UNDER THE RADAR – AT 9:06 A.M. ET:  A remarkable, and disturbing, event in Pakistant came in under the radar last week, but its implications are just beginning to be understood.  This is important, from Financial Times:

The brazen attack on a Pakistani naval air base has sent shockwaves through the nuclear-armed country, raising concerns about the military’s ability to protect sophisticated weaponry.

The ease with which six Taliban militants stormed the PNS Mehran base in Karachi, close to the city’s busy commercial airport, and destroyed two newly US-supplied P-3C Orion maritime surveillance aircraft has unnerved Pakistan’s military establishment...

...Pakistan’s security establishment insists that the nuclear arsenal is carefully guarded.

Some analysts, however, argue that nuclear material used in the earlier phases of weapons production is more vulnerable.

“There is more concern about the plutonium and highly enriched uranium in production facilities and laboratories, which involve considerably more people and facilities that aren’t as protected as well as military bases,” said David Albright at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

“You [would worry that militants] could try to seize a reactor in order to have a very visible suicide mission where they could threaten to damage the reactor or cause a massive radiation release.”

COMMENT:  Or, they could steal nuclear material.  Please remember that building a nuclear weapon is an engineering project, not a scientific project.  The science is well known.  What militant groups need is the materials and the expertise at assembly.  Pakistan has both, and Pakistan is growing increasingly unstable. 

We simply don't take this seriously enough.  We speak of WMD, weapons of mass destruction, as if it's an abstraction.  The nuclear weapon, though, does exactly what it's supposed to do.  If two were floated into American harbors in the holds of vessels, on the same day, and set off by suicide crews, the resulting devastation would be greater than any we have experienced in our history.  We could lose, in one moment, more people than we have lost in all American wars put together. 

That is the nuclear nightmare.  And now, with Iran apparently supplying missiles to Venezuela, that nightmare can grow in our own backyard.

May 24, 2011