Many people have been asking in recent years if the Taliban or other radical Islamist groups could control Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and, speculation apart, there has been precious little hard information available to help answer them. A new report concludes that it would be almost impossible for Islamists to achieve that aim.

Any attempt to answer the question would be doomed to failure without an understanding of how Pakistan administrates and protects its nuclear weapon stockpile, and that was precisely the objective of a recent study and research programme carried out by the French Institute the ‘Foundation for Strategic Research’ – the FRS in French.

The study examined the scenarios which most worry Western Intelligence Agencies.

Its conclusions are summed up in one simple phrase by Bruno Tertrais, Master in Research at the FRS;

“The Taliban will never be able to wrest control of Pakistan’s nuclear arms by force.”

Pakistan has become more volatile over the last five years. The Taliban’s Swat Valley insurrection and religious extremism have contributed to a deteriorating security situation within Pakistan’s borders. The Taliban and their allies are not hiding their intention of destabilising the country.

The scenario in which the Taliban come down from the mountain to attack nuclear installations is pure science-fiction, but there are others.

Pakistan developed its first nuclear weapon in the 1970’s with for sole objective the protection of the country from any eventual attack by India, which already posessed a nuclear capability..
Research into how best to create a weapon was greatly aided by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani employee of Urenco, a European company specialising in the enriching of uranium. He stole the company’s technology and took it back to Pakistan.From there, a little help from the Chinese helped Pakistan to complete it’s research.

Pakistan had the bomb.

Khan was also responsible for Pakistan becoming the principal nuclear proliferator on the planet.

Iran, North Korea and Libya all profited from the technology that he either gave or sold to them.

Pakistan now has just under a hundred nuclear warheads, almost all of which are composed of enriched uranium. Nuclear engineers are actively looking to upgrade the country’s nuclear capability using plutonium.

The man responsible for the security of Pakistan’s nuclear installations and technology is 59 year old Khalid Kidawi. He runs the Pakistani Strategic Planning Department, the SPD.
The United States gave him a credit line of $100 million to help him develop his control systems with their aid. Pakistan didn’t let Americans into sensitive areas though, and that’s why America still has limited knowledge of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Americans and Pakistanis do agree on one thing however, and that is that the Taliban or any other group would never be able to physically gain control over nuclear weapons and activate them, in any situation.

Not only are the weapons dissimulated on ultra-protected independent and hermetic sites, they are stocked in “kit” form. The motors are stored away from the missiles, and fissile material is kept in a separate area from the warheads.

Any movement of any element must have the agreement of at least two individuals all the way down the command chain.

An additional safeguard consists of the fact that the missile activation procedure, besides following the above procedure for all actions, also has a double coding system which needs command authentication in order that those ordering the bomb’s activation as well as those actually activating it need to verify and authenticate themselves.

But there is also the scenario of technology transfer and leaks, such as what happened with Khan. 70 000 people work in Pakistan’s nuclear sector, including 8000 research engineers, 2000 of which have access to sensitive information.

The CIA has not forgotten the case of Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmoud, a nuclear engineer converted to Radical Islamism and invited to meet Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri in order to share what he knew. Luckily, he only had access to low-level data.

The result of that episode was that since 2005 Pakistan has implemented a carbon copy of a sophisticated American personnel surveillance programme called the ‘Personal Reliability Program.’ This programme is a combination of intense police and intelligence surveillance and enquiries linked to psychological testing.

Although this programme is not estimated to be fail-proof, Pervez Hoodboy, Physics Department President at Pakistan’s prestigious Qaid-e Azam university, says that “It is not impossible that a plot be organized to help terrorists to build a rudimentary bomb, but there would have to be at least twenty of them in order to obtain all the specific knowledge necessary to build the bomb as well as to procure fissile material for it.”

But the two scenarios which are most worrying intelligence experts are elsewhere.

The first scenario involves a radicalisation process developing within the system itself. The consensus is that an Islamic Revolution is impossible, but chaos and anarchy in Pakistan could destabilise the country to a point where people could view the nuclear issue in another light.

This is why the Pakistani government decided to deal with the Swat Valley rebellion so determinedly. The idea that the Taliban could win the hearts and minds of the people was seen as a threat. The Pakistani and American governments entirely agree on the need to ensure that the Swat Valley experience does not repeat itself.

The second and by far the most worrying scenario does not just involve Pakistan’s internal affairs. It involves India too.

What intelligence agencies fear the most is that another massive wave of terrorist attacks in India and organized inside Pakistan could, in a worst-case scenario, provoke high tensions and even war between India and Pakistan.

This could lead to a situation in which Pakistan relieves the pressure on the Taliban and leaves them free to roam the country to defend it.

This in its turn could result in extremely dangerous circumstances in which the Pakistani Army may need to transfer and prepare several armed and prepared weapons at once, all of this done by people whose frustration with an eventual war’s progress could lead them to consider the Taliban as a means of helping them to attack India.

It is thought that this is the scenario which the United States and other countries fear the most.