Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials.

But with the future of that country’s leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying about whether Washington has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Pakistan’s reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort.

The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training of Pakistani personnel in the United States and the construction of a nuclear security training center in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this year.

A raft of equipment — from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment — was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material, its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of nuclear proliferation in the atomic age.

While American officials say that they believe the arsenal is safe at the moment, and that they take at face value Pakistani assurances that security is vastly improved, in many cases the Pakistani government has been reluctant to show American officials how or where the gear is actually used.

That is because the Pakistanis do not want to reveal the locations of their weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel the country is now producing.

The American program was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration debated whether to share with Pakistan one of the crown jewels of American nuclear protection technology, known as “permissive action links,” or PALS, a system used to keep a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorizations.

In the end, despite past federal aid to France and Russia on delicate points of nuclear security, the administration decided that it could not share the system with the Pakistanis because of legal restrictions.

In addition, the Pakistanis were suspicious that any American-made technology in their warheads could include a secret “kill switch,” enabling the Americans to turn off their weapons.

While many nuclear experts in the federal government favored offering the PALS system because they considered Pakistan’s arsenal among the world’s most vulnerable to terrorist groups, some administration officials feared that sharing the technology would teach Pakistan too much about American weaponry. The same concern kept the Clinton administration from sharing the technology with China in the early 1990s.

The New York Times has known details of the secret program for more than three years, based on interviews with a range of American officials and nuclear experts, some of whom were concerned that Pakistan’s arsenal remained vulnerable. The newspaper agreed to delay publication of the article after considering a request from the Bush administration, which argued that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.

Since then, some elements of the program have been discussed in the Pakistani news media and in a presentation late last year by the leader of Pakistan’s nuclear safety effort, Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who acknowledged receiving “international” help as he sought to assure Washington that all of the holes in Pakistan’s nuclear security infrastructure had been sealed.

The Times told the administration last week that it was reopening its examination of the program in light of those disclosures and the current instability in Pakistan. Early this week, the White House withdrew its request that publication be withheld, though it was unwilling to discuss details of the program.

In recent days, American officials have expressed confidence that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is well secured. “I don’t see any indication right now that security of those weapons is in jeopardy, but clearly we are very watchful, as we should be,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday.

Admiral Mullen’s carefully chosen words, a senior administration official said, were based on two separate intelligence assessments issued this month that had been summarized in briefings to Mr. Bush. Both concluded that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was safe under current conditions, and one also looked at laboratories and came to the same conclusion.

Still, the Pakistani government’s reluctance to provide access has limited efforts to assess the situation. In particular, some American experts say they have less ability to look into the nuclear laboratories where highly enriched uranium is produced — including the laboratory named for Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Pakistan’s nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The secret program was designed by the Energy Department and the State Department, and it drew heavily from the effort over the past decade to secure nuclear weapons, stockpiles and materials in Russia and other former Soviet states. Much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if it left secure areas.

But while Pakistan is formally considered a “major non-NATO ally,” the program has been hindered by a deep suspicion among Pakistan’s military that the secret goal of the United States was to gather intelligence about how to locate and, if necessary, disable Pakistan’s arsenal, which is the pride of the country.

“Everything has taken far longer than it should,” a former official involved in the program said in a recent interview, “and you are never sure what you really accomplished.”

So far, the amount the United States has spent on the classified nuclear security program, less than $100 million, amounts to slightly less than one percent of the roughly $10 billion in known American aid to Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of that money has gone for assistance in counterterrorism activities against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The debate over sharing nuclear security technology began just before then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was sent to Islamabad after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan.

“There were a lot of people who feared that once we headed into Afghanistan, the Taliban would be looking for these weapons,” said a senior official who was involved. But a legal analysis found that aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — even if it was just with protective gear — would violate both international and American law.

General Musharraf, in his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” published last year, did not discuss any equipment, training or technology offered then, but wrote: “We were put under immense pressure by the United States regarding our nuclear and missile arsenal. The Americans’ concerns were based on two grounds. First, at this time they were not very sure of my job security, and they dreaded the possibility that an extremist successor government might get its hands on our strategic nuclear arsenal. Second, they doubted our ability to safeguard our assets.”

General Musharraf was more specific in an interview two years ago for a Times documentary, “Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” Asked about the equipment and training provided by Washington, he said, “Frankly, I really don’t know the details.” But he added: “This is an extremely sensitive matter in Pakistan. We don’t allow any foreign intrusion in our facilities. But, at the same time, we guarantee that the custodial arrangements that we brought about and implemented are already the best in the world.”

Now that concern about General Musharraf’s ability to remain in power has been rekindled, so has the debate inside and outside the Bush administration about how much the program accomplished, and what it left unaccomplished. A second phase of the program, which would provide more equipment, helicopters and safety devices, is already being discussed in the administration, but its dimensions have not been determined.

Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the United States’ nuclear arms, argued that recent federal reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more dangerous.

