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Pakistani leaders, a CIA veteran, experts and reporter David Sanger discuss the threat of Pakistan's alleged 30-50 nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands.

"Can terrorists get a nuclear weapon from Pakistan?"

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard
If you can have over forty heavily armed terrorists show up in the middle of Moscow and seize a theatre. How many might show up at some remote Pakistani nuclear weapon storage facility? This is a country that has you know substantial armed remnants of Al Qaeda still operating in the country, that are able to hold off big chunks of the Pakistani regular army and the frontier provinces for weeks at a time. If a huge Al Qaeda force arrives at one of these nuclear weapon storage facilities, what do the guards do? Do they fight, do they help. This strikes me as a very open question.

David Albright, Inst. for Science & International Security
Well there is another set of concerns, which is what if a fundamentalist government takes over in Pakistan, and the thought of Al Qaeda motivated or fundamentalist driven, Pakistani government with nuclear weapons is going to be a really serious problem for the world and the region god knows what India would do. So you have a situation where you need to make sure that Pakistan protects it's nuclear material, it's nuclear weapons very well and particularly against this insider threat. But you also have to have a situation that you want to make sure that the Pakistani government doesn't collapse and then civil war happens or in the chaos someone steals the nuclear material or a government comes in that is very hostile to Western interest and it's pro Taliban in it's thinking and is pro Al Qaeda.

Art Brown, Former CIA Operations Director, Asia
I think that if Mussaraf is removed from office particularly if he is assassinated and there is a power grab I think the control over the Pakistani nuclear program would obviously be a concern. We would be concerned over any government that had that kind of a program and lost it's leader in a bloody coup. The laboratory themselves are probably less of a concern just because it would take longer to do something with those materials in the laboratories, take them out and sell them. What might be able to intercept that at some point, but the ready made nuclear weapons that are sitting there in the Pakistani arsenal, those indeed could go out somebody's door and appear in our opponents box overnight.

David Sanger, New York Times
American officials have said quite publicly that they have few worries about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal as long as General Mussaraf is alive. But in public testimony they have said look there have been two assassination attempts against him that we know that, two very public ones. That if he was killed it's unclear what the security of that arsenal would be. So the U.S. has tried to do whatever it can to make sure the arsenals secure but to the Pakistani's this is there national treasure. They are not going to make anybody else touch it. So in the end we really don't know.

General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan
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. We have taken into account two things, the development aspect controlled development to the extent that what you have fixed is being produced out of uranium. The quantity going for enrichment, exactly the quantity being converted into enriched uranium, what quantity is left and balanced, exact documentation of every detail of it. Whatever enriched uranium goes into the bomb making, exact quantity of that and whatever is left behind, we have total absolute control under developmental aspect. Then whatever the other aspect, the security of whatever we have, our assets. I have told you that we created, army, navy, air force, strategic force command. They are totally under the command of organised body. The army strategic force command is headed by a lieutenant general, and he has total organisation which holds all these and they are in very, very secure places. There is no doubt in my mind that they can ever fall in the hands of extremists.

Benazir Bhutto, Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
This nuclear issue is one which would be highly dangerous for the world community and for Pakistan, because god forbid, god forbid, god forbid, if there was any dirty bomb attack on a third country and it's tracks even mistakenly led back to Pakistan there would be reappraisals that would be too horrendous for our people.

The State Department Official for Arms Control and other experts discuss the threat of nuclear attacks by terrorists and what is being done to prevent them.

"Can terrorists get an atomic bomb?"

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard University
Is it plausible that a well organized group could make a nuclear bomb if it got hold of the nuclear material? Yes, unfortunately that's plausible. Is it plausible that they could get nuclear material? Unfortunately the answer to that is also yes, it is plausible. Around the world there are hundred and tons of highly enriched uranium and separate plutonium. Enough for tens of thousands for nuclear bombs. Some of this material is extremely well secured, some of it is secured. In many cases not more than a night watchmen and a chain link fence.

David Albright, Inst. for Science & International Security
How do you estimate the probability that Al Queda will succeed in detonating a nuclear weapon or obtaining one and maybe it will just decide it wants to possess one and threaten it's use in the same way States do. So how do you estimate that probability. I think most of us agree it's low, we reject these ideas, it's better than even chance. Those are not estimates those are just somebody guessing. But it's low. But unfortunately low probability events can happen and this one could be so devastating that you have to do all kinds of things to prevent it.

