nuclear-news

The danger of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons situation

Which sinks the U.S. into the nadir of absurdity. It funds a terrorist-sponsoring state while conducting a massive undeclared war on part of that state’s territory. It wants that state’s assistance to end the Afghanistan war while that state’s soldiers help insurgents wage it. And seeking a world without nuclear weapons while its “Major Non-NATO Ally” drastically increases the probability that terrorists will acquire a the most dangerous weapon of all.

Pakistan Carts Its Nukes Around In Delivery Vans, Wired.com By Spencer Ackerman  November 4, 2011 Pakistan is taking nuclear paranoia to a horrifying new low. And it’s making the world a vastly more dangerous place in the process.
Freaked out about the insecurity of its nuclear arsenal, the Pakistani military’s Strategic Plans Division has begun carting the nukes around in clandestine ways. That might make some sense on the surface: no military wants to let others know exactly where its most powerful weapons are at any given moment. But Pakistan is going to an extreme.

The nukes travel “in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic,” according to a blockbuster story on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in The Atlantic. Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg write that tactical nuclear weapons travel down the streets in “vans with a modest security profile.” Somewhere on a highway around, say, Karachi, is the world’s most dangerous 1-800-FLOWERS truck…..

the self-reinforcing downward spiral of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. U.S. cash continues to go into the Pakistanis’ pockets, and from there into the hands of anti-American terrorists. There is, for many justified reasons, absolutely no trust between either side’s security services and militaries. There is also no alternative to the toxic relationship that anyone cited in the Atlantic piece is willing to contemplate. (When I recently suggested that the U.S. cut off aid and continue the drone war until Pakistan reins in terror groups, I got blasted on Twitter as a warmonger.) “There is no escaping this vexed relationship,” Ambinder and Goldberg conclude, reflecting the conventional wisdom in Washington and Islamabad.

Which sinks the U.S. into the nadir of absurdity. It funds a terrorist-sponsoring state while conducting a massive undeclared war on part of that state’s territory. It wants that state’s assistance to end the Afghanistan war while that state’s soldiers help insurgents wage it. And seeking a world without nuclear weapons while its “Major Non-NATO Ally” drastically increases the probability that terrorists will acquire a the most dangerous weapon of all.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/pakistan-nukes-delivery-vans/

November 5, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Pakistan, weapons and war