Cables bare US concerns about Pakistani nukes

PARIS — A French newspaper is reporting that once-secret U.S. diplomatic cables reveal concerns by US officials that Islamic militants might gain access to Pakistani nuclear material. The revelation was published Tuesday night on the website of the newspaper Le Monde, one of the dailies that WikiLeaks has provided with some of its more than 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. The newspaper says that in the cable traffic President Barack Obama reportedly confided that Pakistan was his "private nightmare." A February 2009 cable from then-US Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad said "our main worry" was that a worker inside a Pakistani nuclear site "might bring out enough fissile material to build a bomb." Le Monde says that among the US concerns was the failure of a plan that Pakistan had agreed to implement "in principle" in 2007 for an "operation" to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani nuclear reactor. — AP