion that U.S. intelligence officials in Pakistan and elsewhere
dismiss as absurd. Meanwhile, Pakistani investigators have reportedly
questioned a grand total of eleven people from among the country's
6,000 nuclear scientists and 45,000 nuclear workers, and have refused
to allow either the United States or the IAEA access to Khan for
questioning.

Pakistan's nuclear complex poses two main threats. The first—
highlighted by Khan's black-market network—is that nuclear weapons,
know-how, or materials will find their way into the hands of
terrorists. For instance, we have learned that in August of 2001,
even as the final planning for 9/11 was under way, Osama bin Laden
received two former officials of Pakistan's atomic-energy program—
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid—at a secret compound near
Kabul. Over the course of three days of intense conversation bin
Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, grilled Mahmood
and Majid about how to make weapons of mass destruction. After
Mahmood and Majid were arrested, on October 23, 2001, Mahmood told
Pakistani interrogation teams, working in concert with the CIA, that
Osama bin Laden had expressed a keen interest in nuclear weapons and
had sought the scientists' help in recruiting other Pakistani nuclear
experts who could provide expertise in the mechanics of bomb-making.
CIA Director George Tenet found the report of Mahmood and Majid's
meeting with bin Laden so disturbing that he flew directly to
Islamabad to confront President Musharraf.

This was not the first time that Pakistani agents had rendered
nuclear assistance to dangerous actors: in 1997 Pakistani nuclear
scientists made secret trips to North Korea, providing technical
support for that country's nuclear-weapons program in exchange for
Pyongyang's help in developing long-range missiles. And not long ago,
according to American intelligence, another Pakistani nuclear
scientist negotiated with Libyan agents over the price of nuclear-
bomb designs. Pakistan's nuclear program has long been a leaky
vessel; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has deemed the
country "the world's No. 1 nuclear proliferator."

learly, there is a significant danger that the black market will put
Pakistani nukes (or nuclear material and technical knowledge) in
terrorist hands—if it hasn't already. But there is a second, equally
significant danger: that a coup might topple Musharraf and leave all
or some of Pakistan's nuclear weapons under the control of al-Qaeda,
the Taliban, or some other militant Islamic group (or, indeed, under
the control of more than one). Part of the problem is that in order
to keep its focal enemy, India, from destroying its arsenal in a pre-
emptive strike, Pakistan has hidden its nuclear weapons throughout
the country; some of them may be in regions that are effectively
under fundamentalist Muslim control. Moreover, Pakistan's official
alliance with the United States in the war on terror has only
increased the danger posed by al-Qaeda sympathizers within its
nuclear establishment. Although Musharraf has pledged his "unstinting
cooperation in the fight against terrorism," not all the thousands of
officers in Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies have signed
on. After all, until 9/11 some of them were working closely with
members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Nor, for that matter, does
Pakistan's general population support Musharraf's alliance with the
United States. A poll this past March asked Pakistani citizens which
leaders in international affairs they viewed favorably. Only seven
percent said George W. Bush—and 65 percent said Osama bin Laden.

The uneasy contradiction between Musharraf's pro-American foreign
policy and the widespread anti-Americanism within Pakistan has forced
Pakistani policymakers to walk a razor's edge. Musharraf faces the
clear and present threat of assassination: twice in the past year he
has narrowly escaped attempts on his life. When I spoke to him not
long after the second of those attempts, he said he thought he had
used up many of his nine lives.

It may not take a bullet to wrest control over Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal from Musharraf. In local elections held in October of 2002 a
coalition of fundamentalist parties won command of the government in
the North West Frontier Province. The group, known as Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), offered a simple platform: pro-Taliban, anti-
American, and against all Pakistani involvement in the war on terror.
MMA is now the third largest party in Pakistan's parliament; from its
new position of strength it has spoken vigorously about the need to
regain the honor Pakistan has lost through its subservience to the
United States and its struggle with India, with which it has been
engaged in a harrowing game of nuclear brinkmanship. To win a vote of
confidence that would allow him to serve out his presidential term
(which ends in 2007), Musharraf was recently compelled to make a deal
with the Islamist parties to step down as head of the military by the
end of this year. If all that weren't disconcerting enough, the
region the MMA controls happens to be the very one where Osama bin
Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are currently believed to be hiding.

