NEW YORK: Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified programme to help Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf secure his country's nuclear weapons, a media report said on Sunday quoting unidentified current and former senior US administration officials.
But with the future of the Pakistani leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying in Washington about whether the US has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Islamabad's reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort, the New York Times reported.
The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training of Pakistani personnel in the US and the construction of a nuclear security training centre in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this year.
"Everything has taken far longer than it should," a former official involved in the programme told the paper. "And you are never sure what you really accomplished."
A raft of equipment - from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment - was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material, its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of nuclear proliferation in the atomic age, the Times said.
While American officials say that they believe Pakistan's arsenal is safe at the moment, the report said in many cases the Musharraf regime has been reluctant to show American officials how or where the supplied gear is actually used.
That is because the Pakistanis do not want to reveal the locations of their weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel the country is now producing, the report said.
The American programme, the paper reported, was created after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration debated whether to share with Pakistan one of the crown jewels of American nuclear protection technology, known as "permissive action links", or PALS, a system used to keep a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorisations.
In the end, despite past federal aid to France and Russia on delicate points of nuclear security, the US decided that it could not share the system with the Pakistanis because of legal restrictions, it added.
In addition, the Times says the Pakistanis were suspicious that any American-made technology in their warheads could include a secret "kill switch", enabling the Americans to turn off their weapons.
While many nuclear experts in the federal government favoured offering the PALS system because they considered Pakistan's arsenal among the most vulnerable to terrorist groups, some administration officials feared that sharing the technology would teach Pakistan too much about American weaponry, the report said.
The same concern kept the Clinton administration from sharing the technology with China in the early 1990s.
The secret programme was designed by the Energy Department and the State Department, and much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if it left secure areas.
Harold M Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the US' nuclear arms, was quoted as saying that recent federal reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more dangerous.
"Lawyers say it's classified," Agnew told the paper in an interview. "That's nonsense. We should share this technology. Anybody who joins the club should be helped to get this."
"Whether it's India or Pakistan or China or Iran, you want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can't use them without proper authorisation," he said.
The system hinges on what is essentially a switch in the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code that starts a timer for the weapon's arming and detonation, the paper said.
