Is the obvious tag on vacay?

Does anyone expect anything more from a country like Pakistan?

Ackerman's comments and the original Atlantic piece both downplayed a huge factor in the whole Pakistan conundrum, which is the warming U.S. relations with India.

U.S. diplomats and officials like stressing that relations with India and Pakistan are "not zero-sum". Unfortunately, most Indian and Pakistani analysts don't see it that way. If India is warming to Washington, then Pakistan is losing out, to the smug satisfaction of the earlier and the alarm of the latter. It doesn't help that the U.S. keeps on selling more military goodies to India and talks about transferring top-shelf tech. It doesn't help that they very elaborately orchestrated the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver. Most importantly, however, the U.S. maintains a very strict no-touching policy as far as mediating or even commenting on the Kashmir issue goes.

The paranoia that is generated by this abrupt shift is causing very bad choices on the part of Pakistan that seem rational to them. For one, it's giving them an excuse to build more nukes, which is bad for both strategic stability and stockpile security. At the same time, they're stalling talks at the Conference on Disarmament on a fissile material cut-off treaty.

The Pakistani military leadership is not in a comfy position, but it can play off the Indian threat against the Islamist threat for as long as it likes, at least until the whole house of cards collapses. The U.S. has to remove one of those threats in order to get the Pakistanis to actually snap out of their irresponsibility. Since it can't seem to neutralize the Islamist threat, the best bet for the U.S. would be to cool relations with India slightly, put pressure on them to get serious about establishing actually useful confidence-building measures, set a very preliminary roadmap for Kashmir talks, and stop treating them as some sort of exceptional country. But the Indian lobby in the U.S. is huge... sigh. And there are dreamy-eyed neocon-lites in Washington that somehow think buddying up with India, the world's largest democracy, to balance against China is a straightforward game.

That's not to say the Pakistanis are off the hook. The pressure on them to crack down on the terrorists and the Haqqani network has to stay. The drone strikes need to continue. All that has to be maintained. You can squeeze them hard, but you have to leave them an escape route. Right now, there is none. They are cornered and therefore lashing out anyway they can.

I'll bet somebody will make a video game out of this. Would you rather be the terrorist(s), or the van driver in this scenario?

"You'll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban..."


Sorry, I'm having trouble coming up with a funny offbeat remark to poignantly make light of this monumentally stupid statement.

DOE carries nuclear stuff in unmarked 18-wheelers all the time.

Actually it's marked you just need to be able to read the hazmat signage....those numbers mean things.

butt-nuggets: I'll bet somebody will make a video game out of this. Would you rather be the terrorist(s), or the van driver in this scenario?

It depends. Does the other guy drive this?

We're going to have one legendary fark thread the day these things start going off in our cities.

UberDave: ZAZ: Can drones carry radiation sensors good enough to track these bombs through traffic?

A drone? Doubtful. And I wouldn't be surprised if they put a little shielding in the van (it wouldn't take much) just in case someone was driving down the road with a uber-response survey meter..

IONDS would like a word with you.
We know where it all is, all the time
Or, do you think we've just been lucky for the last 60 years?

Not 5 minutes ago, Mr Bear and I were discussing the possibility of a Russian accident with their aging stockpile

ah, the power of Fark to be always relevant and informative

This is why I'll never donate money to any Pakistani flood/earth quake/famine relief effort. If you can afford nukes but can't/won't take care of your own people then you're SOL when you pass the hat around and it gets to me.

doomjesse: DOE carries nuclear stuff in unmarked 18-wheelers all the time.

Actually it's marked you just need to be able to read the hazmat signage....those numbers mean things.

Nuclear "stuff" not nuclear flippin' bombs, big difference. We're pretty anal about those things, usually, there was that incident where a B52 crew flew one across the country without realizing it. The secretary of defense fired the hell out of a bunch of people for that, as he should have.

Even at that if flew on a military aircraft from one place with a lot of guys with guns, and clear shoot to kill orders, to another..

PacManDreaming: Meh, the DOE Knight Industries carries nuclear stuff a more powerful weapon in an unmarked 18-wheelers all the time. Or at least they used to during the '80s.

tinyarena: UberDave: ZAZ: Can drones carry radiation sensors good enough to track these bombs through traffic?

A drone? Doubtful. And I wouldn't be surprised if they put a little shielding in the van (it wouldn't take much) just in case someone was driving down the road with a uber-response survey meter..

