Pak's nuclear arsenal a challenge to US policy

For the Obama administration, the assessment poses a direct challenge to a central element of the president’s national security strategy, the reduction of nuclear stockpiles around the world. Pakistan’s determination to add considerably to its arsenal — mostly to deter India — has also become yet another irritant in its often testy relationship with Washington, particularly as Pakistan seeks to block Obama’s renewed efforts to negotiate a global treaty that would ban the production of new nuclear material.

The United States keeps its estimates of foreign nuclear weapons stockpiles secret, and Pakistan goes to great lengths to hide both the number and location of its weapons. It is particularly wary of the US, which Pakistan’s military fears has plans to seize the arsenal if it was judged to be at risk of falling into the hands of extremists. Such secrecy makes accurate estimates difficult.

Rapid rise

But the most recent estimates, according to officials and outsiders familiar with the American assessments, suggest that the number of deployed weapons now ranges from the mid-90s to more than 110. When Obama came to office, his aides were told that the arsenal “was in the mid-to-high 70s”, according to one official who had been briefed at the time, though estimates ranged from 60 to 90.

“We’ve seen a consistent, constant buildup in their inventory, but it hasn’t been a sudden rapid rise,” a senior US military official said. “We’re very, very well aware of what they’re doing.”

White House officials share the assessment that the increase in actual weapons has been what one termed ‘slow and steady’.

But the bigger worry is the production of nuclear materials. Based on the latest estimates of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, an outside group that estimates worldwide nuclear production, experts say Pakistan has now produced enough material for 40 to 100 additional weapons, including a new class of plutonium bombs. If those estimates are correct — and some government officials regard them as high — it would put Pakistan on a par with long-established nuclear powers.

“If not now, Pakistan will soon have the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, surpassing the United Kingdom,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and the author of ‘Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad’.

“And judging by the new nuclear reactors that are coming online and the pace of production, Pakistan is on a course to be the fourth-largest nuclear weapons state in the world, ahead of France,” he said.

Riedel conducted the first review of Pakistan and Afghanistan policy for Obama in early 2009.

Pakistan’s arsenal of deployed weapons is considered secure, a point the White House reiterated last week while declining to answer questions about its new estimates. The US has spent more than $100 million helping the country build fences, install sensor systems and train personnel to handle the weapons. But senior officials remain deeply concerned that weapons-usable fuel, which is kept in laboratories and storage centers, is more vulnerable and could be diverted by insiders in Pakistan’s vast nuclear complex.

In US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks late last year, Anne Patterson, then the American ambassador to Pakistan, wrote of concerns that nuclear material in Pakistan’s laboratories was vulnerable to slow theft from insiders.

NYT