Against the Tide: Securing Pakistan’s Nuclear Assets By Henry Sokolski Executive Director The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center www.npec-web.org DRAFT Presentation before a Council on Foreign Relations Nuclear Roundtable “How Secure Are Pakistan’s Nukes?” February 20, 2008 Washington, DC Let me say at the outset that I’m not sure how safe nuclear weapons are in Pakistan. I’m not sure anyone is. I understand that we have spent $100 million in Pakistan over the last several years to help Islamabad secure their nuclear weapons assets. Because there have been no public hearings, General Accountability Office or Inspector General reports on how this money was spent, though, it remains unclear precisely what we gained. In early 2001, at the outset of the project that resulted in the book you have before you, Pakistan’s Nuclear Future: Worries Beyond War (available at http://www.npec- web.org/Books/20080116-PakistanNuclearFuture.pdf ), I asked the nation’s leading Pakistani nuclear expert at one our National weapons laboratories to clarify precisely how secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was. He was polite but refused. It then occurred to me that it would perhaps be easier to learn something of the answer by approaching the issue indirectly by focusing first on how secure Pakistan’s civilian nuclear assets might be. In time, I actually did succeed in getting Peter Lavoy, the current National Intelligence Officer for South West Asia, to detail the steps Pakistan has taken to enhance Pakistan’s nuclear command and control and what Pakistani officials believe maintaining deterrence against a possible Indian attack might require. His detailed descriptions, which can be found in Chapter 5, are helpful in clarifying just how seriously the Pakistani military takes the matter of command and control. The good news is that the Pakistanis do take it seriously. The not-so-good news is that Pakistan’s military may be all too confident that they have their weapons under control and that not much more effort is needed. Also, there’s some bad news. Pakistan’s military clearly believes that without nuclear weapons, they are incapable of keeping
Transcript
Against the Tide:
Securing Pakistan’s Nuclear Assets
By
Henry Sokolski Executive Director
The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center www.npec-web.org
DRAFT Presentation before a
Council on Foreign Relations Nuclear Roundtable “How Secure Are Pakistan’s Nukes?”
February 20, 2008 Washington, DC
Let me say at the outset that I’m not sure how safe nuclear weapons are in Pakistan. I’m not sure anyone is. I understand that we have spent $100 million in Pakistan over the last several years to help Islamabad secure their nuclear weapons assets. Because there have been no public hearings, General Accountability Office or Inspector General reports on how this money was spent, though, it remains unclear precisely what we gained. In early 2001, at the outset of the project that resulted in the book you have before you, Pakistan’s Nuclear Future: Worries Beyond War (available at http://www.npec-web.org/Books/20080116-PakistanNuclearFuture.pdf), I asked the nation’s leading Pakistani nuclear expert at one our National weapons laboratories to clarify precisely how secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was. He was polite but refused. It then occurred to me that it would perhaps be easier to learn something of the answer by approaching the issue indirectly by focusing first on how secure Pakistan’s civilian nuclear assets might be. In time, I actually did succeed in getting Peter Lavoy, the current National Intelligence Officer for South West Asia, to detail the steps Pakistan has taken to enhance Pakistan’s nuclear command and control and what Pakistani officials believe maintaining deterrence against a possible Indian attack might require. His detailed descriptions, which can be found in Chapter 5, are helpful in clarifying just how seriously the Pakistani military takes the matter of command and control. The good news is that the Pakistanis do take it seriously. The not-so-good news is that Pakistan’s military may be all too confident that they have their weapons under control and that not much more effort is needed. Also, there’s some bad news. Pakistan’s military clearly believes that without nuclear weapons, they are incapable of keeping
Pakistan safe against Indian conventional threats and Pakistan’s military is far from convinced that it has anywhere near the nuclear assets necessary to deter India from conventional coercion in the future. This not only suggests the need for Pakistan to expand its nuclear weapons efforts, but that Pakistani nuclear use is more likely than not. In an effort to hedge its nuclear military bets against a possible Indian nuclear expansion, the Pakistani government announced plans to increase its current civilian nuclear power capacity twenty fold to 8.8 Gigawatts by 2030. The idea here is for Pakistan to be ready and able to expand its military nuclear capacity if India expands theirs and, if this is not necessary, to have at least a series of reactors capable of producing some needed electricity. Unfortunately, while this effort may help deter India, it will do little to reduce the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear sites and holdings to terrorist theft or attack. Consider the analysis by Abdul Mannan, a senior official with Pakistan’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency, who graciously shared his research in Chapter 7. He asserts that there is little reason to be concerned about the possibility of terrorists stealing civilian weapons or weapons materials or even of them attacking military or civilian reactors with much success. On