The Hindu : Front Page : Nuclear weapons in safe hands, says Pakistan

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Sunday, Jan 27, 2008
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Nuclear weapons in safe hands, says Pakistan

Nirupama Subramanian

Extraordinary briefing for foreign journalists

RAWALPINDI: Under pressure from the Western media, Pakistan’s nuclear establishment on Saturday rolled out an extraordinary red-carpet briefing for foreign journalists based in Islamabad to give the assurance that its strategic assets were in safe hands and that there was “no conceivable scenario” in which they could fall into the hands of extremists.

Even the two Indian journalists based in Pakistan, who are usually not invited to military-related events and are barred from Rawalpindi in the normal course, were invited to attend the briefing at the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), the nuclear establishment’s inner sanctum at the Chaklala military base here.

Lt. Gen. (retd.) Khalid Kidwai, SPD Director-General, gave a PowerPoint presentation on the command and control structure that is arranged in three tiers — the National Command Authority, the SPD and the Strategic Forces Command — and the multilayer security surrounding the nuclear facilities.

He explained concepts such as C4I2SR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Information, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) and the “two-man rule, codes and permissive action links” to about 50 journalists and then took questions.

This was the third such briefing for the international community this month. Earlier, the SPD made the presentation to diplomats and military attaches.

The message from Lt. Gen. Kidwai — a suave man in a grey suit with impeccable English — was that there was “no chance that one day there will be a D-G SPD here with a long beard who will be controlling everything.”

Most of the journalists returned impressed with what they had heard, or at least with the willingness of the normally secretive SPD to discuss the issues with the media.

Lt. Gen. Kidwai said that while Pakistan was constantly reviewing the safety and security of its nuclear arsenal, “all in all, the state of alertness has gone up” in the last six months amid an escalation in attacks on the military by Islamist militants.

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