S-3/Arighat SSBN (above) was launched on on November 19, 2017.
Information on the above-shown vessel can be obtained here: http://trishul-trident.blogspot.com/2017/07/drdo-owned-navy-operated-mris-vessels.html
Civil engineering work on NAOB (above) began in 2011 and thus far the construction of underground SSBN parking pens have been completed, while work continues on the construction of SLBM storage-cum-loading/unloading facilities.
Zeeshan Rafiq joined the Pakistan
Navy as a lieutenant in 2008. He first went to sea two years later, as part of
Combined Task Force 150, a 25-nation sea patrol operation that deployed ships
from Karachi into the Arabian Sea on counterterrorism and antipiracy missions.
The coalition’s participants included Pakistan, the United States, and NATO navies. Rafiq chose his country’s navy after
“listening to patriotic songs,” and he was motivated to serve. But after a few
years, he came to think that the Pakistani military had become “the right hand
of these infidel forces” and that his country’s generals and admirals “follow
American diktats. One signal from America and the entire Pakistan Army
prostrates before them,” he reflected. Rafiq once watched an
American soldier board a Pakistan Navy ship. Everyone addressed him as “sir”
and he was accorded the protocol of an officer even though he was just an
enlisted man. In the war between the Muslim faithful and the infidels, Rafiq
wondered, “Which side is Pakistan’s army on?” The generals who ran his country
assisted in the “carpet bombing” of Afghanistan. They turned air bases over to
the CIA for drone attacks against Muslims. Rafiq read Inspire, Anwar Al-Awlaki’s English-language Internet magazine. He
studied the biographies of Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber,
and Nidal Hasan, the Major who went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.
He wanted to do something to remind “mujahids around the world” that it was
important to “break the grip of infidels over our seas.”
Rafiq discovered that another
serving Pakistan Navy Lieutenant based in Karachi, Owais Jakhrani, who was from
Baluchistan, felt similarly. Jakhrani’s father was a senior Police officer. The
son nonetheless came to believe that his country had become a slave state of
America. Jakhrani’s radicalization manifested itself as complaints to navy
officers that the service was insufficiently Islamic; an internal investigation
of him led to his dismissal. Sometime during 2014, Jakhrani and
Rafiq made contact with Al Qaeda in Waziristan. After Osama Bin Laden’s death,
his longtime Egyptian deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, succeeded him. Zawahiri issued
occasional pronouncements but kept a low profile, to avoid Bin Laden’s fate. Al
Qaeda’s local network increasingly consisted of Pakistani militants who had
drifted toward the organization and its brand name from other violent groups
based in Punjab and Kashmir. One of the leaders of this less Arab, more
subcontinent-focused Al Qaeda fought under the name Asim Umar. His real name,
according to the investigations of Indian intelligence agencies, was Asim
Sanaullah Haq, originally an Indian citizen in the state of Uttar Pradesh. He
left there in the mid-1990s and ended up in Pakistan, where he joined
Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin before moving toward Al Qaeda. During 2014, Rafiq and
Jakhrani met him and explained that they could mobilize a sizable group of
sympathizers and seize control of a Pakistan Navy warship, and then use it to
attack the enemies of Islam.
The Pakistan Navy was not merely
a conventional surface fleet; it was part of the country’s systems of nuclear
deterrence. In 2012, Pakistan launched a Naval Strategic Forces Command,
meaning a command focused on the deployment of nuclear weapons at sea. The
country’s military leadership sought to develop a nuclear “triad,” akin to that
deployed by the United States: that is, systems that would allow the firing of
nuclear arms from aircraft, from land bases, or from the sea. The advantage of
a triad is that it makes it difficult for an adversary that also has nuclear
arms to launch a preemptive strike, because at least some of the targeted
country’s dispersed nukes and delivery systems would likely survive and could
be used in retaliation. While developing their triads, the United States,
Russia, Britain, and France placed special emphasis on submarines armed with
nuclear missiles because these stealthy undersea vessels would be particularly
hard for an enemy to locate and destroy during a first strike. Pakistan had not
yet acquired and deployed enough high-quality submarines to place the sea leg
of its nuclear triad only with those vessels. Analysts assumed that Pakistan
would also consider placing nuclear weapons aboard navy ships that carried
cruise missiles with enough range to reach India, which of course was by far
the most likely adversary to enter into a nuclear war with Pakistan.
