Pakistan Carts Its Nukes Around In Delivery Vans - WIRED

[Electric Monk]

Source: WIRED

(snip)

Freaked out about the insecurity of its nuclear arsenal, the Pakistani military’s Strategic Plans Division has begun carting the nukes around in clandestine ways. That might make some sense on the surface: no military wants to let others know exactly where its most powerful weapons are at any given moment. But Pakistan is going to an extreme.

The nukes travel “in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic,” according to a blockbuster story on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in The Atlantic. Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg write that tactical nuclear weapons travel down the streets in “vans with a modest security profile.” Somewhere on a highway around, say, Karachi, is the world’s most dangerous 1-800-FLOWERS truck.

Tom Clancy should be suing Pakistani generals for ripping off the basic idea behind The Sum Of All Fears. You’ll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, the leadership of the old-school Taliban, its friends in the Haqqani Network and a host of anti-Indian terrorist groups that the Pakistani intelligence service employ as proxies. Sometimes the Pakistani military helps these terrorist and insurgent groups attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And any one of these groups would love a chance to wield a nuclear weapon.

Except that Pakistan isn’t trying to safeguard its nukes from them. It’s trying to safeguard its nukes from us. The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the U.S. military’s next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term “congested and dangerous roads,” trying to throw off the scent of the U.S., with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/pakistan-nukes-delivery-vans/

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What could possibly go wrong?

[BlueJazz]

1. I wonder what would happen if I pushed this but.......

[no_hypocrisy]

2. What could go wrong? Like a CIA drone hitting a 800-Flowers truck carrying a nuke?

[spin]

4. That would be an enormous and very tragic OOPS! (n/t)

[AtheistCrusader]

6. It would PROBABLY just destroy it and release what would amount to an enormous dirty bomb.

You need a very specific chain of events for it to go critical. But crack it wide open and spread the material in the pit all over a few city blocks? Yeah, a hellfire could do that.

[boppers]

12. I guess enormous is relative?

Considering the cost of generating pit material, it would be well worth Pakistan's cost to recover every single gram of physical material over those blocks, for sorting and re-constitution.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

3. I wonder if we can track them.

[jaysunb]

5. Cmon...nobody could be that stupid.

Really ! Really ???

:rofl:

[UnrepentantLiberal]

7. Wait, this is the plot of a slapstick farce, right?

Like dude, they're stealing the van!

[Hugabear]

8. They have every reason to think the US would try to steal its nukes

We've already shown that we don't give a shit about Pakistani sovereignty.

[Kolesar]

11. Pakastani terrorists attacked the Indian parliament a few years ago

They killed people , IIRC
Terrorists/operatives

[Lurks Often]

9. Maybe not just the U.S.

I forgot where I read it, but I remember reading something to the effect that there was a plan for US forces to seize or render unusable Pakistan's nuclear weapons if there was a likelihood that a, for lack of a better word, "responsible" Pakistani government was in danger of being overthrown by extreme Islamic fundamentalists who would be willing (or even eager) to use those weapons.

It also won't surprise me if India and maybe even China had similar plans locked away somewhere.

It is prudent to have contingency plans, even if no one wants to have to use them.

[Ian David]

10. From Stargate: SG-1

http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Rand_Protectorate

[cosmicone]

13. This is too comical

If the communications infrastructure is destroyed or severely jammed (which is the first thing an enemy would do), the military won't be able to reach its arsenal to fire hahaha.