Nuclear terrorism is perhaps the most important threat the world faces today. Few countries carry greater risks of allowing terrorists to get their hands on illicit nuclear materials than India and Pakistan, notwithstanding the safety records of these south Asian nuclear powers. Pakistan's case is particularly troubling.
In a poor country of 166m, there is not enough money to build schools for educating Pakistan's largely illiterate population or feeding its undernourished children. But there is enough, it seems, to build a modern plutonium reactor that will churn out 15 to 20 times more plutonium for bomb-making than the country can ever use.
The danger for the rest of the world lies in radical Islamists – of which there are many in Pakistan – getting hold of a growing and readily available source of radioactive materials that can be easily transported and shaped into less detectable, miniaturised configurations. To maintain Pakistan's support in its war on terror, the Bush administration has looked the other way while this dangerous nuclear development took place. That its man in Islamabad, Pervez Musharraf, was an assassin's bullet away from handing Pakistan's future to the very radicals the US is trying to eradicate does not seem to have mattered much in Washington.
Satellite photos show that a new 1,000 megawatt plutonium reactor is being built adjacent to the existing 50 megawatt Khushab district reactor that will produce enough plutonium (about 200kg) for 40-45 weapons per year, or about 15 to 20 times what is produced today. Construction on the reactor appears to have begun in 2000. It is still a few years from completion, hindered by the dismantling of the illicit black-market nuclear network run by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's atomic father, several years ago.
The drive for nuclear cores that can be more easily fashioned into complex warhead designs may be Pakistan's overarching military objective, but it brings with it a plethora of dangerous scenarios that brittle governments, such as Gen Musharraf's, are ill-equipped to handle. The most troubling is one in which Islamabad's political manoeuvring to keep its neighbour, Afghanistan, in check by supporting a resurgent Taliban spirals out of its control. Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and others who hopscotch across the Afghan-Pakistan border are as capable of transporting processed plutonium into the wrong hands as they are of running guns and heroin.
Pakistan has successfully walked the anti-terror tightrope since September 11 2001 because Gen Musharraf has sought to be all things to all people. But what if he is gone tomorrow? Who insures the world against Islamists wresting control of a nuclear programme that is populated with some of the brightest, most radicalised minds in the Muslim world who still deeply resent the US dethroning of A.Q. Khan?
The new reactor also raises serious questions about the underlying motivations of the US-India civilian nuclear arms pact – passed by the US House of Representatives last week – that will bring American nuclear technology to India's atomic power industry. Improving India's civilian nuclear safety standards and transparency of operations is a laudable goal in providing for that country's energy needs and renovating its decrepit reactors. But if Washington thinks giving India nuclear technology is appropriate compensation for looking the other way while Islamabad builds its mega-plutonium plant – enabling India to build 40-50 nuclear weapons a year to match Pakistan – it risks dangerously escalating a regional arms race and destroying economic growth in the process.
If his army hawks insist on finishing Khushab II, Gen Musharraf can at least ensure that it starts up operations with full international safeguards in place that match those agreed to by New Delhi under the US-India nuclear pact. These include inspections that ensure fissile materials are safeguarded and accounted for at all times. He can change the dynamics of south Asia's arms race by championing a new fissile materials cut-off treaty – forbidding the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium – and prodding George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, to do the same.
Pakistan's erroneous decision to build Khushab II – and the US plan to fuel India's nuclear power plants as a counterbalance – should not be permitted to put the rest of the world at risk at the hands of extremists.
The writer, a New York financier, assisted US authorities in discovering activities tied to the illicit nuclear network of A.Q. Khan in 2000-2001
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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