“The Atomic Bazaar,” by William Langewiesche; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 179 pages, $22
In 1945, Paul Tibbets was 29, an ordinary military pilot whose plane lurched and nosed upward as he released a bomb from the Enola Gay. He banked her steeply up and away, turning tail to the destruction. The shock wave measured 2.5 g’s on the cockpit accelerometer and knocked Tibbets so sharply that he “tasted the fillings in his teeth. He saw the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima, and, as must be expected, he felt no regrets.”
So begins “The Atomic Bazaar,” a calm, clear-as-water book that assesses the illicit global nuclear trade six decades after Tibbets helped end a war and open Pandora’s box. The young pilot made colonel, still lives in Ohio, and has remained consistent. He told Studs Terkel in 2002 that our country should answer al-Qaeda with nukes.
Writer William Langewiesche excels at a kind of forensic journalism, and his new book can be read as a globe-trotting tour of the law of unintended consequences. Much of the news on proliferation is shocking, but some of it is not, especially the bald fact that no rogue group has yet managed to one-off a nuclear bomb and no nation outside our own has pulled the trigger in war.
Acquiring the damnable thing is another matter.
The knowledge has been in the public domain for decades, and while the mechanics are trickier, they can be bought piecemeal. Some 40 years ago, reacting to rival India, politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto “uttered the now famous remark that Pakistanis would eat grass if necessary, but they would have their bomb.”
Today, Langewiesche reports, Pakistan is the biggest purveyor of illicit nukes, having “set up a virtual nuclear-weapons market in which countries could buy the entire package, from the necessary machine shops and centrifuges to the blueprints for a bomb.” The nation”s Ministry of Commerce did its part, too, running full-page ads.
The maestro at the center of the bazaar is A.Q. Khan, “a fleshy, banquet-fed man, unused to criticism and outrageously self-satisfied.”
Langewiesche introduces him with an anecdote about Khan’s decision to flout the law by building a weekend home that jeopardized the drinking water of Rawalpindi – a brazen move that did not outrage the poor citizenry, but charmed them.
The arc of Khan’s rise from subcontinent refugee boy to global kingmaker helps the reader understand his celebrity, and measure how, to the West, his “rapid success came as a particular shock because it so quickly transformed this runt called Pakistan into something like a runt with a gun.”
Langewiesche is blunt, but he is nuanced, carefully examining the Khan phenomenon from multiple perspectives over a third of this slender book. Perceived as “Dr. Strangelove” by the West, Khan towers as a hero among the have-nots, as Langewiesche lets us see the shifts in realpolitik.
“At some point this change occurred,” explains a Russian expert. “The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.”
Nonproliferation workers are bound to object to “The Atomic Bazaar” because it deems their struggle noble, but futile. The book’s tone is even more pessimistic than “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s similarly gripping primer on global warming.
Both books are for grown-ups, readers who seek to be literate on two of the most urgent questions of the day. Even as our entertainment is busy flirting with nuclear annihilation, from “24” and “Heroes” on television to Cormac McCarthy”s masterful “The Road,” William Langewiesche’s little book has the temerity to look the real thing in the eye.
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