So I don’t normally post on BookFox about non-fiction titles, but I’m making an exception for William Langewiesche’s new book The Atomic Bazaar, which addresses the proliferation of nuclear weapons (if the title didn’t tip you off). I’ve been reading Langewiesche in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly for a while now, and his articles on Khan and nuclear weapons have been both terrifying and wonderful examples of top-notch reporting. Every time I read him, I felt like I was being let into a clandestine world of international secrets that somehow all the mainstream media had either willfully ignored or never known about. What? Khan just stole all the information and parts for his nuclear reactors as easy as one, two, three? What? He started selling weapons to any country with money? What? That’s all that is needed for a centrifuge to start enriching uranium?
Art Winslow, reviewing it in the LA Times, summarizes a bit of the book:
At the state level, this is worrisome, and much of “The Atomic Bazaar” is devoted to reporting on Pakistan and its atomic mastermind, Abdul Qadeer Khan, “the greatest nuclear proliferator of all time,” who fed nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya — and made overtures to a fourth country (Syria? Saudi Arabia?) — before he was stopped. Langewiesche cautions that although Khan was perceived as evil in the West, to his countrymen and others in the Islamic world he “openly represented the right of the global underclass to bear nuclear arms.”
Despite trying very hard, I’ve never been able to take Dr. Strangelove’s advice to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb, and this book makes it sound like a lot more worrying is to come.
