Is Pakistan on the Verge of Collapse? Inside the Unstable Nuclear Power

There are nine nuclear powers in the world today, holding among them roughly 13,000 warheads. The United States and Russia account for about ninety percent of that arsenal, and their stockpiles draw the most attention, but that still leaves thousands of city-destroyers in the hands of seven other nations. The fear that one of these weapons might actually be used has climbed sharply in recent years, fed by speculation that Russia could reach for a low-yield device in Ukraine, or that North Korea might one day launch at a neighbor.

WarFronts has examined the prospect of a war between Pakistan and India spiraling into atomic territory before. But the nuclear unease surrounding Pakistan does not depend on a war with anyone. A growing body of concern holds that internal instability alone could fracture Pakistan as a country, and let its nuclear arsenal fall into the wrong hands, a scenario often labeled “nuclear Somalia.” The threat is taken seriously enough that the United States has drawn up a contingency plan for exactly this situation.

This analysis examines the present situation in Pakistan, asks whether the country truly stands on the edge of total catastrophe, and weighs the far-reaching consequences a collapse would carry for the region and the world.

Trying to Pinpoint the Instability

Identifying the single root of Pakistan’s instability is as hopeless as picking out one grain of sand on a beach; there are simply too many candidates. The most useful approach is to narrow the field to three core issues: economy, politics, and terrorism. Each has plagued the country for decades, but each has grown more acute in recent years, and each feeds the others. A collapsing economy fuels political unrest; political paralysis opens space for extremists; and extremist violence further erodes the state’s capacity to govern.

Together they form a self-reinforcing spiral that no single reform can easily break.

How Natural Disaster Deepened the Crisis

Before any of these structural problems can be weighed, it is important to note how badly they were compounded by catastrophic natural disaster. Between June and September of 2022, the monsoon season dropped a record-breaking volume of water on Pakistan, in places pouring down as much as 250 percent more precipitation than average and placing as much as a third of the entire country under devastating floods. The flooding was preceded by back-to-back record heat waves in May and June, which accelerated glacial melting in the east and added still more water to the floods and landslides.

In total, the floods directly affected 33 million people, damaged or destroyed two million houses, killed millions of livestock, swept away nearly 500 bridges, and left hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland sitting under standing water. The disaster did nothing but aggravate the country’s existing problems, first among them the economy.

An Economy Barely Keeping the Lights On

Beyond the estimated $30 billion in flood damage, Pakistan’s economy has struggled for years, and the strain has sharpened recently. While much of the world has wrestled with elevated inflation, Pakistan’s has run sky-high, around 40 percent, recently overtaking Sri Lanka for the highest rate in Asia. Soaring prices for food, fuel, electricity, and water have left many citizens wondering whether they can afford basic necessities.

The federal picture is no better. Over the past 25 years, Pakistan’s debt has grown by an average of 14 percent annually while GDP has expanded by only about 3 percent. By 2022, national debt had reached nearly 63 trillion Pakistani rupees, a little more than $220 billion; by mid-2023 it had already climbed to $270 billion. At the same time, economic growth has slowed to its lowest level in recent history, leaving the country with a widening gap between what it owes and what it produces.

Blackouts, Shuttered Factories, and the IMF

The government is now barely scraping by to supply energy to its people, bidding for natural gas in a global fuel market tightened by sanctions. In January, the country suffered an unprecedented nationwide blackout that left its 230 million people without electricity for more than 24 hours. Analysts warn that such blackouts could become commonplace if the energy crisis is not resolved.

Industry has already felt the blow. The All Pakistan Textile Mills Association announced in October 2022 that it was closing 1,600 factories nationwide for lack of power subsidies, throwing five million people out of work in an instant. Toyota and Honda have both shuttered their assembly plants, as have many prominent materials and textile firms.

Pakistan has repeatedly been bailed out by the International Monetary Fund to avoid defaulting on its debt, a default that would tip the country into an energy catastrophe. But the IMF has been reluctant to step in again unless Pakistan agrees to sweeping internal economic reforms, which does not appear likely.

Fracturing Politics and the Fall of Imran Khan

The question of how the situation reached this point leads into the country’s fracturing politics. Pakistani economist Yousuf Nazar observed that during the globalization and trade liberalization that swept Asia in the 1990s, Pakistan “was busy playing power games between the military and civilian elites,” and that the present crisis “was brewing long before the Ukraine war, which was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.”

Fed up with the trajectory of the nation and the government’s evident inability to manage it, 2022 saw Prime Minister Imran Khan removed from office in a no-confidence vote that pinned much of the blame for recent failures on his tenure. Already a divisive figure, Khan leaned fully into that role after his ouster. He claimed his downfall was a U.S.-led conspiracy operating within the Pakistani military, and he began gathering support through events and rallies aimed at reinstalling himself as prime minister.

Riots, Assassination, and the Threat of Wider Conflict

Khan’s refusal to back down drew the attention of violent groups. Several of his supporters were murdered and many more arrested, culminating in an attempted assassination of Khan himself in November 2022. In 2023, Khan was arrested on corruption charges, igniting huge protests from his base that clashed with riot police. In Peshawar, rioters set fire to police vehicles and offices, and in several instances police opened fire on protesters.

Exact figures are hard to confirm, as media outlets report wildly different numbers, but at least 20 people have been killed and a few hundred injured.

