WASHINGTON - When John Pike began examining new satellite photos of Pakistan's nuclear missile site, he expected to find ''two warehouses inside a fence.'' Instead, he discovered an entire well-developed military base.

Pike is a civilian who works for a private scientific group. His disclosure of the Pakistan images yesterday not only has implications for US foreign policy, but more broadly shows that obtaining and analyzing such sophisticated satellite images is now possible for anyone - for a price.

''In the past, you had to be a superpower to produce this imagery,'' said Pike, a defense analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. ''Now just about anyone can order it. It's a lot of fun, almost illegally fun.''

The Federation, an arms control organization, has used grants from the Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations to begin purchasing photographs that show details down to a yard across of chemical, biological, and nuclear facilities around the world.

So far, it has analyzed and released pictures of sites in North Korea and Pakistan. Next it hopes to buy pictures of sites in India, Iran, Syria, Egypt, and the so-called Area 51 in Nevada, a top-secret US military base.

The group purchased the pictures from Space Imagery Inc. of Thornton, Colo., a forerunner in the commercial spy satellite business that is now going public. Soon, as many as three other US companies will be peddling high-resolution imagery.

The cost is high: a minimum of $1,000 per order for US sites, $2,000 for foreign sites. But the possibilities for using high-resolution photographs are staggering.

Real estate agents can use them to show neighborhoods to prospective buyers. Disaster relief organizations can use them as guides in emergencies. Governments can use them to gather intelligence.

Under US law, anyone can buy pictures of every country in the world except Israel. Terror groups or countries designated by the State Department as sponsoring terrorism can't buy the pictures. And the secretaries of defense or state can order an area of the world off-limits to commercial sales in times of emergency, such as a war.

Not everyone is sanguine about the selling of spy pictures, or about civilians such as Pike interpreting data without more sources of information.

''This can be abused by people who don't have access to overhead imagery to increase the danger they pose to the United States or to our allies,'' said Frank J. Gaffney, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration and now president of the Center For Security Policy, a conservative Washington think-tank. ''That would most obviously be the case when somebody might be able to do a proverbial `Hail Mary' pass overhead and see where our military forces are deployed.''

Gaffney said the Federation of American Scientists' analysis also would ''suffer inevitably from an inability to have access to a package of what is called sources and methods. You can very easily make wrong-headed conclusions.''

But Pike and Corey Gay Hinderstein, a policy analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think-tank specializing in nuclear proliferation issues, said they carefully confine their analysis to what seems probable or possible.

The photographs, Pike said, ''level the playing field between the government and the electorate. I hope these images do for public policy debate what they did for the classified intelligence community 40 years ago: substitute fact for speculation.

''In a field like this, the imbalance of information between the public decision-makers and the public gets so profound that people inside government can ignore outsiders because the outsiders don't really know what they're talking about.''

The Pakistan pictures confirmed the existence of a heavy-water facility to produce plutonium and revealed the larger-than-expected military facility. Pictures of India's nuclear sites have been delayed because of cloud cover, Pike said.

In the aftermath of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, US policy has been aimed at making both countries walk away from nuclear programs. In President Clinton's trip to the region next week, he is expected to raise the issue with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a coup last October.

But Pike said the satellite pictures of Pakistan's buildup at the plutonium reactor at Khushab and the nearby missile base at Sargodha in the central part of the nation show the low odds of Pakistan simply giving up its program.

''Say they had a few missiles and a few warehouses,'' Pike said. ''You could see how you could persuade them to shut down. But to shut down a whole base? This is not something the Pakistanis did inadvertently and now you can kick them in the shins and tell them to put it away.''

Earlier this year, the Federation released pictures of North Korea's Rodong base, the country's lone site for launching long-range missiles. The pictures showed what seemed to be a primitive rural site with only small patches of paved roads, little security, no rail link.

''It's remarkably modest,'' Pike said. ''The facility we see today in North Korea for missile testing is not consistent with what would be a more rigorous, robust training program.''

The photographs are viewable on the Federation's Web site, www.fas.org.

© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company

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