Does America have a plan to capture Pakistan's nuclear weapons?

Military tensions between India and Pakistan over the Pahalgam terrorist attack have resurrected fears of a nuclear showdown. While India has a no-first-use policy, Pakistan often threatens India with a nuclear strike. Pakistan's defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif has said recently that Pakistan would use its nuclear weapons if "there is a direct threat to our existence". Another minister, Hanif Abbasi, threatened India with nuclear retaliation and said that 130 missiles, including Shaheen, and Ghaznavi, were kept for India. "Those Shaheen (missiles), Ghaznavi (missiles), which we have kept arranged in our bases, we have kept them for Hindustan (India). The 130 weapons we possess are not just kept as models — and you have no idea in which parts of Pakistan we have positioned them," Abbasi said in a press conference a few days ago.

While Pakistan's nuclear sabre-rattling has become too common to invoke any immediate concerns, the risk of a nuclear exchange between the two countries can never be underestimated.

Interestingly, the US has had deep concerns over Pakistan's "loose nukes" and is also said to have an emergency plan to capture Pakistan's nuclear wepaons if a risk arises.

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America's plan to "snatch-and-grab" Pakistan's nuclear weapons
America's concerns over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal go decades back. It was reported in by NBC News in 2011 that the US has a contingency plan to "snatch-and-grab" Pakistan's nuclear weapons, if and when the US President believes they are a threat to either America or its interests. Plans had been drawn up for dealing with worst-case scenarios in Pakistan, NBC news reported quoting several US officials, who said that ensuring security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons had long been a high US security priority even before 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Among the scenarios drawn by the report were Pakistan plunging into internal chaos, terrorist mounting a serious attack against a nuclear facility, hostilities breaking out with India, or Islamic extremist taking charge of the government or the Pakistan army.

NBC said in its 2011 report that the greatest success of the US war on terrorism, the military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in his safe house in Pakistan had fuelled concerns about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The report said there were increasing suspicions among US officials that Osama had support within the ISI and the Abbottabad operation had emboldened those in Washington who believe an orchestrated campaign of lightning raids to secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons could succeed. In the aftermath of the bin Laden raid, US military officials testified before Congress about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and the threat posed by "loose nukes" - nuclear weapons or materials outside the government's control. Earlier Pentagon reports also outlined scenarios in which US forces would intervene to secure nuclear weapons that were in danger of falling into the wrong hands.

In an interview with NBC News in 2011, former Pakistan military ruler Pervez Musharraf had warned that a snatch-and-grab operation would lead to all-out war between the countries, calling it "total confrontation by the whole nation against whoever comes in". Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistan's best known nuclear physicist and a human rights advocate, too, said a US attempt to take control of Pakistan's nukes would be foolhardy. "They are said to be hidden in tunnels under mountains, in cities, as well as regular air force and army bases," he said. "A US snatch operation could trigger war; it should never be attempted."

Despite such comments, interviews with US officials, military reports and even congressional testimony indicated that Pakistan's weaponry had been the subject of continuing discussions, scenarios, war games and possibly even military exercises by US intelligence and special forces regarding so-called "snatch-and-grab" operations, the 2011 NBC News report said. "It's safe to assume that planning for the worst-case scenario regarding Pakistan nukes has already taken place inside the US government," Roger Cressey, former deputy director of counter-terrorism in the Clinton and Bush White House, had told NBC News. "This issue remains one of the highest priorities of the US intelligence community ... and the White House."

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Pakistan's "emerging threat" to the US
American concerns over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal narrated in the NBC News report in 2011 must have only grown over time as Pakistan stockpiled more nukes and also achieved greater military power. A decade later, in 2021, a Brookings article mentioned the American plan to capture Pakistan's nukes: "Indeed, since the shock of 9/11, Pakistan has come to represent such an exasperating problem that the U.S. has reportedly developed a secret plan to arbitrarily seize control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if a terrorist group in Pakistan seemed on the edge of capturing some or all of its nuclear warheads," wrote Marvin Kalb. "When repeatedly questioned about the plan, U.S. officials have strung together an artful, if unpersuasive, collection of “no comments.”

Last year, the US was alarmed by a new development in Pakistan. A senior White House official said in December that nuclear-armed Pakistan was developing long-range ballistic missile capabilities that eventually could allow it to strike targets well beyond South Asia, making it an "emerging threat" to the US, Reuters reported. Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer's surprise revelation underscored how far the once-close ties between Washington and Islamabad had deteriorated since the 2021 US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Speaking to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Finer said the number of nuclear-armed states with missiles that could reach the US homeland "is very small and they tend to be adversarial," naming Russia, North Korea and China. "So, candidly, it's hard for us to see Pakistan's actions as anything other than an emerging threat to the United States," he said. An official told Reuters that the threat posed to the US is up to a decade away.

Finer's speech came a day after Washington announced a new round of sanctions related to Pakistan's ballistic missile development program, including for the first time against the state-run defense agency that oversees the program.

(With inputs from agencies)