The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor - Hardcover

Langewiesche, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374106789 ISBN 13: 9780374106782

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

In his shocking and revelatory new work, the celebrated journalist William Langewiesche investigates the burgeoning global threat of nuclear weapons production. This is the story of the inexorable drift of nuclear weapons technology from the hands of the rich into the hands of the poor. As more unstable and undeveloped nations find ways of acquiring the ultimate arms, the stakes of state-sponsored nuclear activity have soared to frightening heights. Even more disturbing is the likelihood of such weapons being manufactured and deployed by guerrilla non-state terrorists.

 

Langewiesche also recounts the recent history of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist at the forefront of nuclear development and trade in the Middle East who masterminded the theft and sale of centrifuge designs that helped to build Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and who single-handedly peddled nuclear plans to North Korea, Iran, and other potentially hostile countries. He then examines in dramatic and tangible detail the chances for nuclear terrorism.

 

From Hiroshima to the present day, Langewiesche describes a reality of urgent consequence to us all. This searing, provocative, and timely report is a triumph of investigative journalism, and a masterful laying out of the most critical political problem the world now faces.

About this title

About the Author

William Langewiesche is the author of five previous books, Cutting for Sign, Sahara Unveiled, Inside the Sky, American Ground, and, most recently, The Outlaw Sea. He is currently International Correspondent for Vanity Fair, and was for years a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, where this book originated.

Reviews

Reading William Langewiesche's new book is like going to a concert and discovering that your favorite rock star is having an off night. The sublime talent rings through in a few electric riffs. The voice registers the deep truth of heavy experience in two or three places. But the show doesn't hold together from start to finish.

The first theme we hear in The Atomic Bazaar, a series of reports on the proliferation of nuclear weapons, is that they have become the weapons of the poor, and proliferation is inevitable. It is highly possible, Langewiesche warns, that "one or two nuclear weapons will pass into the hands of the new stateless guerrillas, the jihadists, who offer none of the retaliatory targets that have so far underlain the nuclear peace. . . . These jihadists are the people who would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear device."

For the next quarter of the book, Langewiesche inventively explores how terrorists might steal or buy the plutonium or highly enriched uranium needed to make nuclear bombs. He travels into the heart of secluded Russian nuclear cities and sits in bars where would-be terrorists might try to make connections with helpers on the inside. He walks around the fenced compounds and imagines ways to sneak or fight in and out. He concludes it would have to be a nonviolent inside job; otherwise, the bad guys would not be able to stay ahead of the posse over the 1,200 miles to the Caspian Sea or Caucasus. His visit to a U.S.-funded border checkpoint between Russia and Georgia is a tour de force. You don't know whether to laugh or cry over the ground-level realities on which Washington's well-intentioned bureaucratic projects founder. At the checkpoint, for example, a vast complex of air-conditioned buildings, dormitories, VIP quarters, and athletic facilities sit like a turnstyle that smugglers can simply skirt around. Because the turnstyle is bolted into concrete, it cannot be stolen and is therefore safe from congressional scrutiny, but what's needed more are mobile, street-savvy operatives who can be eyes and ears in the byways that smugglers travel.

From Russia, Langewiesche travels to the mountainous Kurdish border region between Turkey and Iran. After late-night bull sessions with leaders of smuggling clans, he reckons that deals could be made to move highly enriched uranium across the border into the commotion of Turkey. Then a gang of pretty sophisticated experts -- likely foreigners -- would have to work for weeks with noisy machine tools and other gear to make a nuclear bomb. Walking around Istanbul, Langewiesche observes, "In even the most chaotic neighborhoods, where industrial shops are mixed among illegal apartment blocks and communities of impoverished newcomers and squatters, it would be difficult to keep neighbors from asking inconvenient questions."

