Pakistan persists with nuclear as extremists circle

PAKISTAN is expanding its nuclear bomb-making facilities despite growing international concern that advancing Islamist extremists could overrun its atomic weapons plants or seize sufficient radioactive material to make a dirty bomb, US nuclear experts and former officials say.

David Albright, a former senior weapons inspector for the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq, said commercial satellite photos showed two plutonium-producing reactors were nearing completion at Khushab, about 260 kilometres south-west of Islamabad.

"In the current climate, with Pakistan's leadership under duress from daily acts of violence by insurgent Taliban forces and organised political opposition, the security of any nuclear material produced in these reactors is in question," Mr Albright said in a report issued by the independent Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

"Current US policy, focused primarily on shoring up Pakistan's resources for fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, has had the unfortunate effect of turning the US into more of a concerned bystander of Pakistan's expansion of its ability to produce nuclear weapons," he said in the report, co-authored with Paul Brannan.

The Khushab reactors are situated on the border of Punjab and North-West Frontier province, the scene of heavy fighting between Taliban and government forces. Another allegedly vulnerable facility is the Gadwal uranium enrichment plant, less than 96 kilometres south of Buner district, where some of the fiercest clashes have taken place in recent days.

Uncertainty has long surrounded Pakistan's nuclear stockpile. The country is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty or the comprehensive test ban treaty.

Nor has it submitted its nuclear facilities to international inspection since joining the nuclear club in 1998, when it detonated five nuclear devices. It is estimated to have about 200 atomic bombs.

US Administration officials would not say whether the issue of Pakistan's nuclear security would be raised during the first scheduled meeting between Pakistan's President, Asif Ali Zardari, and Barack Obama in Washington tomorrow.

Mr Zardari heads the country's National Command Authority, the mix of political, military and intelligence leaders responsible for its nuclear arsenal.

But his command and control over the weapons are considered tenuous at best; that power lies primarily in the hands of the army chief-of-staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the former director of Inter-Services Intelligence, the country's intelligence agency.

The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, told Congress recently that Pakistan had dispersed its nuclear warheads across the country to improve security. But several US officials said they were worried that if the weapons were moved, an insider could tip off insurgents.

However, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, dismissed the warnings, saying: "The spectre of extremist Taliban taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan is not only a gross exaggeration, it could also lead to misguided policy prescriptions from Pakistan's allies."