COLUMN ONE : Terrifying Quest for A-Arms : The weapons are held by a growing number of developing nations. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, proliferation poses the world’s most pressing danger.

In May, 1990, as India and Pakistan careened to the brink of war over the disputed region of Kashmir, U.S. intelligence picked up unmistakable signals that the two nations were preparing to use nuclear weapons against each other.

Pakistan was hastily assembling atomic bombs from components it had produced and stockpiled as part of a clandestine weapons program launched in the early 1970s. At the same time, India was readying its nuclear weapons for delivery by aircraft against Pakistani cities.

President Bush dispatched then-National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates to Islamabad and New Delhi on an urgent and little-noticed mission to try to pull the two nations back from the precipice. According to a senior U.S. official privy to the conversations, Gates told Indian and Pakistani leaders that U.S. intelligence estimates and war games showed that the conflict would leave the two impoverished countries physically and economically devastated.

Gates, now director of the CIA, never revealed to those leaders how much the United States knew about Indian and Pakistani preparations to use nuclear arms. He did not need to.

“Beneath the surface of all the discussions was the threat of nuclear devastation,” a senior official involved in the meetings said. “We wanted to stop them while there was still time.”

Just how close the world came to its first nuclear war that spring has been one of the best-kept secrets in Washington. Officials believe that it was only the timely intervention by the United States, and parallel entreaties from Moscow, Beijing and several European governments, that prevented all-out war involving nearly a fifth of the world’s population.

Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismemberment of its once-mighty military machine, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction poses the most pressing danger confronting the world today.

Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are now in the hands of a growing number of developing nations in some of the world’s tensest regions. Like India and Pakistan, many of these countries are inflamed by territorial and sectarian passions and are unfettered by the calculus of deterrence that prevented a superpower nuclear conflagration over the four decades of the Cold War.

In his first public speech since assuming the leadership of the CIA, Gates said that curtailing weapons proliferation would be one of the agency’s highest priorities, second only to monitoring developments in the commonwealth that has emerged out of the old Soviet Union. He said he had created a special proliferation center at the CIA that eventually will be staffed by 300 specialists.

“Beyond the borders of Russia and the newly sovereign republics lie other challenges to peace, to international order, and thus to us,” Gates told CIA employees in a Dec. 4 speech. “Foremost among these is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical and biological, and related delivery systems--by nearly two dozen nations, forging arsenals of such destructive capacity as to defy all reason.”

The CIA director said these weapons are “all too often in the hands of megalomaniacs, unstable military governments, strongmen of proven inhumanity, weak and unstable governments, or in the hands of some who are threatened by such governments.”

Fear of the spread of nuclear weapons has mushroomed in recent months with the fall of the Soviet Union, which once controlled a stockpile of 27,000 nuclear warheads, including 15,000 portable and easily concealed battlefield weapons such as nuclear-tipped artillery shells.

Although leaders of the new Commonwealth of Independent States have taken pains to assure the world that the world’s largest nuclear arsenal remains under firm central control, the diversion of even a single nuclear weapon to terrorists or a rogue state could have monstrous implications.

In addition, thousands of Soviet advanced weapons scientists face unemployment, and the temptation to sell their secrets and services could become overwhelming as the economic situation deteriorates. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 employees of the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Power and Industry hold high-level security clearances giving them access to the most sensitive details of nuclear bomb-making, according to Christopher Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. Most of these scientists and technicians are paid less than Moscow bus drivers, Paine notes.

Already, there have been reports of Soviet arms makers defecting to would-be nuclear powers or being offered large sums to do so. Late last month, an Italian prosecutor said that weapons-grade Soviet uranium and plutonium are being offered for sale by Soviet officials through Swiss intermediaries.

Gates warned in congressional testimony last month that even if nuclear weapons and critical components can be physically controlled, there is no way to halt the movement of people who carry the mysteries of the atom in their heads.

“Tens of thousands of scientists, engineers and medical doctors are emigrating annually from the former Soviet Union. Some of these have expertise applicable to special weapons and missiles,” Gates told the House Armed Services Committee on Dec. 10. “Most of these emigrants will prefer to settle in Israel or in the West, but some may find a better market for their expertise in Third World countries trying to acquire or improve special weapons capabilities.”

There are other disturbing trends.

Algeria, with extensive Chinese help, is building a reactor at a remote and heavily guarded site south of Algiers that Western experts believe is intended to produce plutonium for nuclear arms.

