Ten months ago, the threat of a political accident causing a nuclear calamity raised considerable alarm in South Asia and among the region's would-be remote controllers in Washington. Fears over a similar threat are being revived, even if fewer talk about it now.

    In November 2007, General Pervez Musharraf proclaimed martial law in Pakistan, which he and his camp preferred to call an emergency. The declaration instantly raised fears of the country's destabilization - and a nuclear disaster. The situation appeared, especially to Washington and Western observers, a tailor-made opportunity for Pakistan's nuclear weapons to fall into terrorist hands or those of warring groups.

    Truthout was among the very first to take note of these fears (see Nuclear Fallout from Imploding Pakistan?, November 6, 2007). We then pointed to the perceived opportunity for al-Qaeda and to the added possibility (according to some experts) of nuclear thefts in view of faintly visible rifts in Pakistan's army.

    We also mentioned that some observers saw "the threat enhanced by the armed ethnic conflicts raging in the country's tribal areas, which supply about a quarter of Musharraf's soldiers." The current fears are connected to the same conflicts.

    Those who voice these fears cite, among other things, a statement made by a leader of Pakistan's ruling coalition on July 26. Maulana Fazlur Rahman, chief of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), one of the four constituents of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani's coalition government, said: "'The North-West Frontier Province (or the NWFP, the province and political base of Rahman) is breaking away from Pakistan. That is what is happening. That is the reality."

    The statement caused serious consternation among observers who believe the tribal NWFP to hold most of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The province has been associated with the country's nuclear-weapon program ever since it was reportedly started in 1974 with a project located at Wah, next to the Pakistan Ordnance Factories, and close to Peshawar, capital of the NWFP. Since 2006, the province has witnessed suicide bomb blasts aimed (according to a semi-official suggestion) at "facilities providing regional security for Pakistan's nuclear program."

    The NWFP's place on Pakistan's nuclear map has not been established. Nor, however, has Islamabad considered it important to allay the apprehensions.

    The Washington-led West voiced anxiety over the security over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal immediately after 9/11. Within two days of the tragedy, the Musharraf regime was reported to have carried out relocation of the weapons to six "secret locations." We heard of the subject again in August 2007, when Washington and the Pentagon let it be known through an American television channel that they knew of the locations. Some experts then speculated that the "leak" might have led to a fresh relocation of Pakistan's "crown jewels" to other sites, including mines and tunnels. The terrain of the NWFP does offer sites of such description.

    Rahman's statement came just days before Gillani's visit to Washington, where he came under intense pressure to ensure effective action against militants thriving in the tribal areas with the connivance of Pakistan's security agencies, according to many accounts. The pressure campaign provoked Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik to accuse India of attempts to "destabilize" the tribal belt. This was the first such public charge by the Gillani regime.

    Perception of such destabilization attempts in Pakistan - which India's hawks are not trying hard to discourage - can lead to a dangerous situation. Not without relevance here is a report on the region - and what is really the biggest threat to it - by two Italian nuclear physicists, released in January 2002. After a visit to Pakistan on the eve of an India-Pakistan military standoff, which brought South Asia to the brink of nuclear war, Paolo Cotta-Ramusino and Maurizio Martellini of the Landau Network, an arms control institution, talked of Pakistan's "four nuclear thresholds."

    Quoting Lieutenant-General Khalid Kidwai of Pakistan's nuclear Strategic Planning Division, the report spoke of "spatial, military and economic thresholds," all three referring to provocations from India that would prompt Pakistan to "use nuclear weapons as a last resort." The fourth threshold would be crossed, it added, if India pushed Pakistan into "political destabilization or creates a large-scale internal subversion there."

    The six-year-old report should sound a warning, as India-Pakistan relations continue to deteriorate by the day ever since the blast at the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7. Indian adversaries of the "peace process" between the nuclear-armed neighbors, talking of Pakistan's hand in the terrorist strike, openly advocate a policy of "paying them back in their own coin" and a resumption of India-backed serial blasts of the eighties across the border. "And now, a war of the consulates?" wonders Pakistan's Daily Times editorially, as it notes a blast at the Pakistani consulate in Afghanistan's Herat.

    We must wait for the answer. What we must know is this: a proxy war between India and Pakistan on Afghan soil, which can spill all too easily into tribal terrain, will pose not much less of a nuclear threat than the one that South Asia survived in 2002.