Safeguarding Pakistan's Nuclear Arsenal: The Threat of Nuclear Theft in Pakistan
Van Scoy, Margaret L.
2021
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Relative to other nuclear-armed states, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are viewed as highlyinsecure and vulnerable to nuclear theft. There are terrorist organizations in Pakistan that have expressed their desire for nuclear material. If one of these organizations successfully stole from the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, the consequences would be catastrophic. It is critical that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons ... read more(and all nuclear weapons) are protected from nuclear theft attempts.A terrorist organization has never stolen from a country’s nuclear arsenal. Therefore,evaluating the effectiveness of a country’s nuclear security architecture is challenging, because scholars have no case studies and lack direct intelligence about terrorist organizations’ leadership and decision-making.In this thesis, I analyze the relationship between Pakistan’s nuclear security architectureand the threat of nuclear theft by one of three major terrorist organizations. I use a variation of the Delphi Method to find scholarly consensus about Pakistan’s nuclear security and terrorist organizations’ decision-making calculus. By comparing Pakistani policies to terrorists’ ambitions, I find that Pakistan has made great progress in its nuclear security, but there are outstanding vulnerabilities facing its arsenal (mostly from changes in its nuclear force posture) that will likely remain unresolved until the Indo-Pakistani conflict ends.
Advisor: Professor Jeffrey W. Taliaferroread less - ID:
- 9p290q463
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