the other hand, he details an all too plausible scenario in which terrorists gain access to anti-tank missiles and use these to hit spent fuel being transported through Karachi. You can see what the he believes the radiological impact might be of such an attack on page 250. Although the number of prompt deaths would be quite limited, the probability of mass self-evacuation, public disorder and the need for long-term quarantine could produce politically dramatic fallout. Dr. Mannan warns that as Pakistan expands its nuclear infrastructure, it will have to work even harder to manage such contingencies. This will not be easy. According to Chaim Braun, a nuclear analyst at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and author of the book’s Chapter 8, Pakistan will have to train up 1,000 new nuclear operators, engineers, and regulators each year for the next two decades to achieve its stated goal of bringing 8.8 GWe on line by 2030. Even more personnel, of course, would be needed to maintain and expand Pakistan’s nuclear weapons complex. How these numbers can be achieved without allowing potential terrorist or terrorist sympathizers into Pakistan’s nuclear system is unclear. In all fairness to Pakistan, any one of these problems, at some level, is shared by all nuclear powered states—including the U.S. For some sates, such as India, these problems are arguably just as acute. Still what makes them particularly worrisome in Pakistan’s case is the prospect of severe irredentism, and of Islamic radicals and their sympathizers seizing political control of the state or gaining control or successfully attacking its nuclear assets. All of these problems seem more severe in Pakistan than any other nuclear powered state. This, then, brings us to the subject of Mr. Donnelly’s presentation, “Bad Options or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Live with Loose Nukes.”
The subject of this analysis by now is familiar to us all. Indeed, judging from the public commentary of the last six months, there seems to be a general impression that when the going gets tough in Pakistan, we, the tough, are supposed to militarily invade Pakistan Recently Senator Obama, for example, suggested that he would be willing, if necessary, to use U.S. forces to invade Pakistan to kill terrorists, with or without the consent of Mr. Musharraf. A somewhat more sober set of comments were offered by Mr. Kagan and Mr. O’Hanlon, who suggested that U.S. needs to consider mounting military operations to extract nuclear weapons and materials with special forces if Pakistan’s government collapses or loses control of its outlying provinces. Underlying these views are the assumptions that either:
1. The U.S. can go in alone, invade Pakistan militarily and achieve our purposes without the help of the Pakistani military.
OR that
2. The U.S. can and should rely on the Pakistani Army, vice the ISI, to be moderate and trustworthy in any cooperative military operation in Pakistan.
With regard to the second finding, I think it would be fair to say that it is only half-right. It is certainly unlikely that Pakistan’s military would be 100 percent trustworthy. We definitely know that there were people in the Pakistani Army that were entirely sympathetic to Dr. Khan’s activities and vision. What comes to mind here is an incident that occurred when I was working under Harry Rowen in the Cheney Pentagon. In 1990, I testified before Congress that the U.S. could no longer certify that Pakistan was not enriching uranium to weapons grade and, as such, was finally going to sanction Pakistan under the Pressler Amendment. Shortly, thereafter, Harry Rowen visited India and Pakistan. What Harry later explained to me is that when he met with General Beg, the head of the Pakistani military, Beg bluntly warned him that unless the U.S. dropped its sanctions, Pakistan was prepared to help Iran get nuclear weapons. At the time, this was a jaw dropper. Harry passed on what Beg told him to his DoD superiors, but apparently nobody took Beg’s warning seriously. In any case, we ought not to assume that the Pakistani Army, somehow, no longer has any more officers like General Beg. As for the first assumption that we can successfully insert U.S. troops into Pakistan to kill terrorists or to extract or secure Pakistani nuclear weapons holdings without Pakistan’s full cooperation and consent, I would only repeat what Tom suggested I spotlight to introduce his analysis. To those that say, “Yes we can”, Tom would reply that in this case such cockiness is gravely misplaced and that the deck is heavily stacked against us ever securing all the nuclear assets we need to. There are a huge number of unknowns
and almost as many moving pieces, each of which threatens to produce a Desert One-type military disaster. And, oh, attempting such an operation might start a larger war. Besides producing a diplomatic faux pas, then, launching such an operation unilaterally would be a mistake because–and this is the key point of Tom’s analysis–the chances of our military succeeding even with the Pakistani government’s full support and cooperation are exceedingly poor. I should note before I get into the details of Tom’s work (and the attached Power Point slides he produced) that this conclusion is not merely the punch line of some essay or op-ed. Two decades ago, the Pentagon commissioned the first official analysis of what the intelligence requirements might be for a nuclear securing or extraction operation. The work was done with the full cooperation of the assistant secretary’s office of special operations and low intensity conflict. After nearly two years, the results came in. They were sobering. Not only did the study generate massive new intelligence requirements, but it seemed