Iran, employing a vast network of foreign suppliers, is thought to be just five years away from assembling an atom bomb.

North Korea is thought capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium within a year, giving it the capability to build its first nuclear weapon before the end of 1994. Pyongyang’s acquisition of an atomic weapon could fuel a nuclear arms race in Asia, pushing South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to develop their own nuclear capabilities.

Libya is aggressively seeking nuclear capability, by either purchasing a weapon or buying the brainpower of weapons scientists. U.S. officials said that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi has offered Pakistan billions of dollars for nuclear technology and is in the market for Soviet specialists willing to barter their knowledge.

China, despite its announced intention to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, continues to supply technology for nuclear weapons and missiles to the Third World, particularly Pakistan, Algeria and the volatile Middle East.

But there are hopeful signs as well. Brazil and Argentina last fall agreed to suspend nuclear weapons development and to open their nuclear facilities to mutual inspection.

Iraq’s ambitious bomb project has been set back years by the Persian Gulf War and a harsh U.N.-imposed monitoring regime. Last week, North and South Korea signed a treaty that would make the peninsula a nuclear-free zone, effective next month, and in the process require North Korea to renounce its nuclear arms program. But U.S. officials remain skeptical that Pyongyang will actually halt its nuclear efforts.

South Africa, an undeclared but assumed nuclear power since 1979, joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in July, 1991, and will submit its nuclear facilities to international inspection beginning this year.

The story of Pakistan’s atom bomb development provides a vivid case study of how an ambitious nation can overcome technical problems and international opposition to join the nuclear club.

The catalyst for Pakistan’s weapons program was India’s 1974 test of what New Delhi called a “peaceful” nuclear device. Pakistan publicly vowed that it would match India’s nuclear status, and privately began an elaborate secret effort to acquire the means to do so.

In 1976, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger flew to Islamabad to warn Pakistan’s prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, that the United States opposed Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions and would do all it could to thwart them.

In a stormy session, Bhutto dismissed Kissinger’s pleas and promised that the Pakistanis would “eat grass if we have to” in pursuit of the bomb.

Already, Pakistan was building a complex of centrifuges to enrich uranium at a secret plant near Kahuta. The plant was the brainchild of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb,” who acquired much of his expertise while employed at a similar European facility in the early 1970s. That plant, located at Almemo, in the Netherlands, was operated by Eurenco, a multinational consortium that produced enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power reactors.

Khan returned to Pakistan in 1976 with the blueprints and supplier lists from Eurenco and began to replicate the plant piece by piece from European--mainly German--suppliers. While much of the material for the Pakistani nuclear project was sold knowingly by private firms, Khan employed a variety of sophisticated subterfuges to evade export controls and Western efforts to slow the Pakistani program.

Khan today is a national hero in Pakistan, a scientific genius who outwitted the West to bring Pakistan into the nuclear big leagues.

According to congressional investigators and other Western proliferation experts, buyers working for Khan purchased sensitive materials through a variety of front firms in Canada, the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France, Holland and Abu Dhabi. Many of the most important components were ostensibly bought in the name of Karachi Textiles Mills and a firm called Machinery Coils Factory.

Their procurement efforts were financed in large measure by the outlaw Bank of Credit & Commerce International, which was founded by two Pakistanis and had close ties to the government. Libya also provided substantial financial help in return for what Libya’s Kadafi expected to be full access to the technology, or to the weapons themselves.

Help from German firms was critical. After a two-year investigation, the Bonn government estimated in 1989 that 70 West German companies exported key nuclear technology and equipment to Pakistan, including many of the same firms that helped Baghdad build its nuclear weapons facilities.

As Khan labored to procure key materials and build an arms manufacturing complex, the breakthrough came as a gift--from Beijing. In 1983, for the first time in history, one nation gave another a complete, tested nuclear weapons design.

According to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, China gave Pakistan full design details of a 25-kiloton atomic bomb--twice as powerful as the Hiroshima weapon--as well as enough weapons-grade enriched uranium to fuel two nuclear weapons. U.S. officials made a model of the bomb, which was about the size of a soccer ball with detonators around the surface, and found its design to be “completely reliable,” he said.

Milhollin calls the transfer “one of the two greatest acts of proliferation in history,” the other being Israel’s joint testing of a nuclear bomb with South Africa in 1979.

Both India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons and are vigorously working on ever-more-sophisticated means of delivering them. Both have medium-range ballistic missiles and are trying to improve their range and accuracy.