Robert Joseph, US State Dept., Arms Control
What concerns me the most is that a terrorist has to be successful only one time in terms of acquiring the material and acquiring the nuclear device and detonating that device on an American city or a city anywhere in the world. So what we need to do is have a comprehensive approach for dealing with that threat. We are emphasizing two key elements. One of course is prevention. So that we deny the terrorist access to fissile material or other weapons of mass destruction of related materials. We also need to put in place and we are working hard, the protection capabilities the ability to detect the transfer of this type of material for example. As well as to interdict this material.

A former intelligence officer, experts and Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA discuss the threat of others filling the void left by the Khan network.

"Has the Khan Network been put out of business?"

Art Brown, Former CIA Operations Director, Asia
I believe that the A.Q. Khan network is no longer the danger it once was. Is that to say that there is not some renegade elements of it or individuals that within the system who are now going to go out and try to duplicate it, to grow there own version of that using there own expertise that they got from the A.Q. Khan time. Sure that's possible.

David Albright, Director, Inst. for Science & International Security
Well the network has been stopped. Where the united states isn't giving the whole story is could it reconstitute it? Will there be digital design drawings, digitized design drawings that become the basis for a new network. Will some of the people that worked in the Khan network after surviving the prosecutions decide to do it again with somebody else. You can't say that the Khan network is dead. We are going to worry about the remnants or the remnants causing a new Khan network for a long time.

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard
Because this was a privatized network operating with key players essentially on every inhabited continent and most of those people are still walking around free people today, and because a lot of what was being solved is the kind of thing that can be put on a CD Rom, you know the atom bomb design, the Centrifuge design, the Centrifuge manufacturing manuals. You know that stuff can pop up again anywhere at anytime and if you talk to the international investigators at the international atomic energy agency. That really concerns them. Are we going to be in a world where anybody who wants centrifuge technology is going to buy one of these CD Rom. That would be a great disaster if that were to occur.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency
I mean this was regarded as unthinkable, why, you know a few years back that you can have a Walmart and underground Walmart selling the equipment that you needed to develop nuclear weapons. This was always regarded to be some of the most tightly held secrets and that the equipment are the mostly vigorously controlled. It was a disaster and we discovered that and we have been scrambling since that time to make sure that this will not happen again. Try the source of supply, make sure that the people who have been involved are properly investigated, penalized if we can. No, it is not the future. I think it was an aberration and hopefully, this is a sad lesson that we need to learn that it should not be repeated.

New York Times reporters William Broad and David Sanger and Harvard's Matthew Bunn explain some of the science involved in making a nuclear bomb.

"How hard is it to make a nuclear weapon?"

William Broad, New York Times
If you already have the fissile material, building a bomb is pretty simple. I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist, I mean you basically you know need two sub critical masses that you put together, right. You can do that in a gun barrel, slam them like that. You can do it in your hands, you'll die, you'll blow up and it won't be very efficient. That's the name of the game, to do this well, which means to do it efficiently which means how you get a big devastating blast does require high technology. But if you looking for one or two time bomb, if your looking to you know make a mess it's easy.

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard University
The bomb that obliterated the Japanese city of Hiroshima was literally a canon that fired a shell of highly enriched uranium into rings of highly enriched uranium. That obliterated a city. That is not difficult to do if you can get the highly enriched uranium. With plutonium or if you didn't have enough of the highly enriched uranium for this relatively inefficient gun type bomb you have to make what's called an implosion type bomb. There you have a ball of nuclear material and you have explosives ringed around the ball of material. You set off the explosives in such a way that they all sort of go off at the same time and you have a shock wave that goes in and crushes the ball down to a smaller size and that sets off the nuclear explosion. That is tricky to do and it would be more of a challenge for a terrorist to do. But it can't be ruled out especially if they got knowledgeable help like they have been trying to do.

David Sanger, New York Times
To make a weapon from plutonium you need a very large, a very visible nuclear infrastructure. You need nuclear reactors that can then produce waste and from that waste you produce the bomb fuel. A nuclear reactor has the advantage that you can argue that you're just involved in the civilian program. It has a disadvantage that one somebody cuts you through that argument and discovers your really producing bomb fuel it's not extraordinarily difficult to know what it is to take out in a bombing raid. The uranium program is slower, it involves this process in enriching raw uranium, sending it through thousands of centrifuges, refining it in each cycle, enriching it in each cycle until at the end you get something pure enough for bomb fuel. So it's complex, it's technologically difficult, it's expensive, but you can hide it. You can put these centrifuges underground, you can put them in buildings that look quite innocent.

