Global Warnings

Tomgram: Collins and Frantz, Pakistan's Nuclear Wal-Mart in Its Infancy
There they go again. While Somalia burns at one end of "the arc of instability" (as Bush administration officials liked to call a swath of territory from North Africa to the Chinese border in the good old days before they thoroughly destabilized it), at the other end, the Taliban is now considered a "permanent presence" in more than 50% of Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan is in increasing chaos. As if that weren't enough, Bush administration supporters and officials are already starting to plan for, or call for, more of the same when it comes to solving Washington's problems -- that is, militarizing them further. Various possible military interventions in Pakistan are now clearly going on the table. They range from sending A! merican military trainers into Pakistan's tribal areas to train a supposedly pro-government militia force to the mad suggestion that U.S. Special Forces extract Pakistani "nuclear materials and warheads" from that country and somehow ship them to New Mexico in the US of A.

That gem of a proposal, which appeared in a recent New York Times op-ed, is the bizarre stepchild of an American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution collaboration from the tag-team of Frederick Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon. As journalist Jim Lobe comments, "I have no doubt that their musings are indeed an indication of what is speeding to the top of the administration's national-security agenda."

The urge to militarize anti-nuclear-proliferation efforts has been at the heart of the Bush administration's post-9/11 planning. The potential for "loose nukes" in Pakistan and the possibility of that country being a "ticking nuclear time bomb" for the proliferation of such weaponry is indeed unnerving. But journalists Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, who spent four years tracking the most sensational proliferation story in history -- the troubling journey of the "father" of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, A. Q. Khan -- for their just published book, The Nuclear Jihadist, provide a timely reminder of exactly how hopeless a military response to nuclear proliferation really is.

You just can't launch a war against an underground global business, one that, until recently, the Bush administration showed a remarkable lack of interest in pursuing in more peaceful ways in Pakistan, including by questioning Khan himself. Any military "solution" to the Pakistani bomb crisis will undoubtedly prove as hopeless there as elsewhere. In the end, A.Q. Khan's proliferation spree may be the most devastating horror story of the nuclear age. It's also riveting, as Collins and Frantz show us, using private letters that Khan exchanged with a Canadian-Pakistani friend and collaborator. Tom


The Proliferation Game
How the World Helped Pakistan Build Its Bomb
By Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz

Globalization, what a concept. You can get a burger prepared your way practically anywhere in the world. The Nike Swoosh appears at elite athletic venues across the United States and on the skinny frames of t-shirted children playing in the streets of Calcutta. For those interested in buying an American automobile -- a word of warning -- it is not so unusual to find more "American content" in a Japanese car than one built by Detroit's Big Three.

So don't kid yourself about the Pakistani bomb. From burgers to bombs, globalization has had an impact. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal -- as many as 120 weapons -- is no more Pakistani than your television set is Japanese. Or is that American? It was a concept developed in one country and, for the most part, built in another. Its creation was an example of globalization before the term was even coined.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.