The litany of nuclear horribles is known to most Americans, although they may be short on specifics. A few remember that we never located a hydrogen bomb that a bomber was forced to ditch after a mid-air collision off the Georgia coast in 1958, but most of us are aware of a cache of nuclear weapons in Pakistan, 70 to 100 warheads at last guestimates, sitting squarely in the sights of Taliban militants dedicated to the destruction of Israel… and the United States.
The legendary Dr. A.Q. Khan, Pakistan’s “father of nuclear weapons,” made sure that the capabilities for the “Muslim bomb” were spread around the second and third world. North Korea’s test blasts were germinated with Khan’s design help, and Iran’s entire nuclear program was born of Khan’s engineering assistance.
Israel’s hardline Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently visited Washington; clearly the accumulation of nuclear weapons, particularly the Iranian threat, threatens to undermine President Obama’s commitment to a separate Palestinian state, but the President also made it clear that there was a timeline on seeing progress in defusing Tehran. As reported in earlier blog, as preconditions to a “Palestinian” solution, Israel’s demands for recognition of Israel as a legitimate Jewish state make an accommodation with existing Palestinian authorities, notably the vehemently anti-Israel Hamas faction, seemingly impossible. But the biggest sticking point is obviously Israel’s demand for “security” in the region, a hardly disguised statement that a nuclear weapon in Iran, a nation that has pledge to destroy Israel, is simply untenable. A single nuclear strike on Tel Aviv effectively destroys the entire country. A preemptive strike by Israel against Iran increases in probability as the rhetoric escalated.
This note, appearing in the May 20th Washington Post, makes the “nuclear proliferation” issue in the Middle East even worse: “[Iranian] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran test-fired a new advanced missile [May 20th – a newer, solid fuel weapon] with a range of about 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel, southeastern Europe and U.S. bases in the Middle East.” If Iran does not already have a nuclear warhead, they have to be very close to completing that mission. Is Pakistan’s military or intelligence operation still active in aiding Iran’s nuclear efforts? As Iranian officials continually call for the destruction of Israel, there are chills going down the backs of government officials everywhere as Iran’s nuclear delivery systems are being perfected, missiles which are much more easily hidden than nuclear processing plants.
As Russia and the United States speak of reducing nuclear weapons around the world, the opposite seems to be happening in many of the smaller nuclear powers and nuclear-wannabees. And strangely enough, with a civil war raging within the country, Pakistan appears to be increasing its weapons-grade nuclear fuel-making capacity and actually building more warheads. The worst part of this story, a stated in a May 18th NY Times article, is that Pakistan may be using money from the U.S., geared to fight local fundamentalist terrorism, to fund the nuclear-expansion effort. Confirmation of that extraordinary fact came from Joint Chiefs’ Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen in private Congressional briefings and direct testimony in a U.S. Senate hearing.
The genesis of Pakistan’s nuclear program is mired in their on-again, off-again, conflict with neighboring India (also a nuclear power) over the future of disputed territory – India’s Kashmir (with a large Muslim population – Pakistan’s population is mostly Muslim, and India’s Hindu… a result of partition when the two nations were created 60 years ago). But why does Pakistan need so many new weapons? Surely, they have more than enough nuclear power to deal with India, a nation that seems to have absolutely no intention of loosing its nukes on Pakistan.
Further, the only real current military threats to Pakistan are from within. The May 23rd Los Angeles Times: “In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said 1,095 militants had been killed during the offensive and 29 captured… Mingora [in Pakistan’s Swat Valley], however, poses a severe challenge for Pakistani troops, who face Taliban fighters deeply embedded in an urban environment and reliant on mines, fortifications and hidden weapons caches to fend off the offensive. The fight will also be complicated by the presence of as many as 20,000 civilians who remained behind after the rest of the city's population of 375,000 fled.”
Even with statistics like this, with horrible civilian casualties, most Pakistanis are actually suspicious of doing anything that smacks of following the U.S. anti-terrorism line; India, to them, is the only genuine menace they need to be concerned about. It’s just how they were raised and how they still feel, facts to the contrary notwithstanding, something even President Obama finds hard to believe.
The fact that Pakistan never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (India and Israel are also non-signatories), coupled with Pakistan’s history of sharing nuclear technology with malevolent powers, is discomfiting to say the least. Is their ability to provide technical support to nuclear wannabees a bargaining chip Pakistan’s leaders are willing to trade with powerful Arab nations in exchange for support for their incumbency? Are Taliban sympathizers within the Pakistani government and military preparing an arsenal for the terrorists themselves? Are the Pakistanis so obsessed defending against a mythical Indian nuclear attack that they are blind to the fundamentalist damage in their own back yard?
While the last U.S. administration turned a blind eye as to how Pakistan’s leadership was deploying American foreign aid, concerns have elevated in this administration and this Congress as we consider how to extinguish the Taliban militancy in neighboring Afghanistan and how to keep that militancy from toppling Pakistan and taking over that nuclear stockpile. The last thing America needs is a diversion of anti-terrorism efforts, funded with U.S. dollars, into making the nuclear nightmare so much worse.
Pakistan will resist any American attempt to tie nuclear arms limitations to American military aid, and yet suppression of the Taliban militancy in Pakistan is a necessary part of our effort to stabilize Afghanistan – it is doubtful that we would have the remotest chance without that cross-border effort. Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Michigan’s Carl Levin, noted: “Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit, in deeds and words, their country’s armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists, and unless they make it clear that they are doing so, for the sake of their own future, then no amount of assistance will be effective.” Committee member, Virginia’s Jim Webb, expressed his “enormous concern” at this turn of events.
At this moment of global financial chaos, the single largest threat on this planet to life itself is probably the future of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the programs, like that in Iran, which Pakistan has spawned. Failure to solve these horrific issues is simply not acceptable. If ever there were a number one priority for America, even ahead of economic recovery, this defeat of nuclear proliferation to nations and cultures that seem quite willing to deploy the weapons against their “enemies,” has got to be it.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I am as scared as you are about this.
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