“Lawyers say it’s classified,” Dr. Agnew said in an interview. “That’s nonsense. We should share this technology. Anybody who joins the club should be helped to get this.”

“Whether it’s India or Pakistan or China or Iran,” he added, “the most important thing is that you want to make sure there is no unauthorized use. You want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can’t use them without proper authorization.”

In the past, officials say, the United States has shared ideas — but not technologies — about how to make the safeguards that lie at the heart of American weapons security. The system hinges on what is essentially a switch in the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code that starts a timer for the weapon’s arming and detonation.

Most switches disable themselves if the sequence of numbers entered turns out to be incorrect in a fixed number of tries, much like a bank ATM does. In some cases, the disabled link sets off a small explosion in the warhead to render it useless. Delicate design details involve how to bury the link deep inside a weapon to keep terrorists or enemies from disabling the safeguard.

The most famous case of nuclear idea sharing involves France. Starting in the early 1970s, the United States government began a series of highly secretive discussions with French scientists to help them improve the country’s warheads.

A potential impediment to such sharing was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars cooperation between nations on weapons technology.

To get around such legal prohibitions, Washington came up with a system of “negative guidance,” sometimes called “20 questions,” as detailed in a 1989 article in Foreign Policy. The system let United States scientists listen to French descriptions of warhead approaches and give guidance about whether the French were on the right track.

Nuclear experts say sharing also took place after the cold war when the United States worried about the security of Russian nuclear arms and facilities. In that case, both countries declassified warhead information to expedite the transfer of safety and security information, according to federal nuclear scientists.

But in the case of China, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s and is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Clinton administration decided that sharing PALS would be too risky. Experts inside the administration feared the technology would improve the Chinese warheads, and could give the Chinese insights into how American systems worked.

Officials said Washington debated sharing security techniques with Pakistan on at least two occasions — right after it detonated its first nuclear arms in 1998, and after the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001.

The debates pitted atomic scientists who favored technical sharing against federal officials at such places as the State Department who ruled that the transfers were illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and under United States law.

In the 1998 case, the Clinton administration still hoped it could roll back Pakistan’s nuclear program, forcing it to give up the weapons it had developed. That hope, never seen as very realistic, has been entirely given up by the Bush administration.

The nuclear proliferation conducted by Mr. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who built a huge network to spread Pakistani technology, convinced the Pakistanis that they needed better protections.

“Among the places in the world that we have to make sure we have done the maximum we can do, Pakistan is at the top of the list,” said John E. McLaughlin, who served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, and played a crucial role in the intelligence collection that led to Mr. Khan’s downfall.

“I am confident of two things,” he added. “That the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it.”

David S. Broder
Washington Post
November 18, 2007

During Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was given a chance to answer the question about offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Before CNN’s Wolf Blitzer turned to him, several of Richardson’s rivals had wrestled with the question that had thrown Sen. Hillary Clinton for a loop in the previous debate, triggering two weeks of complaints that she was being dodgy.

Clearly intent on setting that notion to rest, she answered this time with a monosyllable, “No.” Her governor, Eliot Spitzer, had abandoned the plan a day earlier, so she was joining the retreat.

Instead, it was Sen. Barack Obama who seemed flummoxed, At first, he acknowledged that he had voted as an Illinois state senator to require undocumented aliens to “get trained, get a license, get insurance to protect public safety.” But a moment later, confusingly, he said, “I am not proposing that that’s what we do.” And finally, he said, “Yes.”

Former Sen. John Edwards objected to the question, then said, “No, but … anyone who’s on the path to earning American citizenship should be able to have a driver’s license.”

Sen. Chris Dodd said, “I think driver’s licenses are the wrong thing to be doing, in terms of attracting people to come here as undocumented.”

Rep. Dennis Kucinich objected to the question because “there aren’t any illegal human beings,” and, after an irrelevant swipe at NAFTA, ended up agreeing with Edwards.

And then came Richardson, who said that four years ago, when the Legislature sent him a bill allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, “I signed it. My law enforcement people said it’s a matter of public safety. … We wanted more people to be insured. When we started with this program, 33 percent of New Mexicans were uninsured. Today, it’s 11 percent. Traffic fatalities have gone down. It’s a matter of public safety. States have to act when the federal government and Congress doesn’t act (on comprehensive immigration reform).”

Blitzer then turned to Sen. Joe Biden, whose whole answer, like Clinton’s, was, “No.”

And, of course, none of the other candidates was ever asked, “What about the public safety argument cited by Richardson?”

That is revealing of the weakness of these debates as tools for helping voters decide which candidate to support. The TV impresarios are so eager for headlines, they rarely pause to ask the candidates for evidence to support their opinions or assertions. It is bang-bang, but rarely because-and-here’s-proof.