Under these conditions the emergence of a nuclear-equipped splinter
group from within the Pakistani establishment looks disturbingly
plausible. Provoked by anger that Musharraf has made Pakistan a
puppet of the United States, such a group would have not only a
motive and the domestic political support for a nuclear terrorist act
against America but also the organizational competence, the
expertise, and the raw material to carry it out.

hat to do about this combustible mixture of extreme political
instability and nuclear capability is perhaps the most difficult
challenge facing U.S. policymakers today. (Consider, for instance,
how much simpler it is to deal with North Korea's nuclear program,
which is controlled by a monolithic regime and not by layers of
governmental subagencies that may have conflicting loyalties and
ideologies.) Up to now the Bush Administration's response to this
challenge has consisted of essentially three ingredients: trying to
keep the Pakistani government on America's side in the war on terror
(and the Administration deserves credit for carefully nurturing its
relationship with Musharraf); examining the possibility of having
American forces seize or neutralize Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in an
emergency; and blindly hoping that the worst does not occur. But
hope, as the well-known saying at the Pentagon goes, is not a plan.

Recent history offers something of a model for how to proceed. In
August of 1991 a group of conservatives in the Soviet security
establishment attempted to overthrow President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Tanks commanded by the coup plotters ringed the Kremlin; Gorbachev,
on vacation in the southern part of the country, was placed under
house arrest. In the weeks that followed, President George H.W. Bush
announced that the United States would unilaterally remove all
battlefield nuclear weapons and challenged the Soviet Union to do
likewise. The coup was aborted, and Gorbachev responded to Bush's
initiative by launching a process that eventually withdrew thousands
of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from the outer reaches of the
empire, helping to ensure that the looming dissolution of the Soviet
Union would not create more than a dozen new nuclear states. When
President Bill Clinton took office, he focused on eliminating the
strategic nuclear arsenals that remained in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and
Belarus. By the end of 1996 every one of the nuclear weapons in those
states had been deactivated and returned to Russia. Pakistan's
situation today is not identical to Russia's in the early 1990s,
though the problem of diffused control of nuclear weapons is
analogous. But the same lesson applies: it's that alertness in this
arena can yield positive results.

Most of what has to be done to secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons and
materials will have to be done by the Pakistanis themselves—with
American encouragement. One of the more enduring legacies of the
Musharraf administration may be the Nuclear Command Authority,
completed in December of 2003. Designed to impose greater centralized
control over the Khan Research Laboratories and the Pakistani Atomic
Energy Commission, the NCA is headed by Musharraf and vice-chaired by
Pakistan's Prime Minister, and is divided into two units—for nuclear
weapons and for nuclear scientific personnel—each led by a three-star
general.

One option would be for the United States to supply Pakistan with a
technology called "permissive action links," which would require
Musharraf himself to enter an electronic code before any of the
country's nuclear weapons could be deployed. Judging from my
conversations with Musharraf last winter, however, the delicacy and
sensitivity—and, given the constraints of the nuclear non-
proliferation treaty, the legal difficulty—of such a project can
hardly be exaggerated. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is designed first
and foremost to deter India. As noted, Pakistan fears that India
might locate its nuclear arsenal and destroy its nuclear weapons in a
first strike. (Every nuclear power has had similar fears in the early
stages of its program.) No reasonable country would divulge
information that would leave its arsenal vulnerable to a pre-emptive
strike. And even though Pakistan is now an ally of the United States
in the war against al-Qaeda, can Musharraf be confident that if the
United States provides him with permissive action links, it will not
retain some undisclosed ability to disable Pakistan's weapons? An
offer of U.S. technical and financial assistance—along with
diplomatic assistance in the dispute over Kashmir—might incline
Musharraf to let us help him secure electronic control over his
arsenal. But we must remember that pushing for too much too soon
could destabilize Musharraf—or even lead to his overthrow by someone
who is more sympathetic to bin Laden than to the United States.

Our unlikely savior here might be, of all countries, China. For many
years China has acted as an ally, mentor, and supplier of arms to
Pakistan, and the two countries are united by their antagonism toward
India. If China were to embrace comprehensive security and control of
its own arsenal, and be certified by the United States as having done
so, then perhaps Musharraf would permit China and the United States
each to review the security procedures for half of Pakistan's nuclear
weapons and materials, so that neither country could have full
knowledge of all of Pakistan's arsenal.

he actions required to neutralize the threat of Pakistani
proliferation are ambitious; a measure of realism is necessary. But
realism need not mean defeatism. In the early 1960s John F. Kennedy
predicted that "by 1970 there may be ten nuclear powers instead of
four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty." If those nations with the
technical capacity to build nuclear weapons had gone ahead and done
so, Kennedy's prediction would have come true. But his warning helped
awaken the world to the dangers of unconstrained proliferation. The
United States and other nations negotiated international constraints,
provided security guarantees, offered inducements, and threatened
punishment. Today 187 nations—including scores that have the
technical capacity to build nuclear arsenals—have renounced nuclear
weapons and committed themselves to the nuclear nonproliferation
treaty; only eight states (not the "fifteen or twenty" of Kennedy's
prediction) have nuclear weapons. The challenge now is to achieve
similar success in blocking the seemingly inexorable path to a
nuclear 9/11.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410/allison