Pakistani leaders, experts, reporters and acquaintances of AQ Khan help us understand who he was and how he was able to do what he did.

"Who is AQ Khan?"

David Sanger, New York Times
You should think of him as an extraordinarily well organized project manager and business man who managed to take a series of fairly common technologies, figure out how to aggregate them for the Pakistani bomb and then use that expertise to sell elsewhere.

Simon Henderson, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
I think when it comes to a nuclear project, there are lots of different scientists involved in it. Some of them can only do their part of the project. Khan was somebody who had a vision and an organizational ability to have a broader role in the project.

William Broad, New York Times
He had magic hands. He was a metallurgist and he could make things happen in the laboratory. Which is the secret of a lot of success in science, it's not well documented you always think equations and pure theory. But there is this whole other realm which he was you know an absolute master of making things work. The centrifuges that he developed to purify the uranium, would spin at extraordinary speed, it's like you know pas the speed of sound, you know really really fast, and one little imbalance, and one little problem with a part and they tear themselves apart and they explode. He was a genius at making these things work.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Qaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad
A.Q. Khan was a competent metallurgist but no more than that. He knew next to nothing about nuclear science, he was not a nuclear physicist by training, nonetheless he allowed this myth to propagate freely. So all the newspapers both here in Pakistan as well as outside often referred to him as a nuclear scientist. Now this was not unintentionally, this was not a mistake, this allowed the building of a mystique that he was an Oppenhiemer or a fine man and that he could be counted among the greats of physics.

David Sanger, New York Times
To understand A.Q. Khan you have to understand ego, greed, nationalism, and Islamic identity. The ego was clear, he named the laboratory after himself, he gave quite conspicuously to a number of charities and had buildings named after himself.

General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan
One knows why he did it. Obviously it's not a religious issue, it was a monetary issue, a financial issue. Maybe his ego, he's a man with a big ego. He wants to be a hero to the world, not only Pakistan why restrict Pakistan?

Simon Henderson, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Khan has been demonized, he's come over as the devil, one of the worst men in history. This doesn't tie in with the Khan I know, or knew who was a kind man, a congenial man, a man who was always trying to make little efforts to try and say thank you for something, to tell me a little detail. It wasn't the full story. I have also written a biography of Saddam Hussein, I have got no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a evil man, Khan isn't in that category at all.

CIA veteran Art Brown, experts and reporter David Sanger discuss the victories and failures of the US intelligence community in tracking and stopping AQ Khan.

"Why didn't the CIA stop Khan sooner?"

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad
I'm very puzzled why the United States and the CIA took so long to stop A.Q. Khan because they knew very well what he was up to, there were deals with North Korea with Iran, with Libya and so forth. He was openly advertising his wares you had his website you had newspaper advertisements, you had conferences and so forth. Yet I guess the CIA just wanted to watch.

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard
The obvious question is how much damage was done during that period when we were watching and not yet acting. I think frankly that we should have acted sooner and that what we saw in Libya in particular was more advanced than what we might have thought. It appears that some of North Korea's shopping occurred during this period when we were just watching.

David Sanger, New York Times
After 9/11 you'll remember that the phrase about American intelligence was a failure to connect the dots. You can say the same about the early investigations of the A.Q. Khan network. The CIA knew about Khan from the mid 70's. We had two senior officials say to us non American officials that when the Dutch were ready to pick up Khan the CIA and others in the American intelligence went to the Dutch and said no don't touch him we want to follow him. Well they followed him but they lost him. And the result was that they knew he was involved in nuclear exporting, they knew that North Korea and Iran were seeking the bomb. They knew that Libya was interested in nuclear structure but they never sewed it all up together.

Art Brown, Former CIA Operations Director, Asia
In conclusion we certainly let Khan play out too much of his string. Had we stopped him, had we stopped him before 1993 for example we might be looking at a different situation in North Korea. We might be looking, might be looking at a situation where the primary threat was from the plutonium programs and the plutonium programs are checkable. The uranium programs are not checkable. So by letting Khan or not moving quickly enough on Khan it certainly allowed the North Koreans to acquire something that is now going to be very, very difficult to dig out of their nest.

David Sanger, New York Times
For an American intelligence agency that had been beaten up for failures in Iraq in predicting the collapse, failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the great tales they can tell is how they got into the Khan network in Malaysia. They clearly had key elements of the network penetrated. So penetrated that when they raided the BBC China, which was the cargo ship that was carrying giant equipment from Malaysia to Libya, they knew that the ship also had lots of other things completely unrelated to nuclear material. When they pulled the ship in they didn't unload every single cargo container, they asked for specific numbers, so they were watching it being loaded in Malaysia and they knew what they wanted to get at the other end.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a former defense intelligence officer and David Sanger of the New York Times discuss the question of a nuclear-armed Iran.

