ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Pakistanis were laughing as a sensitive list of U.S. nuclear sites was mistakenly posted on Internet, the latest in a series of American nuclear security breaches that Pakistanis say places the United States as the world’s most dangerous nuclear power.
In 2007 a U.S. air force jet flew across the country without the pilot realizing he was carrying nuclear warheads more than ten times the Hiroshima bombs.
Pakistan’s nuclear community is yet to commit any blunders of this scale, although a Pakistani newspaper reported last week that the U.S. government secretly recruited 12 Pakistani scientists and technicians in 1978 to plan sabotage from within designed to look like a nuclear accident. The ISI aborted the CIA plan. Pakistan’s President Zia telephoned President Carter and strongly protested.
So if Pakistan ever came close to a nuclear accident, it was because of American mischief.
The U.S. media has been running an anti-Pakistan demonization campaign since 2007 and has intensified it in recent weeks with deliberate official and intelligence leaks, portraying Pakistani nuclear safeguards as weak and trying to convince the world that Pakistan was unable to protect its weapons.
The U.S. campaign is based on lies and cooked intelligence at best. Pakistan’s nuclear command and control system is probably the most advanced in the world, building on the work of the earlier nuclear powers. In fact, independent nuclear experts realize that the Pakistani nuclear command structure is more advanced than the one India has. India is a late entrant to the nuclear safeguards debate. U.S. officials were stunned during the negotiations for the U.S.-India nuclear technology transfer deal to discover how inadeuqate Indian nuclear safeguards were.