The Third Nuclear Horn Could Supply ISIS (Daniel 8:4)

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons stockpile could be STOLEN by ISIS terrorists

PAKISTAN’S nuclear weapons arsenal could fall into the hands of terrorist groups unless the volatile South Asian state bolsters security at strategic military bases, a high-ranking US official has warned.

By Tom Batchelor

 

PUBLISHED: 12:00, Fri, Apr 1, 2016 | UPDATED: 12:34, Fri, Apr 1, 2016

Pakistan is now being urged to beef up security around its nuclear bases

 

The country has been developing a new stockpile of smaller battlefield weapons aimed at repelling threats from neighbouring India, which holds a larger, conventional nuclear arsenal.

But Pakistan is now being urged to beef up security around its nuclear bunkers amid increasingly bold threats from Islamic State to buy or steal atomic weapons or the material with which to make them.

The warning comes as world leaders meet for the Nuclear Security Summit, which for the first time will include a simulated nuclear terrorist attack.

Worryingly, Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif is not among the 50 presidents and prime ministers gathered in Washington today for the two-day meeting.

Rose Gottemoeller, the US under- secretary of state for arms control and international security, said: “We have made our concerns known and we will continue to press them about what we consider to be the destabilising aspects of their battlefield nuclear weapons programme.”

The event, hosted by Barack Obama, comes in the wake of last week’s Brussels massacre.

ISIS fanatics linked to those bombings are thought to have been plotting an attack on one of Belgium’s nuclear power plants after police found lengthy video footage revealing the country’s top nuclear official was being surveilled.

Western nations have been scrambling to improve their security procedures since the rise of rogue organisations such as ISIS, which has expressed an ambition to obtain a dirty bomb.

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser in the US, added: “We’ve seen over the years that different terrorist organisations have ambitions related to acquiring nuclear weapons.

“That’s why the summit process is so important, because different countries have different levels of security at their facilities or in terms of how they are handling nuclear materials.”

The country has been developing a new stockpile of smaller battlefield weapons

A surface-to-surface missile test in Pakistan

Express.co.uk reported last summer how ISIS was preparing a new push to seize territory in the province of Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and Iran.

The area is widely-known to be the centre of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, with controversial underground testing of atomic explosive devices in the 1990s.

Middle East terror experts warned at the time that the extremist group could be close to obtaining a ‘dirty’ bomb.

Afzal Ashraf, a former senior officer in the RAF, said Pakistan was “the most likely place” for ISIS to obtain a nuclear explosive.

He argued that the organisation, which has declared a ‘caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria after gaining vast swathes of territory, was now enjoying “success in getting support” in a region at the heart of Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

In 1998, Pakistan exploded five underground nuclear devices in mountains in the Balochistan region as part of an arms race with neighbouring India.

A map of the region

The country remains outside both the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Its growing nuclear arsenal raises the risk that the deadly weapons or the ingredients used to construct them – enriched uranium or plutonium – could fall into the hands of ISIS.

Dr Ashraf, who worked as a counterterrorism strategist for the US army in Iraq, told Express.co.uk: “Balochistan is a province where the Pakistanis do their nuclear tests, and presumably have some of their nuclear facilities, and maybe even some of their nuclear weapons.

“It may be a coincidence but their expansion into that particular part of Pakistan is worrying.”

Pakistan is known to have around 120 warheads, with a missile range of 2,750km (1,700miles), making it capable of striking targets in India, Russia and the Middle East.

In March, the country successfully tested new ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear bomb.

Were a bomb to obtained by ISIS, it could have the potential to reach the eastern edge of Europe, including Turkey.

However, Dr Natasha Underhill, an expert on terrorism in the Middle East at Nottingham Trent University, said the risk of ISIS obtaining nuclear weapons remained “low” for the time being.

Nuclear weapons require careful storage and Dr Underhill said the group would not be able to adequately house a bomb, nor know how to use it.

She said: “Terrorism is about fear and the promotion of fear and for now the use of suicide bombers, beheadings and graphic public displays of brutality suit how the organisation wants to portray itself – as a leader of the new caliphate and one that has strict adherence to Islamic law.”