Where are the Nukes?
Lots of discussion on the web about Seymour Hersh's new article in The New Yorker: "The Deal: Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan's nuclear black marketers?" (Link from Tapped--Matthew Yglesias answers Rich Lowry on "proliferation" issues).
Hersh's answer, briefly, is that the U.S. will pretend to believe A.Q. Khan was a rogue scientist, selling nuclear technology on his own, in return for Musharraf allowing U.S. forces into the mountains to clear out the Taliban and find Bin Laden.
The main point of the article, however, is that nuclear proliferation has been going on among rogue states and non-state actors. There is a black market that is increasingly not under the control of any government. Pakistan and Iran are both extremely unpredictable. Robert Gallucci, "a consultant to the C.I.A. on proliferation isues, told me, 'Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group....The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran.'"
Another amazing line: a "diplomat in Vienna" said: "Iraq is laughable in comparison with this [proliferation] issue. The Bush Administration was hunting the shadows instead of the prey."
Finally, there seems to be confirmation here that Libya's Ghaddafi acquired nuclear technology only very recently, and does not seem to have actually built anything. He may have wanted an impressive bargaining chip he could play at the appropriate time, by giving up nukes, to please the Americans. He certainly got a positive reaction.
As Kevin Drum has asked: will the U.S. realy go into the mountains straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan, threatening to de-stabilize Musharraf and put a worse regime in charge of Pakistan's nukes? On the other hand: will the U.S. just keep allowing things to get steadily worse in that region, whether or not Bin Laden is rounded up?
As someone said on the web a while ago: the Pakistan-India confrontation is much more of a threat to the world than Israel vs. the Palestinians. Or to put it another way: there are Moslem populations in the world that are an actual or potential threat to the West for reasons that Churchill would have recognized 100 years ago--reasons that have nothing to do with the Jews, Zionism, or the state of Israel.
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