Last night I was watching the debate between the various Republican candidates for president of the United States. A journalist gave Texas governor Rick Perry the following hypothetical situation:
“You’re president of the United States. You’re awakened at 3:00 AM one morning with the devastating news that the Taliban has taken over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. What do you do next?”
Governor Perry handled the question well. He more or less said:
“Long before it got to that point I would have strong relationships established inside of India and Pakistan to make sure that such a thing didn’t happen.”
Admiral Mike Mullen appeared before the US Congress yesterday. He told the law makers that the Pakistan ISI had given support to the militants who carried out the attack on the US embassy in Kabul. Pakistan was enraged afterwards.
Pakistan lives in paranoid fear that India will take India will “get the upper hand” in Afghanistan. They will do anything to stop this.
Miscalculations lead to wars. A war is especially dangerous with an unstable country with up to 200 nuclear war heads. We hear all sorts of assurances from US officials who have worked in Pakistan that the Pakistani army is very professional and keeps a tight control on the nuclear warheads.
If we look at the performance of the Pakistan army in wars over the last 64 years, we see a constant pattern of ineptitude. I cannot think of one war that the Pakistanis have won against India in all of this time.
Is such a military organization really capable of securing a large and dangerous nuclear arsenal? I think not. I suspect that senior US planners feel the same way but the documents are classified so high that we will never see them.
My readers I guarantee you that the full surveillance resources of the US are turned to Pakistan. It’s probably the most watched country in the world for the US military and security apparatus. I’m sure that if we got into the heart of the Pentagon’s most secret area we would find many different war games and computer simulations dealing with Muslim militants getting control of Pakistan’s nuclear war heads.
I would guess that if Pakistani nuclear warheads were in danger of falling into the hands of Muslim militants or in the hands of Muslim militants, the US military would insert special operations teams to try to neutralize such endangered weapons. Like anything in life, there would be some success. But some weapons would escape detection.
We in the West cannot take comfort in the fact that Pakistan has no nuclear capable missiles with the range to the hit the US and Europe. A war head could be smuggled to Europe or the USA and detonated in some big city.
India could also be attacked with some of these nuclear weapons. This would lead to nuclear retaliation from India. Some 11 years ago the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica did a study on a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Casualties were estimated at 30 million. A nuclear winter lasting 5 years was predicted for the whole world. The Rand Corporation predicted an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression of the 1930’s for the whole world.
At some point Pakistan is going to serious miscalculate and their nuclear weapons will come into play. This is going to be a crisis for the whole world.
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