Atomic Buddha - fuelling New Delhi

William Langewiesche used to write, and write well, for one of America’s finest magazines, The Atlantic Monthly. He has since moved on to Vanity Fair. His style is easy to spot: beautiful lengthy essays, measured in their thousands of words, where each essay, even if it was part of a series (over several months), could stand alone. And usually did. This is exactly the feel one takes away from his four-chapter “book”. Chapters are united in plot but alas disconnected in characters, time and their capacity to fascinate the reader. Pity.

While William Langewiesche knows the science of physics and the craft of writing, he knows little of history. Like a mushroom cloud following a nuclear blast, his bias is visible for miles around when he fails to distinguish between the uses of nuclear weapons in the quest for good, and their uses in the pursuit of evil.

This sinful moral equivalence mindset is present from the get-go, where the author opens with a lucid outline of the basic physics of the atom bomb that pulverised Hiroshima. He explains just how the B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, flew on a clear day in August 1945 over Hiroshima, and some 43 seconds after dropping Little Boy, the weapon exploded “lighting up the sky”.

Langewiesche reminds us that the total killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki numbered close to 220,000. In a fashion expected of Japanese historical revisionists, he throws in his two yen’s worth: “The intent was to terrorise a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect." Mr Langewiesche doesn’t offer a syllable in defence of the bomb, where he should have confessed that the bombings actually brought forward the closing of the war and spared perhaps upwards of two million lives, both American and Japanese, by dispensing with an otherwise mandatory massive allied landing on the Japanese shore.

Getting his leftist bias off his chest, Langeweische then outlines the two different fuels needed to fire nuclear weapons: highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, and goes about illustrating how a cunning and determined jihadist would seek the much hyped “black market” for nukes in Russia.

Finding himself in the closed town of Ozersk, reached by first flying to the Siberian city of Yekateringberg, he is enthralled by a nuclear facility packed with uranium and other treasures for would-be terrorists. While guards are indeed posted around the facility, he is dispirited that not only are they mostly under-paid and over-drugged, but all the mod cons provided by the United States government to minimise theft are mostly underused or useless. For instance, the radiation detectors designed to intercept theft of nuclear fuel, are mostly switched off as they are far too sensitive. They often sound the alarm when locals walk past with nothing more harmful than a few fish recently caught in the nearby toxic lake.

Scanning the nuclear assets available at Ozersk, the question remaining for any terrorist is how to move the goods out of Central Asia and to a place where they can be secretly assembled. The closest border to Ozersk is Kazakhstan, but it is out of contention for “political reasons”.

That leaves two options: Georgia, which the writer claims is extremely corrupt, and Turkey’s border with Iran. One frontier is monitored by very pliable border guards, manning a resplendent customs station and six lane highway (generously paid for by the US Government), and the other national frontier is manned by Kurdish tribal chiefs rather than the Turkish military. You couldn’t get a more porous border if you spent your lifetime looking, the writer alludes.

And once the uranium is over the border, it is very straightforward to make it useful, we’re told.

The balance of the book is devoted to the career of Dr Abdul Qadeer (A.Q) Khan, the so-called “father” of Pakistan’s Islamic bomb. The writer acknowledges (almost salutes) Dr Kahn’s successful manufacture of the HEU (as opposed to a plutonium) based Islamic Bomb.

Dr Khan worked at a Dutch facility where uranium was enriched for peaceful purposes. He had no problems stealing plans for centrifuges and buying what he needed in Europe (mostly, but not always on the open market). Langweische is very reserved and not at all stirred to passion when explaining that Khan obtained all he needed, even though the sale of such products was officially barred via NPT-conferred export controls.

Dr Khan’s genius is that he seems to have perfected a simplified delivery system of distributing bombs. For a fee of roughly one hundred million American dollars, Dr Kahn offered to home deliver his products (IKEA-like) to the despots of the world community: the Kims of Pyongyang, the "honour" killing mullahs of Teheran, the Al-Asaads of Damascus and those so-called western “allies”, the limb amputating Al-Sa’ud family of Riyadh.