Pakistan Reshuffles Weapons Program

Pakistan became the world’s seventh declared nuclear power in a showdown with India in 1998. Now, Pakistan has moved its nuclear weapons program out of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and into the new National Defense Complex (NDC). The move separates the country’s unclassified and clandestine nuclear programs.

At the same time, the government reassigned two top figures from the bomb program. Pervez Musharraf, the general who took over Pakistan in a bloodless coup two years ago, appointed Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, and Ishfaq Ahmed, chairman of the PAEC, as his special science and technology advisers. The positions have the rank of a cabinet minister.

Khan is frequently described as a national hero and is widely regarded as being an irreplaceable leader of Pakistan’s weapons program. He has headed the country’s premier uranium enrichment facility, the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL), since the 1970s, and has said he doesn’t want to leave. “Dr. Khan was very unhappy and complained publicly of being mistreated,” according to Pervez Hoodbhoy, a high-energy physicist at Quaid-I-Azam University in Islamabad. Hoodbhoy says he believes that the new appointments for Khan and Ahmed are compensation for being forced out of the nuclear bomb program. In an effort to dispel such rumors, General Musharraf gave a speech praising Khan shortly after the appointments were announced.

Replacing Khan and Ahmed are two scientists who are relatively unknown outside of Pakistan. Javed Mirza, an experimental nuclear physicist who served as Khan’s deputy, is the new head of the KRL. And Pervez Butt, a nuclear engineer, has taken over as chairman of the PAEC, which now conducts only civilian research. The NDC, the new center for military research, is headed by Samar Mubarakmand, a nuclear scientist from PAEC who helped develop Pakistan’s medium-range ballistic missiles. He reports not to General Musharraf, but to the National Security Council, which oversees Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Mubarakmand insists publicly that no domestic or international interference in the program will be tolerated.

Some analysts argue that the changes reflect a signal by Pakistan that it is willing to put its nuclear material under international safeguards and move closer to signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Pakistan has been under intense pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to reduce its military program. However, Uzair Haque, a representative of the government-run Pakistan Institute for Air Defense Studies, disputes this interpretation. “At first, the political opposition in Pakistan was under the impression that this was the beginning of a rollback of Pakistan’s nuclear program,” he says. “This is not the case.”