On driver’s licenses, Richardson offered such proof, but in another case, he did not. His “solution” to Iraq is to pull out all U.S. troops and contractors within a year and leave it to “an all-Muslim, all-Arab peacekeeping force, with some European forces, headed by the U.N.”

Well, it’s a nice idea, but such a force exists only in Richardson’s imagination – and none is likely to materialize. But he is not called upon to explain.

Three weeks ago, it was Clinton “stumbling.” On Thursday, she was feisty and aggressive, flinging her own accusations of mud-slinging at Edwards and Obama, and finding inconsistencies in their positions.

In all the sound and fury, several important points were lost. The candidates circled around – but never directly engaged – the question of whether it is realistic, effective and practical to mandate that every family in the country obtain health insurance – and if so, how it would be financed.

As to international policy, we learned along the way that Clinton is more hard-line than her main rivals, not only on her willingness to keep a substantial residual force in Iraq, but in her belief that national security trumps human rights as a priority for American foreign policy. No Jimmy Carter she.

But the implications of these positions go unexplored, because there’s always another candidate, another topic, another headline clamoring for attention.

I suspect these candidates are better than they have looked, and that they’d have reasons to give, if they had time to utter them. I know the voters deserve better. Can’t these debates be rescued?

Panel’s report sees ‘irreversible’ effects

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, right, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra Pachauri present the panel’s synthesis report on climate change after the IPCC XXVII closing ceremony Saturday in Valencia, Spain. Associated Press (Associated Press )

Laurie Goering
Chicago Tribune
November 18, 2007

As concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere accelerate ahead of scientists’ projections, global warming is unequivocally under way, with potentially “abrupt or irreversible” effects looming, a Nobel Prize-winning United Nations panel on climate change reported Saturday.

The world still has time to avoid the most severe effects of climate change, however, if it can rapidly deploy existing and soon-expected new technology to cut carbon emissions, something that probably would require setting a price on carbon emissions to be effective, the Synthesis Report’s authors said.

Without such action, “unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt,” the report warns.

The document, a synopsis of three climate reports released earlier this year by the thousands of scientists who make up the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is intended as a succinct policy guide on the risks of climate change and the possible means to mitigate or adapt to it.

Policymakers, set to meet in December in Bali, Indonesia, are expected to use the report as their baseline to begin the tortuous process of trying to replace the expiring and largely ineffective Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions with a new and more effective world plan to slow climate change.

“We cannot afford to leave Bali without such a breakthrough,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in Valencia, Spain, after the report’s release Saturday. The potential consequences of quickening climate change are “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent global action will do,” he said. He called the problem “the defining challenge of our age.”

The report paints a grim picture of what the world might look like if policymakers – and in particular major polluters such as the United States, China and India – fail to act quickly to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“This report will have an incredible political impact,” said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate change official. “It’s a signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore.”

Without action, rises in sea level will accelerate, forcing millions of people out of low-lying coastal regions. Worsening droughts, severe storms and water shortages will affect many regions of the world, and changing conditions are likely to put at least 20 to 30 percent of the world’s species – including virtually all its coral reefs – on the route to extinction, the report said.

Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already are the highest in 650,000 years, the report said, and emissions are expected to grow 25 to 90 percent by 2030, even taking into account current efforts to cut them.

That suggests that if accelerating levels of emissions aren’t cut soon, the world could see catastrophic changes, including the complete melting of Greenland’s ice sheet and a worldwide sea level rise of 20 feet, within a few hundred years. Less dramatic effects would be widely noticeable by 2030 or even 2020, the report said.

Most at risk are the Arctic, which is on the path to being ice-free in late summer; sub-Saharan Africa, with little money or ability to adapt to predicted changes; low-lying small islands, which face inundation, and the huge river deltas of Asia and Africa, where tens of millions of people in low-lying areas face rising seas, storm surges, river flooding and risk becoming climate refugees, the report said.

Already, “there is high confidence that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change impacts,” the report said, noting that some changes, such as the melting of glaciers, are happening much faster than scientific predictions.

Lowering worldwide greenhouse gas emissions can be done at moderate cost but only if it is done quickly, the report said. That would require, among other things, quickly reorienting decisions on $20 trillion worth of energy infrastructure investment planned between now and 2030, and rapidly testing as many technologies to cut carbon emissions as possible.

Establishing a cost for emitting greenhouse gases – a “price of carbon” – could take advantage of market mechanisms to help drive emissions cuts, the report said, noting that the costs of inaction are likely to be much higher than the costs of acting now.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the climate panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore earlier this year, urged “a new ethic by which every human being realizes the importance of the challenge we are facing and starts to take action through changes in lifestyle and attitude.”

The United States opted out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that the science was unproven and that the burden of mandatory emission cuts was unfair since it excluded fast-growing China and India.

Chief U.S. delegate Sharon Hays said doubts have been dispelled. “What’s changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,” she said in a conference call late Friday. She did not indicate that Washington would abandon its policy of voluntary emission cuts.