How espionage and smuggling proliferate the bomb
APR 30, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024293
The New York Review of Books : The proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries outside the US, UK, and Canada, which jointly developed the first atomic bomb, was inevitable and had been predicted, writes Jeremy Bernstein:
What had not been predicted was the extent to which it would be abetted by espionage. The German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had been part of the British delegation at Los Alamos and returned to England where he worked on nuclear weapons, gave the Russians what was essentially the blueprint of the bomb the US used at Nagasaki. He is in the unique position of having helped three countries build nuclear weapons. Nor did anyone foresee that proliferation of nuclear weapons would become a commercial enterprise, which is the situation that we find ourselves in at the present time.At the center of this activity is the Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan and his collaborators.
A new book by nuclear armaments expert David Albright, called Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies, highlights how Iran, South Africa, Iraq, and Libya have all made use of Pakistan’s supply network to get close to making a bomb, and certain smugglers very rich.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