clear that the U.S. would have difficulty ever meeting them. I know because I was the one to commission the study. It’s also one of the reasons I first approached the Office of Secretary of Defense several months before 9/11 about developing general policy options for dealing with the Pakistani nuclear threat. After 9/11, I got my funding. Tom, however, was not so lucky. He was operating on a separate track that focused entirely on assessing our ability to conduct military operations to extract or secure Pakistan’s nuclear holdings. He managed to line up private funding and secured substantial interest and support from the Pentagon. At the last moment, though, a single Defense official, I am told, aborted project because the results might prove diplomatically embarrassing. Today, I would like to go over the key findings of the work Tom did with only modest support from my center. Tom put a considerable amount of work into the study, which reflects his previous analyses of other special operations in Panama and Grenada, to name just two. Tom’s essay has two parts. The first explains why we need to worry about Pakistan’s nuclear assets. I will focus my comments on the second half of his work, which details the operational and tactical requirements U.S. forces would face in any attempt to secure nuclear assets at Pakistan’s missile and nuclear enrichment complex located at Kahuta. Tom made several optimistic assumptions in his analysis in order to make sure that if the outcome was negative, it is not because of any overly negative operating assumptions. These optimistic assumptions included: That only Kahuta needed to be secured. In fact, several other nuclear sites could be of interest. If one had to secure these as well, the complexity and prospects for any securing or extraction operation would go up significantly.
[See Slide 5 of Tom Donnelly’s PowerPoint presentation, Reflections on Pakistan—Bad Options: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Live with Loose Nukes, which follows the text of these remarks.] That China and UN would not try to block or slow U.S. military entry, and that Pakistan would be sufficiently worried to ask for U.S. help before it was too late for any nuclear securing or extraction operation to succeed. Both assumptions may be overly optimistic since China would probably either want to go in alone or urge with the UN for “joint” operations. Also, the Pakistani military would have to be extremely pressed by events before it would choose to ask for U.S. help. Again, if operations are delayed, their prospects for success will decline significantly. That the U.S. is ready and willing to dedicate forces despite other deployments e.g., in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. As for the hostile forces that might seize Kahuta, it is assumed that they would be lightly armed with some air defense capability and their force would include elements of the Pakistani army. We would not know at the time of the crisis if all of the forces that seized the nuclear complex had stayed there. The U.S. force would consist of special operations forces (DELTA forces, Army Rangers, and SEALs based in the region and shipped in from CONUS), light infantry (a brigade of the U.S.-based 101st) and air power units based in Afghanistan and CONUS, strategic air assets based in the U.S. and one carrier battle group. The SOF forces would require logistical and mobility support (heavy lift and special ops helicopters) and the operation would require a small forward operations headquarters in Pakistan headed by a four-star U.S. general (this, in part to bolster Pakistani trust). The trick in any such operation would be to regain control of the city-seized complex at Kahuta, to free Kahuta personnel, and to find and secure the nuclear weapons related assets there with the lowest possible loss of innocent life and the least amount of destruction of the Kahuta complex itself. It should be kept in mind that the Kahuta complex also is a missile development and production center so that there are vast amounts of highly explosive fuels present. Avoiding setting them off or doing indiscriminate attacks that risked harming the scientists held there or the nuclear materials that need to be secured would be imperative. Certainly, consciously trying to decimate the complex kinetically would risk the continued support of the Pakistani government and the resumption of anything approaching political “stability” in Pakistan and the region. Bottom line: The operation would neither be a massive strike to “destroy” the target, nor some “Ninja” black ops snatch hit. What are the minimal time assumptions for such an operation? The short answer is longer than any American military planner would want. Pakistan is half way around the world with few, if any, appropriate, nearby sizeable portals to push through the relatively large U.S. forces needed to accomplish this operation. [See Slides 14, 15.]
What basing options there are regionally are less than completely satisfying: Diego Garcia (a relatively small staging base, located far from the theater of operations)
Afghanistan/Kabul (a base of operations that is roughly four hundred miles from any suitable Pakistani airfield—i.e., Islamabad or Rawalpindi—and that is itself an embattled zone where U.S. cargo planes and personnel might be targeted by Taliban operatives)
Naval carrier group (operating several hundreds of miles away and can base only a relative small numbers of aircraft to ferry or support whatever Marine or other air forces might be relevant to the operation),
India (helped support the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan but using India in this operation could jeopardize the Pakistani military support needed for success).