PNS Zulfiquar, a China-built
seven-storey guided-missile frigate, which typically had 250 to 300 sailors and officers on board,
was one such warship. On December 19 and 21, 2012, the frigate reportedly
test-fired China-made C-802A anti-ship cruise missiles, which have a range of
about 180km. The C-802As can fly as low as 25 metres above the surface of the
ocean, making them difficult to detect by radar. The missiles can also be
fitted with a small nuclear warhead with a yield of two to four kilotons, or
about 15 to 25 percent of the explosive force of the atomic bomb the United
States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Around the time that it
launched its Naval Strategic Forces Command, Pakistan also accelerated its
development of small, or “tactical,” nuclear weapons like the ones that might
fit on C-802A missiles. During the first decade after the invention of the
atomic bomb, the United States, too, had built and deployed small nuclear bombs
that could be dropped from planes or even fired from special artillery guns.
The United States sent the small bombs to Europe and planned to use them on the
battlefield against Soviet troops and tanks if a land war erupted across the
Iron Curtain. It was only later in the Cold War that the idea of using atomic
bombs on a battlefield as if they were just a more potent artillery shell
became anathema in most nuclear strategy circles. Nuclear deterrence between
the United States and the Soviet Union evolved into an all-or-nothing
proposition under the rubric of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. At the
peak of MAD, each side had more than 20,000 nuclear bombs that were so powerful
that any full-on nuclear exchange would have ended human civilization. The
effects of nuclear war became so dramatic and unthinkable that it made such a
war—or any conventional war that might go nuclear—less likely. That was the
theory, at least.
India and Pakistan tested nuclear
weapons in May 1998. As their version of mutual nuclear deterrence evolved, it
displayed some parallels to the position of the United States in Europe during
the 1950s. The United States feared a massive conventional blitzkrieg by Soviet
forces and saw small nuclear weapons as a way to counter such an invasion. In
South Asia, a similar factor was Pakistan’s fear of a conventional armoured
invasion by India. Because India has a much larger military than Pakistan, as
well as a larger economy and population, it might be expected to prevail in a
long war. Pakistan acquired nuclear warheads to deter India from considering a
conventional tank-and-infantry invasion, no matter how provoked India might feel
from time to time by Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. For this defence to work,
Pakistani Generals had to plant doubt in the minds of Indian leaders about
whether the Generals were really rash enough to be the first to use nuclear
weapons in anger since 1945. The development of small or tactical nuclear
weapons aided Pakistan in this respect. Small atomic bombs might be dropped on
a desert battlefield against Indian troops, away from population
centers. Or they might be fired on cruise missiles against an isolated Indian
military base. The use of even a small nuclear weapon on a battlefield would
likely shock the world and provoke international intervention to end the war,
perhaps before India could achieve its war aims. Overall, the existence and
deployment of small nukes by Pakistan made it more likely that its Generals
would actually use them, which in turn deepened doubts in the minds of Indian
leaders about how costly a war with Pakistan might become. That is, in
Pakistan’s twisted and dangerous logic, small nuclear weapons strengthened deterrence.
Yet there were obvious downsides. One was that building and spreading out so
many small, loose bombs exacerbated the threat that terrorists might try to
steal them—or might come across them inadvertently.
Lieutenant Zeeshan Rafiq and
former Lieutenant Owais Jakhrani knew all about the PNS Zulfiquar’s
internal security systems. After they made contact with Al Qaeda in 2014, they
developed elaborate plans, seemingly derived from Hollywood thrillers, to
defeat that security in order to seize control of the warship and its weapons,
including its 76mm gun and its C-802A missiles. One part of their plan was to
exploit “a particular weakness of the security system,” as Rafiq put it,
namely, that “the lockers and rooms of officers are not checked.” Rafiq and
other officers successfully smuggled weapons aboard the PNS Zulfiquar “in batches, in their
backpacks,” and stowed them in lockers. The next part of their plan was to make
duplicate keys to the doors of the operations room (CIC) and the naval gunnery
compartment “so that these rooms could be accessed without the knowledge” of
the ship’s commanding officers. Here, too, the insider knowledge of the two Lieutenants
offered an advantage. They planned to sneak into the magazine room of the 76mm
gun to load its shells before they moved to seize control of the warship. They
also understood that it was possible to prime and operate both the gun and the
C-802As outside of the main operations room, in an alternate area below, on the
second deck. The C-802As could be operated manually from the second deck when
the missiles’ automated system was off—with their duplicate keys, they could
accomplish this.
