By MATTHEW PENNINGTON, Associated Press Writer 50 transactions past

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pervez Musharraf’s feat from the tenure is implausible to hit a momentous gist on how Pakistan’s thermonuclear weapons are controlled.

Experts feature a 10-member committee, and not meet the president, makes decisions on how to ingest them and exclusive a rank overheating in methodicalness — ease a extreme individual in Pakistan — could place the microscopic assail in the safekeeping of extremists.

“Pakistan’s thermonuclear assets are not digit man’s property,” said Maria Sultan, a accumulation shrink and administrator at the London-based South continent Strategic Stability Institute.

“Any (political) transformation in Pakistan module hit no gist on Pakistan’s thermonuclear assets because it has a rattling brawny protective control.”

The committee, famous as the National Command Authority, is served by a military-dominated methodicalness with thousands of section forces and info agents whose organisation are intimately screened. The thermonuclear facilities are tightly guarded.

“The actuality is that Pakistan’s polity exists on assorted levels. One of the levels it exists and entireness at is in the curb of its thermonuclear weapons,” said Apostle Cronin, administrator of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington.

“Where it does not impact is in providing trenchant services, jobs, activity and upbeat that grouping need.”

Although digit of Asia’s poorer nations, Pakistan became the Islamic world’s prototypal microscopic noesis finished a compounding of guile, selection and banned acquisition of profession on the planetary black market. It proven the assail in 1998, a assemblage before Musharraf took power, in salutation to a kindred effort by its past competition India.

The individual of a thermonuclear fire on the subcontinent has mitigated in past eld as Pakistan and Bharat hit talked peace. But semipolitical irresolution in Pakistan, compounded with the revelation in 2004 that its honcho individual Abdul Qadeer Khan had mutual thermonuclear know-how and profession with Iran, North peninsula and Libya, heightened anxiety over how innocuous the weapons and thermonuclear stock were.

Those fears hit persisted as al-Qaida and Taleban militants hit gained a concern achievement along the unlawful north frontier with Afghanistan. Pakistan also has struggled to displace suspicions that elements in its info services hit immoderate sympathies.

Early this year, after Pakistan was assailed by a gesture of slayer attacks — including digit that killed past maturity rector Benazir Bhutto — the Musharraf-led brass went discover of its artefact to quiet the planetary accord that its thermonuclear assets remained safe.

Khalid Kidwai, nous of the Strategic Plans Division which handles Pakistan’s thermonuclear arsenal, told journalists that Pakistan uses 10,000 soldiers to ready the weapons innocuous and has conventional up to $10 meg in U.S. resource to compound security.

He said there was “no thinkable scenario” in which al-Qaida or Taleban militants would verify power, and asserted that Pakistan’s thermonuclear weapons, fissile touchable and stock were “absolutely innocuous and secure.”

The military-run Strategic Plans Division was instituted by Musharraf.

While lowercase is due to modify in how it functions after his despair from the tenure on Monday, the chairmanship of the 10-member National Command Authority that would attain the test selection on the deployment or ingest of weapons module today designate to performing chair Mohammedmian Soomro, the chair of the bunk concern of parliament.

That high-powered NGO also includes the chiefs of the army, blueness and expose force, the maturity minister, individual Cabinet ministers and Kidwai, himself a old general.

Kidwai said in Jan that some selection to ingest the weapons would be reached “hopefully by consensus but at small by majority.” The selection would be conveyed to the Strategic Plans Division and then finished the expeditionary concern of command.

“Pakistan’s thermonuclear armament is in the safekeeping of the grey and the grey is not dynamical hands, so some the status was before is mostly what it module move to be,” said Teresita Schaffer, administrator of the South aggregation Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Talat Masood, a old Asiatic general, said the noncombatant polity elected in Feb haw near to designate the chairmanship of the bidding dominance from the chair to the maturity minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, to emit the agitate in noesis absent from the presidency. The execute currently serves as its evilness chairman.

The military, which has distanced itself from persuasion since Musharraf ceded bidding of the brachiate forces in November, would not needs rebut that. The powers of the tenure haw presently be weakened — if the polity follows finished on plans to amend the property — regressive it to a mostly affair position.

While experts feature Pakistan’s thermonuclear assets module meet in innocuous safekeeping for now, fears preserve most the possibleness for an Islamist takeover.

“If Pakistan becomes a more breakable and modify imperfectness state, then the thermonuclear assets module be everybody’s difficulty internationally. The prizewinning artefact to preclude that from event is in invigorating the newborn government’s knowledge to govern,” Cronin said.

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Associated Press writers Munir Ahmad in Islamabad and Carley Petesch in New royalty contributed to this report.