My brother got married.

My brother got married.

Who’s Next?

I recently read The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche.

After a bit of WWII-era history the book spend a while discussing the ease or otherwise of producing a non-state nuclear bomb. (If he is right then) there is some reason for hope (though not complacency) here; while security on HEU stocks appears to be very poor in places, there remain substantial difficulties for a non-state group attempting to acquire it and turning it into a usable weapon. The weakest link is presented as border security; the author’s prescription is to cut a deal with the people who control smuggling routes (primarily used for drugs, fuel, etc).

The bulk of the book, however, concerns the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used stolen European designs and more-or-less legitimately ordered components to create Pakistan’s Uranium enrichment program. In Langewiesche’s account, Khan puts surprisingly little effort into hiding what he is doing - he gets away with it due to the supine nature of his targets - for instance when a Dutch colleague at FDO reported his suspicions he was told not to stir up trouble. A similar pattern holds when he puts together the centrifuge program: although occasionally he used front companies, “generally he or his agents simply went out and bought the stuff”.

For all that Kahn’s program is depicted as a massive failure of intelligence and export control by western Europe, especially Germany, it is also held to be inevitable; the manufacture of nuclear weapons is primarily an exercise in engineering, not research, and a government that wants them is going to get them sooner or later. Kahn’s spying and his network of suppliers, much as his subsequent sale of Pakistan’s nuclear technology to other countries, was ultimately no more than a shortcut. The notion that Kahn acted alone in his proliferation activities is dismissed as a transparent lie.

If Kahn is the villain of the piece, the hero is journalist Mark Hibbs, who spent many years joining dots and exploiting high-level contacts to bring the story into the public domain (albeit in publications that most would find obscure). Intelligence services knew more and earlier - but of course, they don’t publish at all.

The last word is given to Mubashir Hassan, a former finance minister of Pakistan:

“But you cannot have a world order in which you have five or eight nuclear-weapons states on the one hand, and the rest of the international community on the other. There are many places like Pakistan, poor countries which have legitimate security concerns - every bit as legitimate as yours. And you ask them to address those concerns without nuclear weapons, while you have nuclear weapons and you have everything else? It is not a question of what is fair, or right or wrong. It is simply not going to work.”