PALS in Pakistan Part Seven – A Dangerous World

Second, most of the signals that Pakistan has sent have suggested that they would accept U.S. nuclear security assistance as long as Pakistan received assurances that any information gained would remain classified and that the U.S. wouldn’t attempt to intervene in their program. The Italian delegation mentioned earlier specifically discussed PALS with Pakistan’s General Kidwai, and left with the belief that Pakistan would accept U.S. offers of assistance if they were made (Cotta-Ramusino and Martellini). Pakistan’s foreign minister also suggested to them that they were planning on sending a delegation of officials to the U.S. to discuss the possibility of allowing the U.S. to install PALS (Cotta-Ramusino and Martellini). While Pakistan may hold some reservations about unlimited cooperation with the U.S., they seem to be sending the signal that they are willing to engage in cooperation within some limitations. If PALS increase the security of Pakistan’s arsenal, then working the program around their needs is a reasonable price to pay for reducing the risk of unauthorized nuclear use.

A second line of argumentation that opponents of PALS transfer have made is based upon the current assembly status of Pakistani weapons (Cotta-Ramusino and Martellini). Pakistan claims that its weapons are currently in an unassembled state and could not be used without first putting the weapons together. This has led some scholars to argue that this unassembled state is better than having PALS installed on their weapons for two reasons: first, because these scholars reason that unassembled weapons would be difficult to use without authorization, and second, that to install PALS the weapons would have to be assembled and thus might spook India into thinking that Pakistan was preparing to either use them or place their weapons on higher alert (Cotta-Ramusino and Martellini). These fears are among the more baseless arguments made about a PALS transfer program. The idea that unassembled weapons cannot be used is highly suspect. The nuclear weapons would be safer in each of the potential scenarios for some kind of unauthorized use with PALS installed.