Virtuosity shines here -- bold, trenchant reporting against the pop refrain that jihadist nuclear terrorism is coming. But then Langewiesche changes his opening lyric. "In the final analysis," he writes, "if a would-be nuclear terrorist calculated the odds, he would have to admit that they were stacked against him, simply because of all the natural circumstances that could cause his plans to fail. . . . In reality Washington, London, and New York are unlikely anytime soon to suffer a nuclear strike."

The book then segues to a staid acoustic chapter, essentially a profile of Pakistan's infamous nuclear proliferator, A.Q. Khan. His story was widely noted when Langewiesche first wrote about him in the Atlantic Monthly in 2005. Langewiesche describes how Khan and his European suppliers sold know-how and equipment to help North Korea, Libya, Iran and perhaps others build nuclear weapons.

Khan's motives are irreducibly complex. But an equally intriguing question is why the Pakistani authorities didn't inquire into how his ostentatiously grand spending sprees squared with his government salary. "Even the army is run like a real estate racket," Langewiesche explains, "expropriating land from ordinary citizens, then passing it on to the officers for their personal gain. It is not by chance that Islamabad is a city of mansions, and that many of them are inhabited by retired generals. What was Khan's skimming compared with all that? And unlike the generals, who tended to lose every fight they provoked, Khan had delivered on his words."

To the extent that Langewiesche establishes a coda, it is that "terrorist attacks can be thwarted . . . but no amount of maneuvering will keep determined nations from developing nuclear arsenals." Post-colonial nations are fed up with the inequality of the nuclear order that makes it okay for the great powers and Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not for anyone else. So, Langewiesche writes, we must accept "the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs, and some may use them."

Langewiesche is a gifted reporter and writer, not a policy wonk. Yet, a more careful study would challenge his assumption that proliferation is inevitable in nations such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Nor would a more intensive study have repeated dubious assertions about the extent of North Korea's uranium enrichment capabilities, and a hollow claim that India and Pakistan verged on a nuclear exchange in 1998.

The Atomic Bazaar suffers from the flaws that often weaken medleys. Composed of previously published magazine articles, it lacks the coherence and concentration necessary to be more than the sum of its parts.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

In this sobering report, William Langewiesche (formerly at The Atlantic Monthly and now at Vanity Fair) asserts that there is no way to prevent Third World countries from obtaining nuclear weapons. We can only "accept the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs, and some may use them," he claims. Critics praised Langewiesche's concise, clearheaded prose and rigorous investigation techniques. However, they were disappointed that the previously published articles comprising the book had not been more thoroughly reworked into a fluid narrative, which results in an awkward structure, clumsy transitions, and multiple repetitions. A few also questioned his choice to end the book with a chapter on Mark Hibbs, a journalist covering the nuclear industry. Although The Atomic Bazaar is not a perfect book, critics agreed that it is an extremely important one.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

In his sixth book of combustible investigative journalism, Langewiesche, long a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and now the international editor for Vanity Fair, takes on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Fluent in nuclear politics, Langewiesche explains why nuclear bombs are now the weapons of choice for poor and poorly governed countries and "the new stateless guerillas," and he reveals how such groups can acquire the components of a nuclear bomb. Intrepid and electrifying, Langewiesche reports on contaminated secret nuclear cities in Russia and such U.S. funded outposts as the so-called Plutonium Palace, and he chronicles how stolen uranium and nuclear hardware are smuggled to Turkey, the "grand bazaar for nuclear goods." The book's most startling disclosures are found in Langewiesche's portrait of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the "Muslim" bomb and the "greatest nuclear proliferator of all time," and his profile of fellow journalist Mark Hibbs, who has revealed secrets pertinent to the mess in Iran. Langewiesche's bracing expose of nuclear criminality blasts away the ubiquitous misinformation usually attendant on this alarming subject. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

 

THE VANGUARD OF THE POOR

 

