Obama’s arms-control aide calls Pakistan his chief worry

President Obama’s top adviser on preventing nuclear terrorism has declared Pakistan to be his biggest source of concern. Gary Samore serves as special assistant to the president and White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, proliferation, and terrorism. He told an audience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the possibility of Pakistan losing control of a nuclear weapon is “the thing that keeps me up at night.” With Pakistan’s unstable government intending to expand its nuclear weapons program, he warned on 19 October, “things could go bad very quickly in South Asia.” But the US has “extremely limited policy tools” to wield in attempting to defuse the threat Pakistan presents, he admitted.

Despite that assessment, Samore said he spends most of his time dealing with Iran’s nuclear program, which the US and its allies maintain is focused on nuclear weapons. Economic sanctions imposed by the UN have “probably slowed [Iran’s] program down by a few years,” he said. The discovery of a second, secret underground uranium enrichment facility in Iran “shook up” Russia and convinced the formerly skeptical nation that its neighbor to the south has nuclear weapons ambitions, he said.

Samore went on to say that persuading existing nuclear weapons states to give up their arsenals will not be possible as long as sovereign nations view them as essential to deterrence and defense. Until then, world powers must prevent the further spread of fissile material production technologies to nations such as Iran. Countries with the capability to produce nuclear fuel should supply reactor fuel to countries that aspire to generate nuclear energy, as the US will do under a recently signed bilateral agreement with the United Arab Emirates.

The world was “extraordinarily lucky” that neither nuclear weapons nor significant amounts of fissile material got into the hands of terrorists following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Samore said. Except for “a couple of cases” in the early 1990s involving kilogram quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium from former Soviet states, which were broken up by police, the vast majority of nuclear smuggling incidents have been “bogus,” he said.

David Kramer