Allen Lane £20 pp180

Nasty countries that want nuclear weapons badly enough will eventually get them, one way or another – and we’d better get used to the idea. On the other hand, the risk of a proper nuclear device (as opposed to a nuisance-value “dirty bomb”) being acquired by terrorists is comparatively small, despite our paranoia. These are the two main conclusions to be drawn from this rather depressing and slight book by William Langewiesche, one of America’s most celebrated investigative journalists. Slight, but I might add, pretty useful as a primer in Armageddon Studies.

Langewiesche, a former pilot, presents a fairly convincing case to the effect that the stockpile of mouldering former Soviet nuclear-weapons materials has not found its way into the hands of Al-Qaeda and its allies – despite the fact that much of the highly enriched uranium can be found lying around in depositories that are about as secure as your garden shed. He takes us on a tour of one of the “closed” Russian nuclear cities in the southern Urals, where the lakes and rivers fizz with plutonium and almost every citizen is employed in the nuke business. For your aspirant terrorist, getting in, out and away with your chunk of radiation would be close to impossible, although not primarily as a result of the nuclear security measures imposed upon Russia and its former satellites and statelets by the west. Nor is it likely that your average Islamist terrorist, wandering the bazaars of, say, Istanbul or Islamabad, would be able to buy the stuff from renegade scientists on the make. How would the fissile material be exchanged without attracting a degree of avid interest from the indigenous security services, for example? I am less than convinced by Langewiesche’s reasoning here – he falls back on a sort of version of the Anthropic Principle to support his argument: the terrorist can’t do it because if they could do it they would have done it by now and they clearly haven’t.

But where Langewiesche gets into his stride is in fingering Pakistan as the greatest source of nuclear danger, both through its nuclear programme (the “Muslim Bomb”) and the self-evident wish of top Pakistani soldiers and scientists to spread the stuff around to people who might also want it – Iran, for example, and Libya. Pakistan has been for the past couple of decades a backward, authoritarian little axis of evil all by itself; however, its president is an ally of the west, so the country has been offered support and succour, rather than bombed back into the stone age. As the author puts it: “the blundering fall of 2002 defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programmes in Iraq, the US government condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan, which . . . was delivering nuclear weapons capabilities into the hands of America’s most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists”.

We are afforded a lengthy glimpse of AQ Khan, the scientist who delivered the nuclear bomb to Pakistan through the most industrious chicanery, buying the crucial parts either illegally or semi-legally from Holland, Switzerland and, with the greatest of ease, Germany. President Musharraf was eventually persuaded to shove Khan (a national hero) under house arrest for his role in flogging a sort of DIY bomb kit to Libya (which didn’t have a clue what to do with it). But as Langewiesche remarks of the investigation into Khan’s activities: “[it] was a cover-up and a sham – moreover of a sort only possible in a morally bankrupt and corrupt nation, where cowardly and illegitimate rulers, propped up by massive infusions of American dollars and dependent on their soldiers’ guns, suppress genuine inquiries because they would be implicated themselves”.

Khan is still a hero in Pakistan, despite his televised apology to the nation in which he begged for forgiveness for having sold his country’s nuclear secrets to Colonel Gadaffi for a mess of pottage. But as Langewiesche notes, if a backward and broke Third World country such as Pakistan can acquire a nuclear bomb then anyone, absolutely anyone, can – as a former Soviet diplomat put it to the author, smiling wryly all the while, “even Hungary”.

The upside is that these sorts of countries probably won’t be able to acquire many nuclear weapons and they probably won’t be sophisticated plutonium fusion devices that could wipe out the entire planet. (So, no mutually assured destruction, the shared terror that kept us safe during the cold war.) The downside is that they may just be all the more tempted to use them.

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