Pakistan's nuclear bases targeted by al-Qaeda Report Says

Pakistan’s nuclear weapon bases have been attacked by al-Qaeda and the Taliban at least three times in the last two years, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

The allegations, by a leading British expert on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, increased fears that terrorists could acquire a nuclear device or could trigger a nuclear disaster by bombing an atomic facility.

Dean Nelson wrote in a paper for the respected anti-terrorism journal of America’s West Point Military Academy, Professor Gregory, director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at Bradford University, detailed three attacks since November 2007 and raised spectre of more incidents could be happened in the future.

He said in The Daily Telegraph that militants had struck a nuclear storage facility at Sarghoda on 1 Nov 2007; launched a suicide bomb assault on a nuclear air base at Kamra on 10 December 2007; and set off explosions at entrance points to Wah containment, one of Pakistan’s main nuclear assembly plants in August 2008.

However, Dr Anupam Srivastava, director of the centre for international Trade and Security at Georgia University, who has advised the US government on nuclear security issues, told The Daily Telegraph he believed there had been more than three attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities and the al-Qaeda militants would intensify its assaults.

The attack on Wah, Dean Nelson wrote that was at the time as the deadliest terrorist strike against Pakistan’s armed forces, with 63 people killed in two suicide bombing.
The target was referred to as major conventional weapons and ammunition on manufacturing factory, but Prof Gregory and other analysts do not agree and said it is in fact an assembly plant for nuclear warheads.

“These sites are all identified by various authorities as nuclear weapons or related sites,” Prof Gregory said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons establishments are protected with heavily armed soldiers who patrol a wide security cordon, while inside state-of-the-art sensors intruders.
Other security facilities including employees are screened by vetting staff from its Strategic Plans Division and officials from its ISI intelligence service.

Warheads, detonators and launch vehicles are stored separately to prevent them being seized together.

However despite this “robust” security system, Prof Gregory said the facilities remain vulnerable because they re located in areas where “Taliban and Qaeda are more than capable of launching terrorist attack”, The Daily Telegraph reports.