Time will tell the Gifts we bring to ourselves and our children in the next few years - the major forces at play accelerating and foretelling our destination are in the headlines - science suppression causing the Trouble With Physics and creating the stagnant energy science is an extremely unwise and lethal choice as it also deprives us of the evolutionary wisdom and understanding that accompanies new energy revelations - all requirements for survival Evolution Freedom Survival The Promise of New EnergyNYT May 20, 2007 The Nuclear Threat By JONATHAN RABAN
THE ATOMIC BAZAAR
The Rise of the Nuclear Poor.
By William Langewiesche.
179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.
One need read only the first three pages of “The Atomic Bazaar” to be reminded of William Langewiesche’s formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. In a single paragraph, he lucidly explains the basic physics of the uranium-based atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a professional pilot, and the author of “Inside the Sky,” Langewiesche then leads the reader inside the “pressurized, well-heated” cockpit of the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet in “smooth air,” piloted by the young Colonel Paul Tibbets, and vividly reconstructs the evasive maneuver taken by the B-29 as it banks steeply to minimize the coming shockwaves, while the bomb, named Little Boy, falls for 43 seconds before igniting several miles below, lighting the sky with “the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen.” Tibbets’s subsequent career, from Air Force general to Internet purveyor of autographed souvenirs of that momentous flight, is adroitly sketched. The bombing of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima, with a plutonium device, is handled in brisk but sufficient detail. Langewiesche counts the total killed in the two attacks (around 220,000), then delivers his own one-sentence bomb: “The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”
There’s no missing the incendiary effect of the word “terrorize,” slyly linking the American attacks on Japanese cities in 1945 and Al Qaeda’s attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon in 2001. Terrorism as a means of warfare is not confined to so-called nonstate actors like Mohamed Atta and his colleagues, but is habitually employed by nation states, including the United States. In 1958, Albert Wohlstetter, the cold war strategist (and guru to many current players on the scene, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), published an influential article whose title, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” succinctly characterized the cold war itself. The chief purpose of nuclear weapons is to terrorize: “mutual deterrence” is simply a euphemism for mutual terror.
On our comprehensively terrorized globe, almost everybody, from covert, stateless bands of jihadists to accredited members of the United Nations, believes himself in need of either ready-made atomic bombs or the technology and expertise with which to manufacture them. “The nuclearization of the world,” Langewiesche writes, “has become the human condition, and it cannot be changed.” It is with that grim but realistic assumption in mind that he sets out on a long expedition, from Washington to Holland, Pakistan, Russia, Georgia and Turkey, in order to discover just how hard or easy it now is for a nuclear aspirant, private or national, to gain possession of such weapons or technology.
First, he adopts the mindset of an imaginative and resourceful jihadist in search of a single device, powerful enough to devastate a city’s downtown. The famed black market in Soviet-era “loose nukes” and “suitcase bombs” turns out to be probably a myth, so Langewiesche, in terrorist disguise, has to shop elsewhere. Plutonium won’t work, for reasons that Langewiesche explains with his usual fluent grasp of technical detail; what’s needed are two small but immensely heavy brick-shaped or hemispherical pieces of highly enriched uranium (H.E.U.), huge numbers of which are stored in Russia’s closed nuclear cities in the southern Urals.
He flies to Ekaterinburg (often spelled with an initial Y in atlases) and from there scouts out one such closed city, Ozersk (population 85,000), a relatively prosperous enclave in a hardscrabble landscape of decrepit farms and toxic lakes and rivers. The 50 square miles of Ozersk and its nuclear facility, Mayak, are contained within a continuous double fence of chain-link and barbed wire. The guards who protect this atomic treasury have a reputation for drinking and taking drugs on the job, and for sometimes killing one another in brawls. Moreover, the United States-supplied radiation detectors are usually switched off, because they’re too sensitive for Ozersk’s radioactive environment, where a fish from the lake, carried in a worker’s bag, is enough to trigger a full-scale nuclear alert. All of this is good news for someone planning an armed raid, but Langewiesche rejects that option: the hue and cry raised after the theft would make escape from Russia with the precious bricks of H.E.U., though not impossible, uncomfortably hazardous.