Hiroshima was destroyed in a flash by a bomb dropped from a propeller-driven B-29 of the U.S. Army Air Corps, on the warm morning of Monday, August 6, 1945. The bomb was not chemical, as bombs until then had been, but atomic, designed to release the energies that Einstein had described. It was a simple cannon-type device of the sort that today any number of people could build in a garage. It was bulbous and black, about ten feet long, and weighed ninety-seven hundred pounds. It fell nose-down for forty-three seconds and, for maximum effect, never hit the ground. One thousand nine hundred feet above the city it fired a dull gray plug of highly enriched uranium down a steel tube into a receiving lump of the same refined material, creating a combined uranium mass of 133 pounds. In relation to its surface area, that mass was more than enough to achieve “criticality” and allow for an uncontrollable chain of fission reactions, during which subatomic particles called neutrons collided with uranium nuclei, releasing further neutrons, which collided with other nuclei, in a blossoming process of self-destruction. The reactions could be sustained for just a millisecond, and they fully exploited less than two pounds of the uranium atoms before the resulting heat forced a halt to the process through expansion. Uranium is one of the heaviest elements on earth, almost twice as heavy as lead, and two pounds of it amounts to only about three tablespoonfuls. Nonetheless the release of energy over Hiroshima yielded a force equivalent to fifteen thousand tons (fifteen kilotons) of TNT, achieved temperatures higher than the sun’s, and emitted light-speed pulses of lethal radiation. More than 150,000 people died.

 

Their executioner was an ordinary pilot named Paul Tibbets, who was twenty-nine then and is still alive now, in Ohio. He neither abhorred nor enjoyed the kill: he was a flight technician, removed from the slaughter by altitude and speed, and coddled by a pressurized, well-heated cockpit. That morning the sky was quiet, with no sign of enemy opposition. The B-29 cruised thirty-one thousand feet above the city in smooth air. It lurched and nosed upward when the bomb fell clear. Tibbets banked steeply to get away and turned the airplane’s tail on the destruction. When the bomb ignited, now far behind and below, it lit the sky with the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen. The first shock wave came shimmering through the atmosphere and overtook the airplane from behind, causing a sharp bump measured at 2.5 g’s by a cockpit accelerometer. The bump felt about like the near miss of an antiaircraft burst, or the jolt of crossing a pothole in a jeep. A second shock wave then hit, but it was a reflection off the ground, like an echo of the first, and therefore even less intense. Tibbets tasted the fillings in his teeth. He saw the cloud rising over Hiroshima, and, as must be expected, he felt no regrets.

 

Still, Hiroshima was not good for him. Though he became a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force, and later the chairman of an executive-jet company, he suffered from the stigma of having killed so many, and he grew bitter about any implication that what he had done was wrong. It was unrealistic and probably unfair to expect him to repent, but over the decades American elites did just that, having first required him to drop the bomb. In his retirement he took to traveling around the country giving talks to war buffs and like-minded reactionaries. He showed up at air shows, I suppose to shake hands. In the 1990s, he waded angrily into a minor controversy about the Smithsonian’s display of the forward section of his airplane, the Enola Gay, and accused the elites of manipulating public opinion for their self-interest. He said he was a pilot and soldier, and by implication a simple man. He sold trinkets on the Internet, including, for $500, a beautifully rendered one-twelfth-scale atomic-bomb model mounted on a (solid, not veneer) mahogany base, and accompanied by an autographed data plate. For those with smaller budgets, he offered a sheet of thirty-six commemorative stamps picturing a B-29 soaring beyond a mushroom cloud, with excellent detail of boiling smoke on the ground. Tibbets may have been bullheaded, but at least he was consistent. When the writer Studs Terkel interviewed him in 2002, eleven months after the September 11 attacks, he did not bemoan the sadness of war or ruminate on the difficulty of facing a stateless foe, but opted true to form for a nuclear response. Against Kabul? Cairo? Mecca? He said, “You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they [he meant we] didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians!’ That’s their tough luck for being there.”

