Boston Globe 9/20/2001
US considers helping Pakistan
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 9/20/2001
In the near term, the United States could assist Pakistan by providing such things as blast-proof doors at its nuclear facilities. Other safety measures under consideration are Permissive Action Links, or PALs, high-tech devices applied to warheads to prevent an outsider from detonating a nuclear weapon.
Aid to Pakistan's nuclear program, however, would be a stark reversal of American policy. Washington has used a variety of economic and diplomatic levers to punish Pakistan for its recent nuclear tests and refusal to sign the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Pakistan is believed to have as many as three dozen nuclear weapons, and its president, General Pervez Musharaff, said in an address to his nation yesterday that the ''safety of nuclear missiles'' is one of his priorities as a potential US military campaign in Afghanistan gets underway. US and Pakistani officials say that Islamabad has yet to mount nuclear weapons on missiles or fully develop other means of delivering them to a target.
The United States has been helping to strengthen nuclear security in Russia and the former states of the Soviet Union since the mid-1990s under a Department of Defense program known as Cooperative Threat Reduction.
Last year Pakistan requested foreign help, including from the United States, to improve what it calls the ''custodial safeguard'' of its nuclear weapons, a system considered primitive by US, European, Russian, and Chinese standards. But the Clinton administration, which leveled sanctions against Pakistan and India after they detonated five nuclear devices in 1998, declined to help Pakistan, so as not to legitimize its nuclear capability.
The Bush administration, however, has been reviewing the nuclear policy toward India and Pakistan since taking office. Administration officials have recently said they plan to lift the sanctions against India, but have not indicated plans to do the same for Pakistan.
Pakistan's critical role in supporting any US-led military operation against exiled Saudi and suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the ruling Taliban militia in Afghanistan, however, has changed Washington's calculus on the nuclear issue.
''Pakistani President Musharaff is embarked on a course of action that could lead to his undoing,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and foreign policy organization in Alexandria, Va. Bin Laden and the Taliban enjoy support among the largely Muslim population of Pakistan.
Musharaff said yesterday that as much as 15 percent of the population is opposed to his decision to give the United States full support in its war on terrorism. Public opinion samples suggest the real figure is much higher.
Asked on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' on Sunday about concerns over Pakistan's nuclear forces, Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged that: ''You could have a change of government in relatively short notice, and we're well aware of that.''
It is possible that bin Laden and his network, Pike said, ''could steal [a nuclear weapon] or part of the arsenal could go missing.''
A US State Department official said it is unclear to what extent Pakistan would allow the United States to help on nuclear security should it decide to make such a proposal; Islamabad would be effectively giving the United States an inside look at some of its nuclear capability just as Washington is strengthening military ties with India, its mortal enemy.
However, Brigadier General Feroz Hassan Khan, director of Pakistan's arms control and disarmament affairs, said during a visit to Washington last December: ''We look up to the experience of others ... to make sure that no matter how safe we are, we should be surer. And this is the area where I think the West ... should help with their experience.''
He specifically cited a need for ''improved electronic locks and better software and communication reliability so that it is foolproof.''
Should the United States decide to move ahead, it may not be able to move quickly, according to specialists. Because Pakistan has not signed the Nonproliferation Treaty, the United States is prohibited by law from participating in nuclear weapons-related activities. The negotiations on how to proceed could also get bogged down.
''This is not something that would happen overnight,'' said David Rigby, chief spokesman for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which oversees nuclear security assistance in the former Soviet Union.
A Pakistani diplomat in Washington this week stressed that Islamabad's nuclear arsenal remains under the ''positive control'' of the military and remains safe. ''The nuclear weapons are not laying in an outhouse somewhere,'' the diplomat said. ''Loose nukes in the hands of the mullahs makes good fiction.''
Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
