After US, Indian Nuclear Security Breached!

Both India and the United States have been quite vocal in the recent past voicing ‘concerns’ about Pakistan’s nuclear security and raising false alarms about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons ‘falling to the Taliban’. In an ironic twist, the nuclear safeguards of both these nations have been breached within days of each other, raising fresh doubts about the safety of their own nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear command and control system, on the other hand, continues to be one of the most advanced in the world.

The governments and media of the two most vocal countries raising false alarms about the safety of Pakistan’s Nuclear Program have some home truths to contend with first.

After the recent US nuclear security blunder, reports are coming in from India that a top nuclear scientist – with access to sensitive information – has been missing for FOUR days. 

L Mahalingam, a top nuclear scientist working at the Kaiga nuclear facility in the Karwar district of Karnataka has been missing since Monday morning.

Mahalingam, who hails from Anna Nagar in Chennai, had gone for his usual morning walk on Monday and has not returned ever since. Although no ransom note or call has been received till now, his wife Vinayaka Sundari is not ruling out kidnap and has since filed an FIR at the Mallapur police station.

The missing nuclear scientist is one of the top officials working in the training section – with access to sensitive documents – of the very important facility tucked away in the remote Karwar region bordering Goa, near to the where the Indian armed forces are building one of their biggest bases – Project Seabird.

“Intensive search is being carried out round the clock by a 40-member team comprising the CISF and local police personnel to trace N Mahalingam, missing since June 8 from the Kaiga township,” Superintendent of Police, Uttara Kannada Raman Gupta told.

Ahmed Quraishi on the weak US and Indian Nuclear Safeguards

Just last week, Pakistanis were laughing as a sensitive list of U.S. nuclear sites was mistakenly posted on Internet, the latest in a series of American nuclear security breaches that Pakistanis say places the United States as the world’s most dangerous nuclear power.

In 2007 a U.S. air force jet flew across the country without the pilot realizing he was carrying nuclear warheads more than ten times the Hiroshima bombs.

Pakistan’s nuclear community is yet to commit any blunders of this scale, although a Pakistani newspaper reported last week that the U.S. government secretly recruited 12 Pakistani scientists and technicians in 1978 to plan sabotage from within designed to look like a nuclear accident. The ISI aborted the CIA plan. Pakistan’s President Zia telephoned President Carter and strongly protested.

So if Pakistan ever came close to a nuclear accident, it was because of American mischief.

The U.S. media has been running an anti-Pakistan demonization campaign since 2007 and has intensified it in recent weeks with deliberate official and intelligence leaks, portraying Pakistani nuclear safeguards as weak and trying to convince the world that Pakistan was unable to protect its weapons.

The U.S. campaign is based on lies and cooked intelligence at best. Pakistan’s nuclear command and control system is probably the most advanced in the world, building on the work of the earlier nuclear powers. In fact, independent nuclear experts realize that the Pakistani nuclear command structure is more advanced than the one India has. India is a late entrant to the nuclear safeguards debate. U.S. officials were stunned during the negotiations for the U.S.-India nuclear technology transfer deal to discover how inadeuqate Indian nuclear safeguards were.

Check out these reports on the latest Indian and U.S. nuclear safety breaches:
Scientist goes missing from Kaiga atomic energy station
Search operation on to trace missing Karnataka scientist
Full Coverage: US in nuclear disclosure blunder
US in nuclear disclosure blunder‎
‘Embarrassing’ mistake puts US nuclear list online‎