The conspirators also scoped out
the armed security guards they expected to find on the PNS Zulfiquar.
These were elite commandos from the Naval Special Service Group. There were
typically five Pakistani commandos aboard when the frigate sailed to join NATO
for operations of Combined Task Force 150. The commandos were deployed in part
to protect the warship in case Somali or other pirates attacked. Rafiq,
Jakhrani, and their co-conspirators devised a plan to kill them or hold them at
bay. First, they would bring two dozen or so co-conspirators aboard—some after
the warship was at sea. They would try to avoid any confrontation with the crew
as the PNS Zulfiquar sailed toward American and other vessels
operating in the coalition. Their target was the USS Supply, a lightly
defended American supply and refuelling vessel. According to Rafiq, the American
logistics ship’s defence was assigned to a US Navy frigate that always shadowed
it, no more than a few miles away. When the PNS Zulfiquar got close,
they would use their duplicate keys to arm and fire its big artillery gun and
its cruise missiles, to “secretly attack the US warship,” as one of the
conspirators put it, before the Pakistani crew aboard realized what was
happening. They would use the 76mm gun to “destroy” USS Supply and then
turn the C-802As on whatever American warship came to its defence. After they launched
their attack on the US Navy, they expected the crew of the PNS Zulfiquar
to try to stop them, but “since it doesn’t take much time to fire missiles”
they would already have done a lot of damage. At that point, they planned to
defend the frigate’s armoury so the Pakistani crew could not arm themselves.
They also would lock all the doors and hatches between the second and third
decks, to barricade themselves below. They would take the frigate’s commanding
officer as a hostage and force him to order the crew to abandon ship, by
donning life jackets and jumping into the sea. Once in full control of the PNS Zulfiquar, the conspirators planned to use
all of the frigate’s weapons—the 76mm gun, “torpedoes, anti-aircraft gun, and
C-802As” to attack “any US Navy ship.” They would continue to fight until “the
PNS Zulfiquar was destroyed” or until the mutineers themselves were
“killed in action.” They hoped to use the ship’s communication systems to reach
“the media and tell the world about this entire operation.”
Early in September 2014, Al Qaeda
publicly announced a new branch, Al Qaeda in the Indian
subcontinent, under the leadership of Asim Umar, the Indian from Uttar Pradesh.
Al Qaeda’s leaders explained that they had worked for some time to recruit and
unite militants from disparate Pakistani groups. The announcement seemed
designed to provide Al Qaeda with new visibility and relevance at a time when
the Islamic State had risen to prominence in Syria and Iraq and had started to
recruit local allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. An Al Qaeda member, Hasan
Yusuf, explained that the group’s main motivation in forming the new branch
came “in the wake of the American defeat and withdrawal from
Afghanistan. . . . This jihad will not end; America’s defeat is
only the prelude.” A withdrawal that was seen in Washington as an intelligent
winding down of an unsustainable war was inevitably understood by jihadists
worldwide as a historic victory and a source of new momentum. On September 6,
2014, in Karachi, at dawn, Rafiq and Jakhrani boarded the PNS Zulfiquar
in navy uniforms, with their service cards displayed. A number of co-conspirators,
in marine uniforms, approached through the harbour in a dinghy. An alert
Pakistan Navy gunner noticed that the “Marines” were carrying AK-47s, which are
not normally issued in the Navy. He fired a warning shot. A full-on gun battle
erupted. SSG commandos on-board joined the fray to defend the warship. When it
was over, by one count, eleven attackers died, including Rafiq and Jakhrani.
They never had a chance to access the weapons they had smuggled on board or to use the duplicate keys they
had made to the C-802A missile room.
The Pakistani defence of the PNS Zulfiquar
was professional and successful. Yet there was a disturbing postscript to
Al Qaeda’s strike. About six weeks after the attack, India’s principal external
intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (R & AW), citing agent
reporting from Karachi, informed India’s national security adviser Ajit Doval that
a nuclear warhead had been on board the PNS Zulfiquar at the time of the attack. If their
plan had succeeded, Rafiq and Jakhrani would have had more on their hands than
they expected, by this account. It is possible that India put a false story out
to stir up global alarm about terrorism and nuclear security in Pakistan. Yet
if the Indian report is accurate, September 6, 2014, would mark the first known
armed terrorist attack in history against a facility holding nuclear weapons.
Judging by Pakistan’s trajectory, it is unlikely to be the last.
