US,Pak negotiating understanding over nukes safety: Report

During meetings with current and former officials in Washington and Pakistan,Hersh was told that the agreements would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis.

At the same time,the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train its soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities,the report says.

The principal fear was that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup,take control of some nuclear assets,or even divert a warhead,Hersh notes.

The Pakistani nuclear warheads and their triggers are stored separately from each other,and from their delivery devices,according to country’s nuclear doctrine.

A former US senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC),the elite counter-terrorism group,the article says.

“The Pakistanis gave us a virtual look at the number of warheads,some of their locations,and their command-and-control system,” the former senior intelligence official told Hersh.

“We saw their target list and their mobilization plans. We got their security plans,so we could augment them in case of a breach of security,” he said. “We’re there to help the Pakistanis,but we’re also there to extend our own axis of security to their nuclear stockpile.”

High-level cooperation between Islamabad and Washington on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal began at least eight years ago.

The detailed American planning even includes an estimate of how many nuclear triggers could be placed inside a C-17 cargo plane,the former official said,and where the triggers could be sequestered,the report added.

However,President Asif Ali Zardari spoke with derision about what he depicted as America’s obsession with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

“Our Army officers are not crazy,like the Taliban,” Zardari went on to say. “A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.” “We give comfort to each other,and the comfort level is good,because everybody respects everybody’s integrity,” Hersh quoted Zardari as saying.

Former president Pervez Musharraf has acknowledged that his government had given US nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures.