This comfortable assumption was turned on its head following Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 when U.S.-led forces attacked the offices of Al Qaeda and its supporters during the invasion of Afghanistan. Among the strategic discoveries following the Afghan invasion was the uncovering of a Kabul-based charity, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), headed by two retired Pakistani scientists with close ties to Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhri Abdul Majeed were nuclear experts whose declared aim was to provide scientific help to the Taliban. Mahmood is a Manchester-educated nuclear engineer and a former chief engineer at the Karachi nuclear power plant specialising in the design and production of nuclear fuel rods. Belgian-trained Majeed, a nuclear physicist, has also worked as an engineer and is an expert in the art of plutonium reprocessing.
Information obtained from the UTN offices in Kabul revealed how both men had held discussions with bin Laden. More detailed information was forthcoming from Mahmood, when he was questioned by intelligence experts. Majeed proved to be more elusive. He slipped out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and has yet to be interrogated.

The UTN link has confirmed Al Qaeda's nuclear hopes and aspirations. But even before the 9/11 attack and the Afghan war there was ample evidence of the terrorist group's nuclear ambitions. As far back as 1998 bin Laden is recorded as saying it was an Islamic duty to obtain weapons of mass destruction. In 2003 when Al Qaeda obtained a fatwa approving the use of weapons of mass destruction, spokesman Suleyman abu Ghayth declared it Al Qaeda's right to kill four million Americans in retaliation for those Muslims killed by the U.S.

More recently one of bin Laden's associates was asked for his response to reports about how the U.S. was planning to upgrade security at Pakistan's nuclear bases. Egyptian-born Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Al Jazeera television. 'God willing, the nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans and the mujahideen would take them and use them against the Americans.'

When U.S. strategic and intelligence experts meet in Washington for their regular reviews of the nuclear threat from Al Qaeda, they invariably start by looking at the vulnerability of the world's existing nine nuclear powers. They are the U.S., Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

The consensus is that nuclear security is as tight as could be expected in each of the nuclear powers, but a question mark always arises over Pakistan. Pakistani officials themselves react angrily to any suggestion that they are in some way less capable than others of safeguarding their nuclear assets. They also refuse to accept the hypothesis advanced in Western capitals of Islamic fundamentalists and their sympathisers working from within the army and security agencies to take control of the country and all its military, including nuclear, facilities.

According to Professor Shaun Gregory, Director of the Pakistan security research unit at Bradford University in the UK, 'Pakistan is one of the most complex and intractable security problems facing the international community. Its importance in relation to two of world's most pressing security issues — Islamic terrorism and nuclear proliferation — is difficult to overstate, as are the catastrophic consequences, regionally and internationally, which would follow the collapse of the state.'

It was Gregory who documented three recent terrorist attacks on key Pakistani nuclear centres. The first was an attack in 2007 on the Sargodha air base, home to nuclear capable F-16 jet aircraft. Soon afterwards a suicide bomber hit Pakistan's nuclear airbase at Kamra in Attock district. In August 2008 it was the turn of the nuclear warhead assembly plant at Wah cantonment where 63 people died after an attack launched by a group of suicide bombers.

These attacks and other similar scares that have not been publicised lie behind repeated and unsuccessful U.S. attempts to persuade Pakistan to share control or at least agree to some kind of external oversight of its many nuclear facilities, including reactors, enrichment and separation facilities, power plants, weapons fabrication factories and nuclear weapons storage centres. 

The Pakistani authorities have allowed teams of U.S. experts to visit some of these places and last year Islamabad also accepted a U.S. $100 million aid package to upgrade nuclear security at all relevant centres. But the Pakistanis continue to resist requests to share control of their nuclear security by allowing U.S. special combat forces to be physically present at key locations that house nuclear materials. Hence the latest American plan to create a secret U.S. commando unit under Joint Special Operations Command — known as JSOC — whose sole job will be to take control of Pakistan's estimated 80 nuclear warheads in the event of Islamabad ever falling under the control of Muslim extremists.

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