Nuclear security/ To produce weapons grade plutonium

News that the fourth reactor at Pakistan's Khushab nuclear facility is now operational marks the fulfillment of Pakistan's long-term goal to establish a plutonium-based nuclear deterrent.

Mansoor Ahmed, lecturer in the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies at Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University, specializes in Pakistan's nuclear program and its delivery systems.

He said operation of the fourth heavy water reactor marked the "fulfillment of [the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission's] long-standing goal [as per the original plan approved in April 1972] of a plutonium-based weapons program that was conceived and planned by the late chairman, Munir Ahmad Khan."

The program has been developed in phases, but Ahmed says the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal "aggravated Pakistan's strategic anxieties in terms of huge asymmetries in stockpiles of fissile material, particularly plutonium, that became a driver for the third and fourth production reactor at the Khushab Complex, the second one largely being the product of technological determinism."

Fourth Pakistani Reactor Meets Long-Term Goal