Protesters have also stormed several military installations and offices, drawing tense warnings from military officials who have promised severe repercussions if the unrest continues. Analysts caution that the riots could escalate into large-scale conflict, possibly pulling supporters of rival political parties into clashes against Khan’s followers.

When Force Is Not a Solution

Conditions may only deteriorate in the months ahead, as inflation pushes more people below the poverty line and brings still more onto the streets to protest for a range of reasons. If push comes to shove, the Pakistani military may step in to crush the chaos with an iron fist, but that would be only a temporary fix. An army intervention, however plausible it sounds, addresses none of the underlying problems facing the country.

As one expert on Pakistan put it, “If you’re unable to meet the economic needs of the people and just respond with force, it will only catalyze greater anger.” Should the government make the wrong move, it is easy to imagine a near future in which the country erupts into widespread anarchy, particularly if basic necessities become not merely expensive but unobtainable. With the government in such a precarious position, the door has been left open for another threat to enter the house: terrorism.

The Resurgence of Terrorism

Extremists have found new life in Pakistan’s unstable environment, above all the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, which has staged a resurgence in recent months. The group was responsible for a January suicide bombing in a mosque that killed more than 100 people and injured nearly 200 more. The situation with the TTP is likely to worsen now that the United States has withdrawn from neighboring Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to return to power there and giving the movement renewed momentum on Pakistan’s western flank.

Also active inside Pakistan is Islamic State, which continues to attack anything tied to Western interests. Together these groups thrive on exactly the breakdown of order that the country’s economic and political crises have produced.

The Nuclear Nightmare Scenario

Stacked together, the economic turmoil, political infighting, riots, and terror attacks paint a bleak picture for Pakistan’s near future, and many fear a complete fracturing of the state is possible. Because Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons, the worry is that in the event of total civil war the warheads could end up in extremist hands.

Two main threats follow. The first is obvious: a militant group smuggles a nuclear bomb into a place like Mumbai and detonates it, in what would be by far the deadliest terror attack in history. The second is that a group sells the bomb at an exorbitant price to a nation like Iran, handing Iran a serious weapon while securing enormous funding for the group. Pakistan adamantly defends its nuclear security, with one official insisting that “of all the things in the world to worry about, the issue you should worry about the least is the safety of our nuclear program,” and that “no one with ill intent can get near our strategic assets.”

A Fissile Road Trip and a Broken Friendship

What is troubling is how that “maximum security” actually works. Pakistan transports its warheads around the country in unmarked vans, on what amounts to a never-ending fissile road trip. The aim is to hide their locations not only from terror groups but also from the prying eyes of American satellites.

Distrust between Pakistan and the United States has grown sharply over the past decade, and it is not hard to see why. U.S. drones have routinely violated Pakistani airspace without warning to strike targets on Pakistani soil, and Pakistan harbored Osama bin Laden for a decade just down the street from a military academy while the world hunted for him. With cracks like these in the relationship, it is understandable why Islamabad would keep its warheads’ locations secret, just in case the next Navy SEAL mission aimed to spirit away Pakistan’s nuclear status.

To be fair, the moving-van approach may be safer than keeping warheads stationary at a traditional base. In 2013 alone, Pakistan reported more than 2,000 rogue attacks on nuclear installations, with so many militant groups at large that responsibility was nearly impossible to assign. With the vans blending into ordinary traffic across a vast country, extremist groups have no clear target.

America’s Contingency Plan

The United States is not comfortable with any of this and has reportedly developed a contingency plan to keep the weapons from slipping away. By these accounts, the Joint Special Operations Command keeps units in the region on standby at all times, ready to move into the country and secure the assets, drawing on special forces, aircraft, and agents already in place. But the plan only works if U.S. forces can locate the warheads in the first place. For all anyone knows, some top-secret CIA program tracks each of them around the clock, yet, as national security adviser Jim Jones put it, “anyone who tells you that they know where all of Pakistan’s nukes are is lying to you.”

Averting a Crisis

One thing everyone agrees on is that it would be far better never to see this contingency plan executed, and that the mystery of Pakistan’s nuclear locations is probably best left as it is. Even so, the challenges facing the world’s fifth most populous nation will not fade away in a matter of weeks. Reversing the country’s course will require serious reforms and societal change, and it is unclear whether the government is up to the task.

One of the biggest hurdles is reforming the tax system. At present, an abysmal two percent of the population is registered to pay taxes, and tax evasion is simply the norm. The problem reaches the highest levels: a recent report found that only about 150 of the country’s 446 federal lawmakers even bothered to file at all.

In 2011, a member of the Pakistani Senate did pay his taxes, but on closer inspection he had paid roughly the equivalent of a single U.S. dollar. Mushahid Sayed was offended enough that the figure went viral to write a letter to Reuters correcting it, noting that he had in fact paid about the equivalent of six U.S. dollars.

The Road Ahead

Taxes, in short, are little more than a joke, depriving the government of vast sums that could ease the nation’s financial woes, assuming the money would be handled responsibly. Many citizens doubt that it would, and that doubt is their main reason for refusing to pay. Political corruption is easily the heaviest chain holding Pakistan back, and it must be confronted if the current problems are to be fixed in any meaningful way.

If the current government cannot weather the storm, the country may face a military coup d’état that, if successful, would propel Pakistan into a deeply uncertain future. With so many lives on the line and so much at stake, it is crucial that the nation find a way back onto its feet. A future in which Pakistan collapses into a failed state is a horrifying prospect, one with the potential to spiral into one of the worst disasters of the 21st century.