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Expose of Pakistan's nuclear rogue status
By David E Sanger
To get to the headquarters of the Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with keeping the country's growing arsenal of nuclear weapons away from insurgents trying to overrun the country, you must drive down a rutted, debris-strewn road at the edge of the Islamabad airport, dodging stray dogs and piles of uncollected garbage...
Just past a small traffic circle, a tan stone gateway is manned by a lone, bored-looking guard loosely holding a rusting rifle.
The gateway marks the entry to Chaklala Garrison, an old British cantonment from the days when officers of the Raj escaped the heat of Delhi for the cooler hills on the approaches to Afghanistan. Pass under the archway, and the poverty and clamour of modern Pakistan disappear.
Man with nuclear keys
Chaklala is a comfortable enclave for the countrys military and intelligence services. Inside the gates, officers in the army and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), live in trim houses with well-tended lawns. Business is conducted in long, low office buildings, with a bevy of well-pressed adjutants buzzing around. Deep inside the garrison lies the small compound for Strategic Plans, where Khalid Kidwai keeps the countrys nuclear keys. Now 58, Kidwai is a compact man who hides his arch sense of humour beneath a veil of caution, as if he were previewing each sentence to decide if it revealed too much.
In the chaos of Pakistan, where the military, the intelligence services and an unstable collection of civilian leaders uneasily share power, he oversees a security structure intended to protect Pakistans nuclear arsenal from outsiders Islamic militants, Qaeda scientists, Indian saboteurs and those American commando teams that Pakistanis imagine, with good reason, are waiting just over the horizon in Afghanistan, ready to seize their nuclear treasure if a national meltdown seems imminent.
In the second nuclear age, what happens or fails to happen in Kidwais modest compound may prove far more likely to save or lose an American city than the billions of dollars the United States spends each year maintaining a nuclear arsenal that will almost certainly never be used, or the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan to close down sanctuaries for terrorists.
Just last month in Washington, members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistans nuclear technology going awry.
When you map WMD and terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan, Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert on the commission, told me. The nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because its not hard to envision a situation in which the states authority falls apart and youre not sure whos in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs and the materials.
Epicentre of terror
For Kidwai, there is something both tiresome and deeply suspicious about the constant stream of warnings out of Washington that Pakistan is the epicentre of a post-cold-war Armageddon. This is all overblown rhetoric, Kidwai told me on a rainy Saturday morning. Please grant to Pakistan that if we can make nuclear weapons and the delivery systems," Kidwai said, gesturing to the models and a photo of Pakistan's first nuclear test, a decade ago, we can also make them safe. Our security systems are foolproof.
Foolproof is most likely not the word Barack Obama would use to describe the status of Pakistans nuclear safety following the briefings he has been receiving since Nov 6, which is when J Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, showed up in Chicago to give the President*elect his first full presidential daily brief.
The Pakistani nuclear programme owes its very existence to the government-endorsed and government-financed subterfuges of A Q Khan, who then turned the country into the biggest source of nuclear-weapons proliferation in atomic history. And while Khan may be the most famous nuclear renegade in Pakistan, he is not the only one. Soon after Kidwai took office, he also faced the case of the eccentric nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who helped build gas centrifuges for the Pakistani nuclear programme, using blueprints Khan had stolen from the Netherlands.
Mahmood then moved on to the countrys next huge project: designing the reactor at Khushab that was to produce the fuel Pakistan needed to move to the next level a plutonium bomb.
Mahmood-the nightmare
An autodidact intellectual with grand aspirations, Mahmood was fascinated by the links between science and the Koran. He wrote a peculiar treatise arguing that when morals degrade, disaster cannot be far behind. Over time, his colleagues began to wonder if Mahmood was mentally sound. This guy was our ultimate nightmare, an American intelligence official told me in late 2001. He had access to the entire Pakistani programme. He knew what he was doing. And he was completely out of his mind.