 

Tibbets spoke from experience, and in a narrow sense he was right: it was indeed just tough luck for all the innocents who died under his wings in 1945. Those people, however, did not constitute collateral casualties—any more than the victims in the World Trade Center did. In fact Hiroshima had been chosen primarily as a civilian target and had in part been exempted from conventional firebombing to preserve it for the most dramatic possible demonstration of a nuclear strike. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was hit by an even more powerful device—a sophisticated implosion-type bomb built around a softball-sized sphere of plutonium, which crossed the weight-to-surface-area threshold of “criticality” when it was symmetrically compressed by carefully arrayed explosives. A twenty-two-kiloton blast resulted. Though much of the city was shielded by hills, about seventy thousand people died. Quibblers claim that a demonstration offshore, or even above Tokyo harbor, might have induced the Japanese to surrender with less loss of life—and that if not, another bomb was ready. But the intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.

 

 

 

It’s too bad, but such is the world we live in. And cities are soft targets. More accurately, they are flammable, dense, and brittle. This goes for New York, with all its high-quality concrete and steel, and even more for the new urban conglomerations of Asia. Beyond this there are significant differences in the dynamics of nuclear blasts, dependent largely on the size of the explosion and the altitude at which it takes place. A Hiroshima-sized terrorist attack at street level in Times Square would shatter midtown Manhattan and raise a cloud of radioactive debris which would settle downwind, lethally, perhaps across Queens. By comparison a North Korean airburst of the same size a half mile above Seoul would cause still larger destruction, but result in less radioactive fallout. These variations, however, become mere details when they are measured against the common result: any city hit by a nuclear bomb will fall badly apart. And a Hiroshima-sized device now lies well within the capacities of any number of nations.

 

When such a device ignites, the nuclear chain reaction endures for a millionth of a second. During that interval, a lethal burst of neutron particles shoots outward, penetrating walls and people in the immediate vicinity, but losing energy within a few hundred yards, as the neutrons collide with the air. Simultaneously, and for seconds afterward, a pulse of electromagnetic gamma rays, similar to light but far more powerful, flows at dangerous levels through the city to a distance of about two miles. All this would be serious enough, but it is just the start. Even in combination, these two forms of radiation (known as the initial radiation) account for only about 5 percent of the energy released by the bomb. Another 10 percent is released well after ignition, by the radioactive residue that may fall to the ground or go drifting off through the atmosphere. But all the rest of the bomb’s energy—85 percent of the yield—is transformed into air-blast and heat. Nuclear bombs of the Hiroshima size destroy cities by smashing and burning them down.

 

These primitive effects kill almost everyone who would otherwise be dying quickly of acute radiation, then spread out to kill many more. They begin within less than a millionth of a second, when the fission process releases massive amounts of invisible X-rays, which at low altitude are absorbed by the air within a few feet. The resulting heat, rising to tens of millions of degrees, raises the pressures within the vaporizing weapon to several million times that of the surrounding atmosphere. Still within the first millionth of a second, an ultrabright fireball forms, consisting of gasified weapons residues and air. The fireball brutally expands and simultaneously rises. Within three seconds of a twenty-kiloton explosion, it reaches its maximum size, about 1,500 feet across. If it touches the ground (whether because the ignition point was on a street, or at less than 750 feet overhead), it vaporizes the earth and all structures that it encounters and begins to loft large quantities of dirt and debris into a violently rising, intensely radioactive column.

 

Rising in that column along with all the ash and earth are hundreds of by-products of the fission, many of which are radio-active, but a good number of which decay so rapidly that they reach the end of their radioactive lives before they settle again to the ground. Rapid decay is a common characteristic of the most radioactive fission by-products. Seven hours after ignition, the emissions of the fallout are approximately one-tenth as strong as at the one-hour mark; after two days, the radioactivity has bled away to mer...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374106789
• ISBN 13: 9780374106782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192