He falls in with a garrulous American technician, who is escorted daily under guard into the nuclear cities but forbidden to live in them — a rich source of human intelligence and just the kind of contact a prospective terrorist would need. The technician describes the ramshackle security arrangements in the facility, how and where H.E.U. is kept and transported from building to building by truck. When he talks of a strange recent flood of money — the supermarket, transformed from Soviet-style bare shelves to a cornucopia of luxury goods, the sudden appearance of large houses with swimming pools, said to be owned by “plant managers” on government salaries — Langeweische scents his opportunity. “A culture of wealth without explanation” signals the “related culture of corruption.” So he imagines an inside job, with $5 million apiece to two workers eager to join the new gravy train.
With his blocks of H.E.U. in hand, as it were (and they have to be kept at least three feet apart), Langewiesche looks for an escape route. Kazakhstan, though temptingly close, is out for political reasons. He explores other likely crossing points, in Georgia (“one of the most corrupt nations on earth”) and at the Turkish border with Iran. Both frontiers are promisingly porous. In Georgia, the United States Department of Homeland Security has built a state-of-the-art port of entry, complete with a new six-lane highway, which smugglers cheerfully bypass, taking paths so well marked that they are almost roads. The Turkish border is controlled not by the government but by Kurdish tribal chiefs. One way or another, it will be no great feat to transport the stolen H.E.U. to Istanbul, where assembling it into a workable bomb will require a machine shop, a nuclear scientist, several technicians and up to four months of work. Then comes the problem of delivering the device to its target, either in a shipping container or aboard a chartered plane with a dedicated, suicidal pilot.
The most alarming thing about “The Atomic Bazaar” is its utter lack of alarmism. At every point, Langewiesche stresses the difficulties that confront the determined nuclear terrorist. Between Ozersk and an explosion in an American city lies an epic string of daunting obstacles. The terrorist would need to be gifted with an extraordinary run of luck. But none of these obstacles are, in themselves, insurmountable and, in the nearly lawless parts of the world described by Langewiesche, luck comes easily to anyone with millions in his pocket.
For nation states, it’s a different matter. The second half of the book is mainly devoted to the career of A. Q. Khan and his successful manufacture of the H.E.U.-based Pakistani bomb. Khan, a metallurgist, not a nuclear scientist, just happened to find employment at a Dutch consortium where uranium is enriched for peaceful purposes in a “cascade” of linked centrifuges, each spinning at a dizzying 70,000 r.p.m. With shocking ease, Khan copied the plans for centrifuges and bought parts for them mostly on the open market in Europe, marvelously unhindered by either nuclear proliferation treaties or export controls.
A vain man, with a taste for extravagant vacations and large houses, as well as an ambition to be known as a lavish philanthropist, Khan then set himself up as the Sears Roebuck-style supplier of packaged bomb-programs to the world. For sums of around $100 million (assembly required) Khan offered his wares to Libya, North Korea, Iran, either Syria or Saudi Arabia and probably other nations. As the result of a British and American interception, in 2003, of a shipload of centrifuge parts bound for Libya, bearing the clear signature of Khan’s operation, he is now under benign house arrest in Islamabad. But, as Langewiesche writes, there is a “likelihood that much of the network he established remains alive worldwide, and that by its very nature — loose, unstructured, technically specialized, determinedly amoral — it is both resilient and mutable and can resume its activities when the opportunity arises, as inevitably it will.” To quote the title and refrain of Tom Lehrer’s unfortunately evergreen 1965 song about nuclear proliferation: “Who’s next? Who’s next? Who’s next?” Lehrer’s prediction was Luxembourg, Monaco and Alabama. He was not far wrong. A Russian nuclear bureaucrat tells Langewiesche: “At some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.”
The Atomic Bazaar” is an important book, but not a perfect one. The best nonfiction books, like good novels, have their own organic structure: chapter flows naturally into chapter, the architecture of the whole sustained by a multitude of subtle foreshadowings of what’s to come and subtle echoes of what has gone before. That is not how any book by Langewiesche works. Like its predecessors, “The Atomic Bazaar” comes with the curse of The Atlantic Monthly all too visible on its pages, its chapters like free-standing boxcars, loosely coupled by a large general theme — much as they appeared in separate issues of the magazine between November 2005 and December 2006. Too little work has gone into its translation from journalism to book. Though short, it’s littered with clunky repetitions and recapitulations, as when we’re repeatedly told what H.E.U. is and does, and A. Q. Khan twice falls from public grace. Again and again I found myself scribbling “Been there, done that” in the margins. This is a serious pity, for Langewiesche is such an outstandingly able writer that he owes the world a proper book, and not another piece of bookmaking whose individual parts are splendid but ultimately fail to compose a shapely, aesthetically satisfying and conclusive whole
The Rise of the Nuclear Poor.