"What are Iran's nuclear intentions?"

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
The problem with the Iranians is that there are multiple ways in which intent has to be questioned. Why, if you only intended a civil nuclear program, would you have lied about activities at Natanz, their facility, one of their facilities, for essentially 18 years to the International Atomic Energy Agency? Why would you have had dealings with A.Q. Khan? Why are they still unwilling to answer some of the questions that the IAEA has? And so the key here is that the Iranians are asking the world to trust them on certain kinds of nuclear technologies that could lead to a nuclear weapon.

Col. Patrick Lang, Former Defense Intelligence Officer
The idea that they want to use it to create electricity for general use seems ludicrous to me. I mean this is – I think the Bush administration has argued cogently in fact that it doesn't make any sense for a country which is one of the world's great oil producers to want to do that at great expense and a lot of bother with everybody else in the world. And the fact that they were involved with the Pakistanis in this matter who are very clearly weapons proliferators, both missiles and nuclear weapons technology would indicate to me, put all that together, that spells nuclear weapons to me.

David Sanger, New York Times
The connections to A.Q. Khan seem particularly suspicious because if Iran simply wanted civilian nuclear power, there are lots of ways to buy it. There are suppliers in Europe. There are suppliers in Russia, which has supplied much of this. There are suppliers in China. A.Q. Khan didn't deal in civilian nuclear work. He put together Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. The Iranians knew this.

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
The Iranians want to turn this into a discussion about their rights -- the right to civil nuclear power, the right to enrich and reprocess. This isn't an issue of rights. This is an issue of the eroded confidence in the international community that the Iranians are, in fact, seeking civil nuclear power.

David Sanger, New York Times
We've recently seen some new discoveries by the IAEA, documents that they discovered in Iran, that suggest that A.Q. Khan offered them drawings, descriptions, specifications for centrifuges, and for a complete plant, for about 2,000 centrifuges. And that would be roughly enough to produce a little more than a bomb's worth of material every year.

Among the documents that Khan had provided to the Iranians was about 15 pages that involved how to go shape your enriched uranium into a hemisphere. And this may not sound like much, but to the nuclear investigators, it rang a lot of bells because the only real reason to shape enriched uranium into this very specific careful shape is to produce a weapon.

Top international officials discuss what the transfer of technology by Khan to rogue states means for international security.

"Can rogue states be stopped from getting nuclear weapons?"

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
We're not dealing in the new world with the ability to track the nuclear programs of countries in the way that we tracked the nuclear program of the Soviet Union or, for that matter, the nuclear program of other declared nuclear states. Because to a certain extent the irony is that a Soviet Union, while they were hiding, of course, certain details of the program, they certainly weren't hiding the existence of a program. And here you have the case of states that are trying to hide their programs. They are very often states that are extremely opaque, very closed societies and very often they're using dual-use technologies. And so the intelligence problem here is really very, very difficult. In order to solve that then, you have to have multiple means.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency
There is a lesson that nobody should learn from North Korea because if the lesson from North Korea that if you want to protect yourself, go as fast as you can and develop your own weapon, because that will protect you. Then we are really drawing absolutely the wrong lesson. If people would say well if Iraq was not protect you know, or because they didn't have weapons of mass destruction and if they would have developed weapons of mass destruction fast enough maybe they would have gotten a better treatment same as North Korea. Well, that would have been a real set back in terms of a message that we want to send to every country. The kind of message that we want to send to every country that nuclear weapons are not the way to protect yourself. Nuclear weapons are not going to provide you security because we are in a situation where we want to rid ourselves, all of us of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons should be considered as an historical accident in which we are trying to extricate ourselves. Rather than a permanent feature of the our collective security system, but if we continue to see the nuclear weapon states, holding on to the nuclear weapon, modernizing the nuclear weapon, I would not be surprised that you will see many countries who feel insecure rightly or wrongly trying to develop their nuclear weapons because they would simply like to imitate the big boys, they would like to be a part of the major league.

Seif el-Islam el-Qaddafi , Qaddafi Foundation
You are safe because you have the unconventional means for defence but at the same time it means that also you have to prepare yourself for international pressure, sanctions. The international committee will do whatever they can do to deprive you of this capability as you know. It happened in North Korea Iran and Libya, but still you are safe because you have something in your hand. But by reaching compromise with the international community then you are safer, because you will not be subject to any threat and people are not going to attack you or press you in order to let you give up the nuclear capability. But if you reach a compromise there is no more excuse anymore for them to attack you, you are safer.

