WikiLeaks Revelation: How US Policy in Pakistan Heightens the Risk of Nuclear Attack

There are few scenarios more frightening for America than a domestic nuclear terrorist incident, which could kill tens of thousands of people, devastate the economy and turn America into a police state. And the greatest potential source of nuclear materials for such an incident lies in Pakistan. As a March 2010 Harvard study reported, Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile “faces a greater threat from Islamic extremists seeking nuclear weapons than any other nuclear stockpile on earth.”

The single most significant revelation of the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks is thus that U.S. policy is actually increasing the danger of a nuclear incident. The cables reveal that the U.S. has so alienated the Pakistani people that their government fears cooperating with Washington on nuclear matters; that the U.S.-India nuclear energy agreement  has convinced Pakistani officials to enlarge their already unstable nuclear stockpile; and that Washington has expanded U.S. military operations into Pakistan in a way that Ambassador Anne Patterson herself secretly admitted “risks destabilizing the Pakistani state” (9-23-09 cable). These newly disclosed official U.S. cables, which strongly point to the growing threat to Americans from mismanaged U.S. policy, require urgent congressional hearings, greater media investigation and public protest.

The assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer  by an extremist, supported by large sectors of Pakistani public opinion, as well as the rest of Taseer’s bodyguards, is an urgent wakeup call about the growing danger to the security of Pakistani nukes from the 120-130,000 Pakistanis working at nuclear sites. Steve Coll has reported in the New Yorker that “Pakistan’s Personnel Reliability Programs, as they are known in the nuclear security trade, involve not only evaluating the suitability of bodyguards for governors but also the management of the country’s swelling stockpile of fissile materials and nuclear bombs. Taseer’s betrayal should give pause to those officials in Washington who seem regularly to express complacency, or at least satisfaction, about the security of Pakistan’s arsenal.”

Despite this, however, the Obama Administration is still pushing for the very policies that are destabilizing Pakistan and its nuclear materials – as revealed by the Wikileaks cable. While outside observers have criticized U.S. policy towards Pakistan, the critical importance of the Wikileaks cables is that they offer official proof that (1) U.S. and allied experts are extremely worried about the instability of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile; and (2) U.S. policy is destabilizing both Pakistan and its nuclear materials, and thus endangering U.S. national security.