Rawalpindi and Islamabad (both are roughly 150 miles from Kahuta and could harbor operatives that might target U.S. forces)
Although ideally you would want to flow forces into the region over a period of several weeks, one might be able to get operations underway sooner. To get the necessary U.S. SOF/light infantry forces and equipment from CONUS (thousands of miles) and from Kabul to Islamabad and/or Rawalpindi (400 plus miles), though, would take no less than a week assuming no hitches. Following this strategic deployment to the staging base in Pakistan, it would be necessary to collect tactical intelligence, complete preparations for the operation (including but not limited to fitting out and re-servicing the mobile ground and air equipment either flown in from Afghanistan or shipped from the U.S., setting up medi-vac facilities, etc). This operational deployment would take at least 48 hours. Finally, it would take no less than eight hours
• to move these forces the from the base of operations by o Moving ground mobile units the 150 miles from Islamabad and or
Rawalpindi up the single access road to the complex at Kahuta o Deploying SOF forces by helicopter to Kahuta,
• to repress hostile fire against these forces • to seize control of each building in the Kahuta complex by waging urban warfare
door to door in a city the roughly the size of Old Town None of these tasks would be easy. First, it would be easy for the hostile forces to see the U.S. forces coming up the single access road, the front gate of which is closer to Islamabad than the complex itself. Second, given even the minimal times associated with the strategic and operational deployment (9-plus days), there would be ample time for hostile forces to move the
nuclear weapons assets from their original locations. All buildings at Kahuta would have to be searched and secured. This would be a time consuming and deadly undertaking. [See Slide 18.] Third, there are many relatively easy ways for hostile forces to escape with one or more nuclear weapon or weapons worth of nuclear material into the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas—Taliban sympathetic territory. [See Slide 19.] Fourth, it may be necessary for the U.S. to conduct its own perimeter control to limit possible leakage or escapes. The U.S. will likely have to rely on Pakistani help for this mission even though the loyalty and availability of Pakistani forces will be questionable. In this regard, one needs to keep in mind that the Pakistani military will almost certainly be otherwise occupied during the operation dealing with possible rebellions in Balluchistan and Sindi rioting, etc. All of the discussion so far leaves out any discussion of what follow-on operations, if any, would be needed. How would we know if we secured all of the weapons and materials we needed to? Will we hold the nuclear and rocket assets at Kahuta for a future, stable Pakistani government? If so, are we prepared to deal with the political chaos such a decision would engender? Would we have to be prepared to “restore” the current government? If so, what might this require? This last point suggests that the problem of Pakistan’s growing nuclear capabilities is not merely a military problem. In the scenario just detailed, it ultimately is necessary to restore a stable moderate government. Yet, what are the prospects of accomplishing this if all we have are military options for securing Pakistani nuclear weapons assets? All of this reminds us of the superiority of politics over any merely technical or military option for securing Pakistan’s nuclear assets. It would be useful if somehow Pakistan could be persuaded not to expand the nuclear complex it already has since this will only increase the security risks already detailed. Here it would help if the U.S. and other nations could assist Pakistan and India in meeting as much of their electricity requirements with less costly non-nuclear systems first. It also would help if Pakistan, India and China could be persuaded to join the U.S., U.K., France and Russia in publicly forswearing the further production of fissile materials for military purposes. Success on any of these fronts, in turn, would require that moderate sensible rule and sound foreign policies be in play not just in New Delhi and Islamabad, but in the capitals of a good number of major nations. This nothing one can assume will be easy to pull off. On the other hand, such political and diplomatic efforts, even if they are not entirely successful, are far less likely to produce any where near as much regret as the slightly imperfect implementation of any military or technical effort to neutralize the security threats Pakistan’s nuclear assets pose. We have no choice but to continue to hone our
military and technical options but we should be under no delusion. In the end, only better politics and sounder societies will save us from the threats Pakistan’s nuclear assets present.
B d O tiB d O tiBad OptionsBad OptionsOr,Or,
How I Stopped WorryingHow I Stopped Worrying
and Learned to Live with Loose Nukesand Learned to Live with Loose Nukes
Reflections on Pakistan
T D ll
Reflections on Pakistan
T D llTom Donnelly
American Enterprise Institute
Tom Donnelly
American Enterprise Institute
Slide 1
‘The prospect that a nuclear-capable state may lose control ‘The prospect that a nuclear-capable state may lose control capable state may lose control
of some of its weapons to capable state may lose control
of some of its weapons to pterrorists is one of the greatest dangers the United States and
pterrorists is one of the greatest dangers the United States and dangers the United States and