“South Asia seems to be the highest-temperature nuclear flash point in the world at this time,” Milhollin said. “You have all the ingredients--a border dispute, historic rivalry, mutual suspicion and no nuclear doctrine in either country.” U.S. officials who intervened to halt the brewing 1990 conflict were dismayed to learn that neither India nor Pakistan had seriously considered the effects of nuclear weapons and had no conception of how to stop a war that had gone nuclear.

Other nations with nuclear ambitions have followed the Pakistani model--theft or purchase of nuclear plans and components from willing foreign suppliers; diversion of nuclear technology from peaceful to military purposes; the use of false bills of lading and front companies to disguise the ultimate end use of nuclear-related materials, and extensive aid from nations that have already crossed the nuclear threshold. And, until recently, the West has either winked at these efforts or actively aided them.

While Third World nuclear programs follow a basic pattern, proliferation experts say each program has peculiar characteristics.

Israel, with an estimated 100 or more nuclear weapons of various types, has the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal outside the five declared nuclear powers--the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, France and Britain. Israel built its nuclear program from a reactor bought from France in the 1960s and heavy water (used to produce plutonium) smuggled from Norway.

North Korea’s weapons program, although originally supported by Moscow, has become largely an indigenous effort.

Iraq appears to have been the Third World nation most adept at using its considerable cash reserves to buy nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology from the West. Baghdad was also aided by a number of European and Soviet experts who helped design and operate its special weapons plants.

Algeria’s nuclear reactor at Ain Oussera, 150 miles south of Algiers, was built by the Chinese and may represent the nucleus of a well-financed multinational Arab bomb-making effort located safely out of range of Israeli aircraft.

Brazil and Argentina branched out from successful commercial nuclear power programs into military research but stopped short of producing weapons-grade material. Both continue to cooperate with other nations on ballistic missile programs, ostensibly for putting satellites into space.

Taiwan and South Korea each launched extensive nuclear weapons programs but abandoned them under intense U.S. pressure--and guarantees of U.S. nuclear protection in case of war.

Leonard Spector of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington said that even as the world is wising up to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, four new nuclear powers have been created from the rubble of the Soviet Union--Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. How successful these new nations will be in restricting the spread of weapons and technology remains an open question.

And while the United Nations has become more aggressive in monitoring arms programs and the West has tightened up on critical exports, Spector noted, “The problems are growing faster than solutions are being put in place.”

EMERGING NUCLEAR WEAPONS NATIONS

Nuclear weapons are now in the hands of a growing number of developing nations in some of the world’s tensest regions. And with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal is now divided among four separate republics.

New States, Old Arsenals

(resulting from breakup of Soviet Union) Russia: Strategic Weapons: 9,650 Tactical Weapons: 9,350 Total: 19,000 Ukraine: Strategic Weapons: 1,300 Tactical Weapons: 2,700 Total: 4,000 Kazakhstan: Strategic Weapons: 1,150 Tactical Weapons: 650 Total: 1,800 Belarus: Strategic Weapons: 100 Tactical Weapons: 1,150 Total: 1,250

Possessing Nuclear Weapons or Components

Israel--Reportedly tested A-bomb in South Atlantic in 1979; estimated to have at least 100 weapons of various types.

India--Has tested nuclear weapon, possesses essentials for 75-100 A-bombs that could be deployed quickly.

Pakistan--Thought to have received extensive help from China; probably has material for 15-20 undeclared A-bombs.

Abandoning Nuclear Arms Programs

South Africa--Assumed to have weapons since 1979, but signed Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991 and will submit to international inspections.

Brazil--Launched weapons program in 1979, halted by current civilian government. Not party to treaty but agrees to inspections.

Argentina--Started weapons development but stopped short of producing weapons-grade material. Not party to treaty but accepts inspections.

Taiwan--Has sizeable A-power program; built secret lab to extract plutonium but dismantled under U.S. pressure. Party to treaty.

Actively Seeking Nuclear Weapons

North Korea--Thought to be within 3 years of weapons capability. Party to treaty but resists inspections. Signed seperate pact with South Korea making peninsula nuclear-free.

Iran--With vast network of foreign suppliers, thought to be 5 years away from A-bomb.

Iraq--Aided by European and Soviet experts, it bought weapons technology from West. A-arms program set back years by Gulf War.

Libya--Aggressively seeking nuclear capability, reportedly offered Pakistan billions of dollars for technology.

Sources: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Natural Resources Defense Council