By Steve Hynd
Sy Hersh has a must-read piece on Pakistan's nukes, examining how secure they are, in the current issue of the New Yorker. He get's a lot right, and has a lot of illuminating passages about the US/Pakistan relationship, but in the whole piece - eight pages in the web version - he only has one actual scenario for a loose-nuke situation.
the safeguards meant to keep a confrontation with India from escalating too quickly could make the arsenal more vulnerable to terrorists. Nuclear-security experts have war-gamed the process and concluded that the triggers and other elements are most exposed when they are being moved and reassembled�at those moments there would be fewer barriers between an outside group and the bomb. A consultant to the intelligence community said that in one war-gamed scenario disaffected members of the Pakistani military could instigate a terrorist attack inside India, and that the ensuing crisis would give them �a chance to pick up bombs and triggers�in the name of protecting the assets from extremists.�
At least Hersh managed to come up with a scenario, however unlikely. In that he's doing better than Arnaud DeBorchgrave did recently when he fearmongered over the prospect of an Al Qaeda assault grabbing a Pakistani nuke. My comment on DeBorchgrave's post is one I'm perfectly happy with.
But someone - it might as well be me - should point out that there's been several such potential situations over just the last decade, including the Mumbai attacks of 2006 and again of 2008 as well as the 2001 terror attack on the Indian parliament. Not once did any dissafected Pakistani fundamentalists within their military heist a nuke, intact and ready to go, with which to blackmail anyone.
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies says that Pakistan's nuclear weapons safeguards are "robust" and include both multi-layered perimeter security and deep personnel assessment as well as separation for the components of a working weapon (physics package, trigger assembly and delivery system). There's no reason to suspect otherwise. Pakistan keeps its nukes in pieces, triggers separate from fissionable core - and then an unauthorised user would still need both the trigger codes which are one of Pakistan's most closely guarded high-level military secrets and some form of delivery system to somewhere useful. Pakistan doesn't leave it's nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft just lying around either.
The number and level of security precautions to be circumvented make any scenario such as Hersh describes unlikely to the point of being in the realm of Tom Clancy novels, not the real world. We'd be as well worrying about Alien Space Bats giving terrorists a bomb.
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