The nuclear weapons are not just an end at self, the nuclear weapon is a mean to secure self, and the security. Therefore if you can reach that end, via a more fruitful and productive way then there is a need for that nuclear option. The end, I mean the ultimate end and the target is security, it's not to have a nuclear weapon.

Art Brown, Former CIA Operations Director, Asia
I think North Korea will never give up it's nuclear weapons program entirely. This is there acquisition of these nuclear weapons program is a fifty year endeavour. They started this in 1956, they have been slugging away at it for fifty years. They see it as there one and only card for strategic regime survival. The chance of them giving that up in response for some sort of economic aid or a bag of bobbles or a present of oil, seems to me very far fetched. They will give up the above ground plutonium program because they know that we can bomb that if we want to. But to give up the underground conceivable uranium enrichment program takes away there only control within his means of keeping his regime in place. He is never going to do that because he doesn't have the trust to give that up that he would stay in power. Remember that from Kim Jung Yung point of view that uranium program is what makes him Mussaraf and not Saddam. Because those are the two options in his mind. By having that uranium enrichment program and the weapons that it produces it gives him that nuclear punch back, and will keep us or our allies from militarily trying to take him out.

From his point of view from Kim's point of view there are two options he faces. The one he wants to go down is the one that Mussaraf chose. A country that tested five nuclear weapons in 1998, ate the economic sanctions that came upon them afterwards, overcame them overtime and eventually became a quote, unquote trusted partner on the war on terrorism. A dialogue partner in the middle east, someone who receives three billion dollars in economic aid, indeed visits Crawford, gets to ride in the pick up truck. But the other option for him is the non nuclear arm, always a confrontation, always under fear that we will role in, in a very superior force and end up like Saddam hiding in a hole or dying in some sort of death by cop gun battle with superior U.S. forces.

Top US and UN Officials, experts and reporter David Sanger explain that today's nuclear reality might be even more dangerous than during the Cold War.

"How has he Khan Network changed the world?"

David Albright, Inst. for Science & International Security
One of the risks we face is that Khan's was very ingenious in creating this international collection of companies, private enterprises that could provide a very dangerous object namely a centrifuge facility. And the fact that Khan did it, maybe the most important things, or one of the most important things that he accomplished, because once you show that it's possible then others are quick to copy. Just like the hardest effort was building the first atomic bomb, those who came after had it much easier because they knew that it would work.

Matthew Bunn, Managing the Atom Project, Harvard
In the past we have always thought about the spread of the nuclear technology as being something where states decided to sell something or maybe in some cases a state managed to get something for a company that a state where that company was operating hadn't really authorized it but it wasn't that there was a private industry supplier of the essential technology of nuclear weapons. That's what A.Q. Khan put together.

Robert Joseph, State Dept., Arms Control
As we learned more and more about the networks operations, we discovered that in fact it was similar to a multi national cooperation. In the sense that the network established field offices across three continents.

David Sanger, New York Times
This is the privatization of the bomb. The outsourcing of the bomb and so our biggest case of early proliferation didn't come from leakage from just a nuclear program but from an individual who figured out that he could assemble the key manufacturing sites around the world.

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
This was really frightening because the thought that there might be people who purely for profit, not for security for a country or out of some warped sense that some countries ought to have nuclear technology, that they were proceeding in this way. It was a really pretty frightening prospect.

David Sanger, New York Times
We are in the second nuclear age now. The first nuclear age was giant powers, amassing giant arsenals and facing off against each other. It was terrifying but not as terrifying as the second nuclear age. In the first nuclear age, anytime you launched a nuclear weapon it basically had a return address. There was a big screen under a mountain where somebody could see where that missile was coming from. In the world of A.Q. Khan there is a series of technologies. Those technologies are sold to countries where the individuals they are buried away, they are produced, you may not know what weapon comes out of it. If one is delivered one day, god forbid it's not likely on top of a big missile, might be but it might be transported in a briefcase, in a ox cart, in a car.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei , Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency
If I put these two things together, a private sector, illicit trafficking and a nuclear material activities, extremist groups in acquiring nuclear material activities. I see that situation to be much more, much more dangerous than during the Cold War. There was a structure, their was two superpowers, their was a very clear command and control system, susceptible to nuclear deterrence, mutual assured destruction. All of these theories are no longer relevant.

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