The New York Times has an excellent symposium up on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. This point from Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who headed up the office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy under President Bush, is particularly concerning:
“Twice since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. taken action to break up networks inside Pakistan’s nuclear establishment who were collaborating with outsiders in efforts to help them build bombs. In both cases, rogue senior officials and their cohorts in the nuclear establishment were not caught by Pakistan’s military, security and intelligence establishment.
The network run by the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, channeled sensitive nuclear technologies to Libya, North Korea and Iran for years under the noses of the Pakistani establishment, before it was taken down in 2003.
The second case involved the Umma-Tameer-E-Nau, which was founded by Pakistani nuclear scientists with close ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
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