By William Langewiesche.
179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.One need read only the first three pages of “The Atomic Bazaar” to be reminded of William Langewiesche’s formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. In a single paragraph, he lucidly explains the basic physics of the uranium-based atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a professional pilot, and the author of “Inside the Sky,” Langewiesche then leads the reader inside the “pressurized, well-heated” cockpit of the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet in “smooth air,” piloted by the young Colonel Paul Tibbets, and vividly reconstructs the evasive maneuver taken by the B-29 as it banks steeply to minimize the coming shockwaves, while the bomb, named Little Boy, falls for 43 seconds before igniting several miles below, lighting the sky with “the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen.” Tibbets’s subsequent career, from Air Force general to Internet purveyor of autographed souvenirs of that momentous flight, is adroitly sketched. The bombing of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima, with a plutonium device, is handled in brisk but sufficient detail. Langewiesche counts the total killed in the two attacks (around 220,000), then delivers his own one-sentence bomb: “The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”
There’s no missing the incendiary effect of the word “terrorize,” slyly linking the American attacks on Japanese cities in 1945 and Al Qaeda’s attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon in 2001. Terrorism as a means of warfare is not confined to so-called nonstate actors like Mohamed Atta and his colleagues, but is habitually employed by nation states, including the United States. In 1958, Albert Wohlstetter, the cold war strategist (and guru to many current players on the scene, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), published an influential article whose title, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” succinctly characterized the cold war itself. The chief purpose of nuclear weapons is to terrorize: “mutual deterrence” is simply a euphemism for mutual terror.
On our comprehensively terrorized globe, almost everybody, from covert, stateless bands of jihadists to accredited members of the United Nations, believes himself in need of either ready-made atomic bombs or the technology and expertise with which to manufacture them. “The nuclearization of the world,” Langewiesche writes, “has become the human condition, and it cannot be changed.” It is with that grim but realistic assumption in mind that he sets out on a long expedition, from Washington to Holland, Pakistan, Russia, Georgia and Turkey, in order to discover just how hard or easy it now is for a nuclear aspirant, private or national, to gain possession of such weapons or technology.
First, he adopts the mindset of an imaginative and resourceful jihadist in search of a single device, powerful enough to devastate a city’s downtown. The famed black market in Soviet-era “loose nukes” and “suitcase bombs” turns out to be probably a myth, so Langewiesche, in terrorist disguise, has to shop elsewhere. Plutonium won’t work, for reasons that Langewiesche explains with his usual fluent grasp of technical detail; what’s needed are two small but immensely heavy brick-shaped or hemispherical pieces of highly enriched uranium (H.E.U.), huge numbers of which are stored in Russia’s closed nuclear cities in the southern Urals.
He flies to Ekaterinburg (often spelled with an initial Y in atlases) and from there scouts out one such closed city, Ozersk (population 85,000), a relatively prosperous enclave in a hardscrabble landscape of decrepit farms and toxic lakes and rivers. The 50 square miles of Ozersk and its nuclear facility, Mayak, are contained within a continuous double fence of chain-link and barbed wire. The guards who protect this atomic treasury have a reputation for drinking and taking drugs on the job, and for sometimes killing one another in brawls. Moreover, the United States-supplied radiation detectors are usually switched off, because they’re too sensitive for Ozersk’s radioactive environment, where a fish from the lake, carried in a worker’s bag, is enough to trigger a full-scale nuclear alert. All of this is good news for someone planning an armed raid, but Langewiesche rejects that option: the hue and cry raised after the theft would make escape from Russia with the precious bricks of H.E.U., though not impossible, uncomfortably hazardous.
He falls in with a garrulous American technician, who is escorted daily under guard into the nuclear cities but forbidden to live in them — a rich source of human intelligence and just the kind of contact a prospective terrorist would need. The technician describes the ramshackle security arrangements in the facility, how and where H.E.U. is kept and transported from building to building by truck. When he talks of a strange recent flood of money — the supermarket, transformed from Soviet-style bare shelves to a cornucopia of luxury goods, the sudden appearance of large houses with swimming pools, said to be owned by “plant managers” on government salaries — Langeweische scents his opportunity. “A culture of wealth without explanation” signals the “related culture of corruption.” So he imagines an inside job, with $5 million apiece to two workers eager to join the new gravy train.