While Khan appeared to be in the nuclear-proliferation business chiefly for the money, Mahmood made it clear to friends that his interest was religious: Pakistans bomb, he told associates, was the property of a whole Ummah, referring to the worldwide Muslim community. He wanted to share it with those who might speed the end of days and lead the way for Islam to rise as the dominant religious force in the world.
In August 2001, as the Sept 11 plotters were making their last preparations in the United States, Mahmood and one of his colleagues met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, over the course of several days in Afghanistan.
There is little doubt that Mahmood talked to the two Qaeda leaders about nuclear weapons, or that Al Qaeda desperately wanted the bomb. George Tenet, the CIA chief, wrote later that intelligence reports of the meeting were frustratingly vague.
Today, Mahmood, like Khan, is back home, under tight surveillance that seems intended primarily to keep him a safe distance from reporters.
Kidwai insists that the Mahmood incident was overblown, raised time and again by Americans to create the image that Pakistan is a nuclear sieve. Nothing went anywhere, he assured me. Its over. But whats terrifying about Mahmoods story is not what happened around the campfire, but rather that the meetings happened at all. They took place three years after Kidwai and his team started their work and demonstrated the huge vulnerabilities in the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure at the time.
Kidwai estimated that there are roughly 70,000 people who work in the nuclear complex in Pakistan, including 7,000 to 8,000 scientists and the 2,000 or so with critical knowledge. If even 1 per cent of those employees are willing to spread Pakistans nuclear knowledge to outsiders with a cause, Kidwai and the United States have a problem.
The Pakistanis insist that these American fears are exaggerated and that it would be next to impossible for someone to steal all the elements of a weapon. As Kidwai paced me through PowerPoints and diagrams, his message was that Pakistan's nuclear-weapons-safety programme is up to international standards.
But back in Washington, military and nuclear experts told me that the bottom line is that if a real-life crisis broke out, it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan's weapons were or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists. Its worse than that, the participant in the simulations told me.
We cant even certify exactly how many weapons the Pakistanis have which makes it difficult to sound convincing that theres nothing to worry about.
(The writer is chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times. This article is excerpted from his forthcoming book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and The Challenges to American Power.)
By David E Sanger
To get to the headquarters of the Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with keeping the country's growing arsenal of nuclear weapons away from insurgents trying to overrun the country, you must drive down a rutted, debris-strewn road at the edge of the Islamabad airport, dodging stray dogs and piles of uncollected garbage...
Just past a small traffic circle, a tan stone gateway is manned by a lone, bored-looking guard loosely holding a rusting rifle.
The gateway marks the entry to Chaklala Garrison, an old British cantonment from the days when officers of the Raj escaped the heat of Delhi for the cooler hills on the approaches to Afghanistan. Pass under the archway, and the poverty and clamour of modern Pakistan disappear.
Man with nuclear keys
Chaklala is a comfortable enclave for the countrys military and intelligence services. Inside the gates, officers in the army and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), live in trim houses with well-tended lawns. Business is conducted in long, low office buildings, with a bevy of well-pressed adjutants buzzing around. Deep inside the garrison lies the small compound for Strategic Plans, where Khalid Kidwai keeps the countrys nuclear keys. Now 58, Kidwai is a compact man who hides his arch sense of humour beneath a veil of caution, as if he were previewing each sentence to decide if it revealed too much.
In the chaos of Pakistan, where the military, the intelligence services and an unstable collection of civilian leaders uneasily share power, he oversees a security structure intended to protect Pakistans nuclear arsenal from outsiders Islamic militants, Qaeda scientists, Indian saboteurs and those American commando teams that Pakistanis imagine, with good reason, are waiting just over the horizon in Afghanistan, ready to seize their nuclear treasure if a national meltdown seems imminent.
In the second nuclear age, what happens or fails to happen in Kidwais modest compound may prove far more likely to save or lose an American city than the billions of dollars the United States spends each year maintaining a nuclear arsenal that will almost certainly never be used, or the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan to close down sanctuaries for terrorists.
Just last month in Washington, members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistans nuclear technology going awry.
When you map WMD and terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan, Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert on the commission, told me. The nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because its not hard to envision a situation in which the states authority falls apart and youre not sure whos in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs and the materials.
