Pakistan must move to the top of US strategic agenda to prevent Islamabad's nuclear arsenal from falling into the hands of Taliban, or worse, an extremist group that seized control of the government, a scholar has warned.
The 'second scenario (would give) international terrorists even greater access to Pakistan's nuclear capabilities, the risk of nuclear confrontation with India would also increase dramatically,' writes John R. Bolton in an article in the Wall Street Journal Monday.
President Barack Obama's endorsement of Pakistan's official position that it has secure control over its nuclear weapons arsenal is 'not reassuring in light of the Taliban's military and political gains throughout Pakistan', he said.
'Unless there is swift, decisive action against the Islamic radicals there, Pakistan faces two very worrisome scenarios,' wrote the former US ambassador to the UN, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
'One scenario is that instability continues to grow, and that the radicals disrupt both Pakistan's weak democratic institutions and the military,' Bolton said, with 'a tangible risk that several weapons could slip out of military control'.
'Such weapons could then find their way to Al Qaeda or other terrorists, with obvious global implications,' he said. But 'the second scenario is even more dangerous'.
'Instability could cause the constitutional government to collapse entirely and the military to fragment' and 'allow a well-organised, tightly disciplined group to seize control of the entire Pakistani government.
'Not only could this second scenario give international terrorists even greater access to Pakistan's nuclear capabilities, the risk of nuclear confrontation with India would also increase dramatically,' Bolton said.
'To prevent either scenario, Pakistan must move to the top of our strategic agenda, albeit closely related to Afghanistan,' he said, suggesting a strengthening of pro-American elements in Pakistan's military 'so they can purge dangerous Islamicists from their ranks and roll back Taliban advances'.
Obama's talks next week in Washington with presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan provide a clear opportunity to take the hard steps necessary to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and defeat the Taliban, Bolton said.
'Failure to act decisively could well lead to strategic defeat in Pakistan.'
Russia is planning to build a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves.
This is causing widespread alarm among environmentalists, reports The Guardian. prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year.
An agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.
The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, Russia's largest oil firm.
The building of the nuclear power stations would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas.
The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years.
In addition, designers are known to have developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs that could allow eight wells to be drilled at a time.
Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, yesterday condemned the idea of using nuclear power to open the Arctic to oil, gas and mineral production, terming it as a highly risky proposition.
Environmentalists also fear that if additional radioactive waste is produced, it will be dumped into the sea.
Russia has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste.
Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.
The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds up to 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, leading some experts to call the region the next Saudi Arabia.
The technological exploitation of the region is next to impossible due to sea ice, strong winds and temperatures that can dip to below -50C.
Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the US have all claimed large areas of the Arctic in the past five years. But many countries bordering the Arctic see climate change as the chance to exploit areas that were once inaccessible and to open trade routes between the Pacific and Atlantic.