Pat Dollard | Young Americans

WASHINGTON, Nov 11 (AFP) Nov 11, 2007

The United States has developed contingency plans to safeguard Pakistani nuclear weapons if they risk falling into the wrong hands, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

But US officials worry their limited knowledge about the location of the arsenal could pose a problem, it said, a week after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency.

“We can’t say with absolute certainty that we know where they all are,” the newspaper quoted an unnamed former US official as saying.

As for any US effort to seize and secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the official said: “It could be very messy.”

US officials and lawmakers have voiced increasing alarm that the Pakistani government could lose control over its nuclear arsenal amid the mounting political crisis there.

“I’m very concerned about it. Not immediately, but over the next year to two years,” Senator Joseph Biden, a Democratic presidential contender, said on CNN, arguing that the United States needed to shore up moderates in Pakistan.

Islamabad, Washington’s key ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, is believed to have about 50 nuclear-armed weapons, an arsenal it began assembling after detonating its first nuclear devices in May 1998.

There is no evidence that any of the weapons, said to be spread out in various locations around the country, currently are at risk. But the volatile political climate has US officials worried.

Pakistan also is suspected of selling atomic secrets on a global black market headed by its disgraced chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

US intelligence agencies have over time prepared contingency plans for possible action to prevent the theft of a nuclear weapon in Pakistan, two “knowledgeable officials” told the Washington Post.

Under a more optimistic scenario for possible intervention, the Pakistani military would help the US military in its effort, the Post said. In other cases, that kind of assistance might not be forthcoming, it said.

“We’re a long way from any scenario of that kind,” Matt Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert and former White House science official under former president Bill Clinton, was quoted as saying.

“But the current turmoil highlights the need for doing whatever we can right now to improve cooperation and think hard about what might happen down the road.”

Officials in the US administration and former government officials say Pakistan’s stockpile is secure but express worry over increasing divisions within Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership, the report said.

“We will watch that very closely,” Lieutenant General Carter Ham, Director of Operations with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday, arguing that the situation was inherently perilous given Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

Democratic Representative Ellen Tauscher, after being briefed in Congress last week on the state of the Pakistan nuclear program, said: “I have learned that we don’t have as a strong handle on it as I thought we do.

“We need a lot more visibility on what’s going on in Pakistan. They have nuclear weapons and it is such a volatile part of the world,” she said.