The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche

HERE’S ONE TO SPOIL your weekend. Within the next few years some country somewhere is likely to use nuclear weapons against its enemy. This is the conclusion – made without apocalyptic language – reached in William Langewiesche’s long essay on nuclear proliferation.

A spare, almost austere writer – as some of the best American journalists are – Langewiesche can make the complex area of nuclear policy comprehensible to the layest of laypersons, from his description of how 220,000 were killed in the two bomb blasts over Japan in 1945, to his summary of 60 years of big-power attempts at keeping the nuclear club as small as possible.

He has set out to answer two questions: first whether terrorists are likely to get the bomb, and secondly whether countries we don’t like will get the bomb. After he has travelled to Russia and the Middle East, his answer on the first is mildly reassuring, to the second most certainly not. To make a device you need a certain amount of highly enriched uranium, which is hard to steal and very hard to make. Once you have the enrichment for civilian purposes, however, you can then carry straight on and make a bomb. Only international inspection can tell whether or not this is happening.

Under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) it was essentially agreed that the Big Five would have the bomb and everyone else could have atomic power. But export controls and sanctions failed to prevent three countries – Israel, India and South Africa – from developing nuclear weapons. This was unsatisfactory enough, but in the 1970s a new kind of proliferation began.

After the Indian test explosions of 1974 a Pakistani scientist working in the Netherlands, A. Q. Khan, began to steal the elements needed to recreate the enrichment process. Within 20 years Khan had become the Oppenheimer of Third World proliferation.

In a time when we are used to blaming the Americans for everything, it is depressing to discover that it was primarily European (especially German) insouciance, greed and stupidity that helped to supply the nuclear weapons programmes of Pakistan, Iraq and other gate-crashers at the nuclear party.

In 1990 Saddam Hussein was three years away from enriching enough uranium to create an atomic bomb. Only war and subsequent aggressive inspection and sanctions stopped the Iraqi bomb. Nothing prevented the Pakistani bomb. On May 27, 1998, according to Langewiesche, Saudi Intelligence warned Pakistan that Israeli planes acting on behalf of India were about to launch a preemptive strike on its nuclear programme. In fact the nuclear weapons were ready, and were put on alert.

But Khan did far more than get a bomb for his own country. Several developing countries, in Langewiesche’s words, coveted the “fast-track, nation-equalising, don’t-tread-on-me, flat-out-awesome destructive power” of the bomb. There was Libya, which paid $100 million for access to the technology. There was North Korea, offering a missile-for-enrichment swap. There was Iran. Khan did business with them all.

Langewiesche argues that today there is no acceptable way of preventing proliferation. And if there is proliferation, the chances of a nuclear exchange grow. Having begun with Hiroshima the book rather perfunctorily concludes that we need to find “the courage . . . to accept the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs and some may use them.”

If that is courage, I don’t know what cowardice looks like. I am no expert, but my estimation of the effect on 21st-century geopolitics and civil society of “some use” of atomic bombs is clearly totally different from Langewiesche’s. One obvious reaction to this prospect will be for the rich countries to protect themselves with expensive missile defence systems, leaving the poor to get nuked. The other is to do what Langewiesche rules out – to intervene.

The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche

Allen Lane, £20; 192pp