Epicentre of terror
For Kidwai, there is something both tiresome and deeply suspicious about the constant stream of warnings out of Washington that Pakistan is the epicentre of a post-cold-war Armageddon. This is all overblown rhetoric, Kidwai told me on a rainy Saturday morning. Please grant to Pakistan that if we can make nuclear weapons and the delivery systems," Kidwai said, gesturing to the models and a photo of Pakistan's first nuclear test, a decade ago, we can also make them safe. Our security systems are foolproof.
Foolproof is most likely not the word Barack Obama would use to describe the status of Pakistans nuclear safety following the briefings he has been receiving since Nov 6, which is when J Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, showed up in Chicago to give the President*elect his first full presidential daily brief.
The Pakistani nuclear programme owes its very existence to the government-endorsed and government-financed subterfuges of A Q Khan, who then turned the country into the biggest source of nuclear-weapons proliferation in atomic history. And while Khan may be the most famous nuclear renegade in Pakistan, he is not the only one. Soon after Kidwai took office, he also faced the case of the eccentric nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who helped build gas centrifuges for the Pakistani nuclear programme, using blueprints Khan had stolen from the Netherlands.
Mahmood then moved on to the countrys next huge project: designing the reactor at Khushab that was to produce the fuel Pakistan needed to move to the next level a plutonium bomb.
Mahmood-the nightmare
An autodidact intellectual with grand aspirations, Mahmood was fascinated by the links between science and the Koran. He wrote a peculiar treatise arguing that when morals degrade, disaster cannot be far behind. Over time, his colleagues began to wonder if Mahmood was mentally sound. This guy was our ultimate nightmare, an American intelligence official told me in late 2001. He had access to the entire Pakistani programme. He knew what he was doing. And he was completely out of his mind.
While Khan appeared to be in the nuclear-proliferation business chiefly for the money, Mahmood made it clear to friends that his interest was religious: Pakistans bomb, he told associates, was the property of a whole Ummah, referring to the worldwide Muslim community. He wanted to share it with those who might speed the end of days and lead the way for Islam to rise as the dominant religious force in the world.
In August 2001, as the Sept 11 plotters were making their last preparations in the United States, Mahmood and one of his colleagues met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, over the course of several days in Afghanistan.
There is little doubt that Mahmood talked to the two Qaeda leaders about nuclear weapons, or that Al Qaeda desperately wanted the bomb. George Tenet, the CIA chief, wrote later that intelligence reports of the meeting were frustratingly vague.
Today, Mahmood, like Khan, is back home, under tight surveillance that seems intended primarily to keep him a safe distance from reporters.
Kidwai insists that the Mahmood incident was overblown, raised time and again by Americans to create the image that Pakistan is a nuclear sieve. Nothing went anywhere, he assured me. Its over. But whats terrifying about Mahmoods story is not what happened around the campfire, but rather that the meetings happened at all. They took place three years after Kidwai and his team started their work and demonstrated the huge vulnerabilities in the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure at the time.
Kidwai estimated that there are roughly 70,000 people who work in the nuclear complex in Pakistan, including 7,000 to 8,000 scientists and the 2,000 or so with critical knowledge. If even 1 per cent of those employees are willing to spread Pakistans nuclear knowledge to outsiders with a cause, Kidwai and the United States have a problem.
The Pakistanis insist that these American fears are exaggerated and that it would be next to impossible for someone to steal all the elements of a weapon. As Kidwai paced me through PowerPoints and diagrams, his message was that Pakistan's nuclear-weapons-safety programme is up to international standards.
But back in Washington, military and nuclear experts told me that the bottom line is that if a real-life crisis broke out, it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan's weapons were or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists. Its worse than that, the participant in the simulations told me.
We cant even certify exactly how many weapons the Pakistanis have which makes it difficult to sound convincing that theres nothing to worry about.
(The writer is chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times. This article is excerpted from his forthcoming book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and The Challenges to American Power.)
Right.......and the rest of the article just lost its credibility and worth to its bad start!
