Pakistan doth protest nuclear weapons security issues too much

Whenever you see someone questioning the veracity of a report by Seymour Hersh, run in the opposite direction of the argument they’re making. The US didn’t torture Iraqi prisoners? Abu Ghraib. The US didn’t have a terrorist assassination program? Subsequent reports indicated otherwise. And this week, in the ‘Annals of National Security,’ we have Hersh’s report that the US and Pakistan are working together on ensuring the latter’s command and control over the South Asian tinderbox’s nuclear weapons arsenal. But it remains unclear how secure the nukes really are.

The reactions from Islamabad’s ‘decision-makers’ published in the Pakistani press are kind of funny. Like this one in Pakistani paper The Nation:

“Pakistan’s nuclear assets are safe and secure. We, as a sovereign state, will never allow any country to have direct or indirect access to our nuclear and strategic facilities,” said Foreign Office (FO) Spokesman Abdul Basit in a statement issued here on Sunday.

Commenting on an article published in online edition of an American magazine, New Yorker, questioning safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the FO Spokesman said that author of the article Seymour Hersh was known to write sensational stories premised in far-fetched and imaginary scenarios. “His latest article is no exception and is, therefore, strongly rejected,” he added.

“Seymour Hersh, yet again, betrays his well-known anti-Pakistan bias by making several false and highly irresponsible claims by quoting anonymous and unverifiable sources,” Basit said. He added that the article was thus nothing more than a concoction to tarnish the image of Pakistan and create misgivings among its people. “The multi-layered custodial controls, which have been developed indigenously, are as foolproof and effective as in any other nuclear state,” he maintained.

I feel bad for Pakistan’s beleaguered diplomats – they’re clearly out of the loop given that the story is all about the military and President Asif Ali Zardari’s office. Not a single mention of Pakistan’s Foreign Office in the story.

And President Zardari himself told Hersh, “We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody’s integrity. We’re all big boys.” Which is hardly a denial that the US and Pakistan have had some serious discussions about the state of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

And in any event, what’s the point of an angry reaction to anything in Sy Hersh’s story? After all, he reports a few basic things: there are worries in America about the security of Pakistan’s nukes; the impact of Islamic extremism on Pakistan’s officer corps is up for debate; America has a number of ideas about how to secure Pakistan’s nukes in a crisis; and, Pakistan does not like constantly dealing with America’s inquiries on this subject, and so it tells American policymakers half-truths whenever the issue comes up.

This was my favorite lie of all, one that probably has not been communicated directly to the Americans from the Pakistanis, but was probably communicated to Hersh to throw off American and Indian analysts:

In an actual crisis, would the Pakistanis give an American team direct access to their arsenal? An adviser to the Pentagon on counterinsurgency said that some analysts suspected that the Pakistani military had taken steps to move elements of the nuclear arsenal “out of the count”—to shift them to a storage facility known only to a very few—as a hedge against mutiny or an American or Indian effort to seize them. “If you thought your American ally was telling your enemy where the weapons were, you’d do the same thing,” the adviser said.

via Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan? : The New Yorker.

Pakistan is believed to have something like 80-100 nuclear bombs that it can deploy. That’s how many it needs to sufficiently deter India’s nuclear arsenal. So the idea that Pakistan has a hedge somewhere seems unlikely to me. A hedge of a few weapons isn’t much of a deterrent because if they’re kept all in one place, and it’s only a handful of weapons in the single or low double digits, a decapitation strike could take them out before they can be used. The name of the game in nuclear strategy is survivability, and a small hedge doesn’t enable that a functioning second-strike capability. Nor does it contribute to a state’s goal of taking out its opponent’s arsenal because its limited ability to strike targets would quickly be overwhelmed by the response.

So with this nugget of Pakistan’s hedge or weapons ‘out of the count,’ we either have the conclusion that Pakistan wants to telegraph to India that its arsenal is survivable, or that its arsenal is actually bigger than believed because a hedge would be useless unless it is large. I’m going with the latter point. And I don’t think it’s true.

I also have trouble believing the following about America’s plan for securing Pakistan’s arsenal:

The triggers are a key element in American contingency plans. An American former senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the élite counterterrorism group. He added that the unit, which had earlier focussed on the warheads’ cores, has begun to concentrate on evacuating the triggers, which have no radioactive material and are thus much easier to handle.

“The Pakistanis gave us a virtual look at the number of warheads, some of their locations, and their command-and-control system,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We saw their target list and their mobilization plans. We got their security plans, so we could augment them in case of a breach of security,” he said. “We’re there to help the Pakistanis, but we’re also there to extend our own axis of security to their nuclear stockpile.” The detailed American planning even includes an estimate of how many nuclear triggers could be placed inside a C-17 cargo plane, the former official said, and where the triggers could be sequestered. Admiral Mullen, asked about increased American insight into the arsenal, said, through his spokesman, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.” (A senior military officer added that the information, if it had been conveyed, would most likely “have gone to another government agency.”)

The triggers? What good does securing the triggers do if it leaves all the fissile material in place? True, if the Pakistani Taliban or an Islamist junta doesn’t have the triggers, it won’t be able to mount the bombs on F-16s and drop them over Mumbai. On the other hand, the Pakistani Taliban may be happy having fissile material that it can form into primitive uranium-based implosion weapons and smuggle into the Mumbai harbor, or Los Angeles for that matter, and hold the world hostage that way. If our special forces really are planning on just rounding up a bunch of nuclear bomb triggers, they’re giving themselves a very false sense of security.

Ultimately, Hersh’s article does a really good job of illustrating the ambiguity and confusion that surrounds the state of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Also the security dilemmas that having a nuclear arsenal at all creates for a country like Pakistan. It should not be read as a definitive account of what’s going on there, but as a demonstration of little is actually understood by America’s national security establishment.