US war game mulls options for securing Pak N-stockpile

WASHINGTON: Amidst concerns that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal may fall into hands of non-state actors, a classified war game in the US has concluded that "there are no palatable ways to forcibly ensure the security of Islamabad's nuclear weapons."
 
The classified war game by US military experts and intelligence officials in Washington explored strategies for securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if the country's political institutions and military safeguards began to fall apart.
 
"The conclusion of last year's game was that there are no palatable ways to forcibly ensure the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons -- and that even studying scenarios for intervention could worsen the risks by undermining US-Pakistani cooperation," said a former Pentagon official on condition of anonymity.
 
"It's an unbelievably daunting problem," said this participant in the secret exercise, conducted without official sponsorship from any government agency apparently due to the sensitivity of its subject.
 
The contingency plans that do exist, he added, are at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, and are in "very close hold," he said.
 
Even so, planners really haven't developed answers for how to deal with nuclear weapons stashed in Pakistan's big cities and high mountain ranges, he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post in a report on Sunday.
 
The report said the secret exercise was one of several such games the US government has conducted in recent years examining various options and scenarios for Pakistan's nuclear weapons:

How many troops might be required for a military intervention in Pakistan? Could Pakistani nuclear bunkers be isolated by saturating the surrounding areas with tens of thousands of high-powered mines, dropped from the air and packed with anti-tank and anti-personnel munitions? Or might such a move only worsen the security of its arsenal? 

The security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons has gained greater urgency in recent weeks as President Pervez Musharraf's move to declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution last month plunged the country into street clashes and political turmoil.
 
For several years the US government has sought to help Pakistan improve its weapons safeguards, spending tens of millions of dollars since 2001 to boost the security of the country's nuclear bunkers.
 
Although US officials express confidence in the current security measures, the more they examine the risks, the more they realize that there are no good answers, said Robert B. Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan.

"Everybody's scrambling on this," Oakley said.
 
"The bottom line is, it's the nightmare scenario," said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who participated in an earlier exercise that simulated a breakup of Pakistan.
 
"It has loose nukes, hard to find, potentially in the hands of Islamic extremists, and there aren't a lot of good military options," he was quoted as saying by the Post.
 
An expert on Pakistani terrorism who did not attend last year's war game but learned about some of its conclusions said that senior US officials "weren't pleased with what the game told them; they were quite shocked."
 
Even some steps that might appear to offer a short-term solution could backfire in the long run, warned Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief in the Pakistani capital.
 
"When you talk about US troops going in and taking out Pakistani nukes," he said, "that means we've just invaded another country."
 
Others maintain that simply holding the games may worsen the situation by antagonizing Pakistanis and by encouraging Islamabad to take countermeasures.

Retired Pakistani Brigadier Feroz Khan, who until 2001 was the second-ranking officer in the army's strategic plans division, which oversees the control of nuclear weapons, thinks such war games and exercises are "very dangerous."
 
As a result of US government studies of the nuclear issue, Pakistani officials have come to believe an American intervention "is a real threat now," Khan was quoted as saying in the report.
 
The Pakistani military almost certainly has taken steps to forestall such a raid, Khan said, such as creating phony bunkers that contain dummy nuclear warheads.
 
He estimated that Pakistan's current arsenal now contains about 80 to 120 genuine warheads, roughly double the figure usually cited by outside experts.
 
The war games conducted by the US government and by other experts offer a recurring conclusion: Retaining the cooperation of the Pakistani government, especially its military, is crucial, the Post reported.
 
The bottom line, said Oakley, the veteran diplomat, is that "the only way you can safeguard them is to work very, very closely with the Pakistani army."
 
To attack that army, he said, would erode the one institution that is keeping the weapons under control. "If you want nukes to get loose," he said, "that's the way to do it."