Who's Got the Nukes, Redux -- A Commentary

Show of Force: Pakistan's Shaheen II missile, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, was shown in an Islamabad parade last year. Anjum Naveed/AP

From In From The Cold:

Writing in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton reminds us that the Taliban's recent gains in Pakistan bring them closer to the unthinkable--control of that country and its nuclear arsenal.

In his op-ed, Mr. Bolton outlines two disturbing scenarios:

One scenario is that instability continues to grow, and that the radicals disrupt both Pakistan's weak democratic institutions and the military.

Often known as Pakistan's "steel skeleton" for holding the country together after successive corrupt or incompetent civilian governments, the military itself is now gravely threatened from within by rising pro-Taliban sentiment. In these circumstances -- especially if, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified recently, the nuclear arsenal has been dispersed around the country -- there is a tangible risk that several weapons could slip out of military control. Such weapons could then find their way to al Qaeda or other terrorists, with obvious global implications.

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My Comment: In From The Cold hits it on the nail with his two paragraph summary at the end with the key sentence being the following.

... the U.S. doesn't have definitive intelligence on the whereabouts of Pakistan's nukes.

I think he is right.