New doubts emerge over safety of Pak's nukes

The first-ever suicide attack on a bus carrying employees of Pakistan's prized nuclear labs in Rawalpindi has raised new questions about Islamabad's ability to withstand increasingly bold assaults by the resurgent Taliban against the country's military complex.

Pakistani officials said the July 2 attack targeted a bus carrying workers from a non-nuclear military plant, but military analysts quoted by International Herald Tribune on Monday said they believed that was an effort to avoid embarrassment of admitting that a vehicle connected with the nuclear programme had been hit.

The attack comes as Pakistan's army is fighting the Taliban on several fronts in the country's restive tribal belt. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda have already announced that their goal is to topple the Pakistan government and gain control of its nuclear arsenal.

Singling out nuclear workers, even though they were miles outside the weapons lab, military analysts say, carries heavy symbolism in a nation that believes its ultimate strength lies in its nuclear capability. It also suggested a worrisome level of sophistication.

'It showed that their intelligence is current,' said Talat Masood, a retired general and a military analyst.

'It was a deliberate strike. They are trying to give a hint that they can strike the personnel who are working for the nuclear facilities.'

The attack killed the suicide bomber, who rammed the bus with his motorcycle, and wounded 30 workers. Military analysts said the workers were from the Kahuta Research Laboratories, where weapons-grade uranium is produced. No high-level official or scientist was on board.

The United States has spent almost $100 million in training Pakistani security personnel on how to make the country's nuclear warheads safe and how to store them separately from the missiles and trigger devices.

But in the last year, officials in Washington have expressed growing alarm about Pakistan's nuclear laboratories. Police said the bus was carrying workers returning home from the nuclear lab. But since then, government officials have said that the bus belonged to a military engineering lab in Taxila, the report said.

An official at the complex, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, denied that. And, in another indication that the wounded were employees of the nuclear programme, officials at the scene had said some of them would be treated at a hospital run by the nuclear labs.

In an editorial, The Nation noted that 'the militants have now started attacking the very basis of the country's conventional as well as nuclear defence.'

'The fact that the employees of one of the major nuclear facilities are not provided proper security is a serious comment on the working of our law enforcement apparatus,' it said.