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.