IONDS would like a word with you.
We know where it all is, all the time
Or, do you think we've just been lucky for the last 60 years?

'fraid not. Those satellites only tell you when and where one goes off, not where unexploded nuclear bombs are. We may have something with that capability, but I doubt it.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I'm sure we'll meet again some sunny day.

caramba421: "You'll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban..."

I can't see real well...is that Bill Shakespear writing that?

caramba421: "You'll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban..."


Sorry, I'm having trouble coming up with a funny offbeat remark to poignantly make light of this monumentally stupid statement.

the sentence isn't saying that al-Qaida is a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, it's listing various groups. the groups are separated by commas, as they tend to be in English. idiot.

EdTheHead: 'fraid not. Those satellites only tell you when and where one goes off, not where unexploded nuclear bombs are. We may have something with that capability, but I doubt it.

click the IONDS links, do a little reading, you'll sleep better

Didn't Reagan want to have trucks transport missiles between silos, then other trucks to transport fake missiles between silos, so the Russians wouldn't know which silos actually contained missiles?

/My vodka ate my google-fu

ani23: Is the obvious tag on vacay?

It's being driven around Islamabad in an unmarked van.

Harv72b: Mmmmm, radioactive free candy...

just because it's free, doesn't mean it's good. Besides, it's nougat. What the hell is nougat anyway? I'll tell you: the devil's semen. That's what it is. Don't get all happy about getting radioactive candy when it's made from the devil's semen. That's just silly.

Sick fantasy time:

I was just dreaming how neat it would be if as our final action before leaving the Afghan/Paki theater of operations we have the Rangers demo all of the Paki early warning stuff, guidance and telemetry systems (kill any sats that they might have too), and upload military grade malwares on all their networks.

Then let the Indians go all Baron Harkonen on them.

UberDave: And if by "well-fortified" subby means "well-fortified, musty, spider cave, with an ass-load of pigeon shiat caked around the entrance", then yeah....that.

black widows at Barksdale.....ewwww.

/yes, I've seen them

thenateman: Didn't Reagan want to have trucks transport missiles between silos, then other trucks to transport fake missiles between silos, so the Russians wouldn't know which silos actually contained missiles?

/My vodka ate my google-fu

Sounds like something he would do, but his long term goal was for "Star Wars" to make nuclear weapons completely unnecessary and get rid of them.

Can't we just disable and destroy all nuclear weapons? Those things are like cheats in games, it destroys everything that's not even part of the target and it makes land radioactive. Just develop better weapons like longer range rifles and things like that, not overpowered stuff that can blow your own entire country if you forget to press the launch button.

tinyarena: EdTheHead: 'fraid not. Those satellites only tell you when and where one goes off, not where unexploded nuclear bombs are. We may have something with that capability, but I doubt it.

click the IONDS links, do a little reading, you'll sleep better

I had just done that. Do you have a reference that indicates an ability to track unexploded nukes ?

Down by the river
I stored my bombs
Down by the river
Bombs ooooh stored my bombs

All I can imagine is ice-cream trucks with a catchy jingle driving around Pakistan with a nuke in the back. "One rocket pop please!"

♫Take me to the river. Drop me in heavy water. ♫♪

Link (new window) This is all I could think about when reading the headline.

tinyarena: UberDave: ZAZ: Can drones carry radiation sensors good enough to track these bombs through traffic?

A drone? Doubtful. And I wouldn't be surprised if they put a little shielding in the van (it wouldn't take much) just in case someone was driving down the road with a uber-response survey meter..

IONDS would like a word with you.
We know where it all is, all the time
Or, do you think we've just been lucky for the last 60 years?

Nope. Highly enriched uranium produces extremely low levels of detectable radiation. Using a radiation detector, a cargo container of bananas results in a larger signal than a uranium based nuclear bomb.

So no, our satellites cannot detect Pakistan's nukes from orbit. Neither can our drones. Even if we littered Pakistan's street corners with remove radiation detectors we would still be very unlikely to detect the movement of their bombs.

Highly enriched uranium is one of the most difficult radioactive substances to detect with radiation detectors. I suspect most of Pakistan's weapons are uranium based.

The only way we'll know where they are is if our spies in the Pakistani military tell us.

Also, Pakistan keeps its nuclear weapons disassembled. Has anybody read anything on what they are trucking around back there? Fully assembled missiles? Warheads? The difference is kinda important.

They stole the idea from the second season of 24. Sometimes life imitates TV shows, I guess.