Pakistan's Nuclear Future: Reining in the Risk

With any attempt to assess security threats, there is a natural tendency to focus first on the worst. Consider the most recent appraisals of Pakistans nuclear program. Normally, the risk of war between Pakistan and India and possible nuclear escalation would be bad enough. Now, however, most American security experts are riveted on the frightening possibility of Pakistani nuclear weapons capabilities falling into the hands of terrorists intent on attacking the United States. Presented with the horrific implications of such an attack, the American public and media increasingly have come to view nearly all Pakistani security issues through this lens. Public airing of these fears, in turn, appear now to be influencing terrorist operations in Pakistan. Unfortunately, a nuclear terrorist act is only one--and hardly the most probable--of several frightening security threats Pakistan now faces or poses. We know that traditional acts of terrorism and conventional military crises in South West Asia have nearly escalated into wars and, more recently, even threatened Indian and Pakistani nuclear use. Certainly, the war jitters that attended the recent terrorist attacks against Mumbai highlighted the nexus between conventional terrorism and war. For several weeks, the key worry in Washington was that India and Pakistan might not be able to avoid war. Similar concerns were raised during the Kargil crisis in 1999 and the Indo-Pakistani conventional military tensions that arose in 2001 and 2002--crises that most analysts including those who contributed to this volume believe could have escalated into nuclear conflicts. This book is meant to take as long a look at these threats as possible. Its companion volume, Worries Beyond War, published last year, focused on the challenges of Pakistani nuclear terrorism. These analyses offer a window into what is possible and why Pakistani nuclear terrorism is best seen as a lesser included threat to war, and terrorism more generally.