With his blocks of H.E.U. in hand, as it were (and they have to be kept at least three feet apart), Langewiesche looks for an escape route. Kazakhstan, though temptingly close, is out for political reasons. He explores other likely crossing points, in Georgia (“one of the most corrupt nations on earth”) and at the Turkish border with Iran. Both frontiers are promisingly porous. In Georgia, the United States Department of Homeland Security has built a state-of-the-art port of entry, complete with a new six-lane highway, which smugglers cheerfully bypass, taking paths so well marked that they are almost roads. The Turkish border is controlled not by the government but by Kurdish tribal chiefs. One way or another, it will be no great feat to transport the stolen H.E.U. to Istanbul, where assembling it into a workable bomb will require a machine shop, a nuclear scientist, several technicians and up to four months of work. Then comes the problem of delivering the device to its target, either in a shipping container or aboard a chartered plane with a dedicated, suicidal pilot.
The most alarming thing about “The Atomic Bazaar” is its utter lack of alarmism. At every point, Langewiesche stresses the difficulties that confront the determined nuclear terrorist. Between Ozersk and an explosion in an American city lies an epic string of daunting obstacles. The terrorist would need to be gifted with an extraordinary run of luck. But none of these obstacles are, in themselves, insurmountable and, in the nearly lawless parts of the world described by Langewiesche, luck comes easily to anyone with millions in his pocket.
For nation states, it’s a different matter. The second half of the book is mainly devoted to the career of A. Q. Khan and his successful manufacture of the H.E.U.-based Pakistani bomb. Khan, a metallurgist, not a nuclear scientist, just happened to find employment at a Dutch consortium where uranium is enriched for peaceful purposes in a “cascade” of linked centrifuges, each spinning at a dizzying 70,000 r.p.m. With shocking ease, Khan copied the plans for centrifuges and bought parts for them mostly on the open market in Europe, marvelously unhindered by either nuclear proliferation treaties or export controls.
A vain man, with a taste for extravagant vacations and large houses, as well as an ambition to be known as a lavish philanthropist, Khan then set himself up as the Sears Roebuck-style supplier of packaged bomb-programs to the world. For sums of around $100 million (assembly required) Khan offered his wares to Libya, North Korea, Iran, either Syria or Saudi Arabia and probably other nations. As the result of a British and American interception, in 2003, of a shipload of centrifuge parts bound for Libya, bearing the clear signature of Khan’s operation, he is now under benign house arrest in Islamabad. But, as Langewiesche writes, there is a “likelihood that much of the network he established remains alive worldwide, and that by its very nature — loose, unstructured, technically specialized, determinedly amoral — it is both resilient and mutable and can resume its activities when the opportunity arises, as inevitably it will.” To quote the title and refrain of Tom Lehrer’s unfortunately evergreen 1965 song about nuclear proliferation: “Who’s next? Who’s next? Who’s next?” Lehrer’s prediction was Luxembourg, Monaco and Alabama. He was not far wrong. A Russian nuclear bureaucrat tells Langewiesche: “At some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.”
The Atomic Bazaar” is an important book, but not a perfect one. The best nonfiction books, like good novels, have their own organic structure: chapter flows naturally into chapter, the architecture of the whole sustained by a multitude of subtle foreshadowings of what’s to come and subtle echoes of what has gone before. That is not how any book by Langewiesche works. Like its predecessors, “The Atomic Bazaar” comes with the curse of The Atlantic Monthly all too visible on its pages, its chapters like free-standing boxcars, loosely coupled by a large general theme — much as they appeared in separate issues of the magazine between November 2005 and December 2006. Too little work has gone into its translation from journalism to book. Though short, it’s littered with clunky repetitions and recapitulations, as when we’re repeatedly told what H.E.U. is and does, and A. Q. Khan twice falls from public grace. Again and again I found myself scribbling “Been there, done that” in the margins. This is a serious pity, for Langewiesche is such an outstandingly able writer that he owes the world a proper book, and not another piece of bookmaking whose individual parts are splendid but ultimately fail to compose a shapely, aesthetically satisfying and conclusive whole
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