Press Trust Of India July 27, 2006
'Pak has 25 to 50 modest nukes'
New york, July 27
Pakistan currently has between 25 and 50 nuclear weapons, mostly relatively simple uranium arms with ‘‘modest’’ yields—around the size of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the journal Nature claimed on Thursday.
The claim followed media reports that satellite photos of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear site have shown what appears to be a partially completed heavy-water reactor capable of a 20-fold increase from its current nuclear capabilities.
Quoting John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit group that specialises in image analysis, Nature says if the new facility is what it seems to be, it would allow Pakistan to build a lot more bombs.
The reactor is ‘‘gigantic’’ and would allow Pakistan to increase its total number of weapons tenfold, Pike says. Plutonium can be used to construct smaller and more lightweight weapons than uranium.
Most uranium bombs require 15 to 20 kg of material, but plutonium weapons can be built with as little as 5 kg.
In addition, small plutonium bombs are often used to trigger larger hydrogen weapons. So the technology, says Pike, is an important step towards developing those bombs, which are thousands of times more powerful than uranium and plutonium weapons.
The reactor seems to be still under construction and several years from completion. To make bombs, Pakistan needs to chemically separate the plutonium from spent reactor fuel, which requires a special reprocessing facility.
It is not known whether the country has such a facility, according to Pike. Many other countries have plutonium-reprocessing facilities including Russia, China, India, Israel, North Korea, the United States, Britain and Japan.
‘‘If Pakistan gets a big stockpile then India’s going to have to get a big stockpile and the Chinese are going to have to go back and count their pennies,’’ says Pike. The result could be an accelerating arms race in southern Asia.
N-ties with Pak peaceful: China
Beijing: China today declined comment on reports of Pakistan’s efforts to beef up its nuclear arsenal but strongly denied any assistance to Islamabad’s weapons-oriented atomic programmes.
‘‘China is aware of the report,’’ Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said when asked to comment on the recent report by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security which reported a significant scaling up of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme.
Liu declined to comment on the report which said Pakistan is aiming to expand its nuclear weapons arsenal with a powerful heavy-water reactor that could produce plutonium for 40 to 50 warheads. -PTI
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