[ RadSafe ] From NYT Book Section: "THE ATOMIC BAZAAR "

[John Jacobus]

May 20, 2007
THE ATOMIC BAZAAR 
The Rise of the Nuclear Poor. 
By William Langewiesche. 
179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22. 


The Nuclear Threat 
By JONATHAN RABAN

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

Jonathan Raban’s most recent books are the essay
collection “My Holy War” and the novel “Surveillance.”



+++++++++++++++++++
“All men dream, but not equally. Some dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds and wake in the day to find it is vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.”
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


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