It would be harder than you might think for terrorists to assemble an atomic bomb and get it into an American city. But it wouldn’t be all that hard.
In his slim but tough-minded analysis of the contemporary nuclear threat, William Langewiesche says the principle that kept the United States and the Soviet Union from destroying each other still holds, 15 years after the latter’s demise. Even the looniest despots fear the retribution likely to be visited upon them should they launch a nuclear attack—or, for that matter, if they help stateless terrorists stage an attack. The flip side to this assurance (beyond “You wanna count on that?”) is that nuclear-weapons technology has spread among the most unstable states, not merely under our noses but while we turned our heads away.
If terrorists level Las Vegas by slamming one clump of HEU, or highly enriched uranium, into another, it will be because of intelligence failures, as Langewiesche sees it. If the nut jobs ruling North Korea or Iran decide to level Tokyo or Tel Aviv, it will be because we didn’t pay attention to intelligence when we should have. We ignored evidence that our “ally” Pakistan was shopping nuclear technology to all comers, so we have to rely on a kind of spook work we’ve shown little interest in pursuing—cultivating the unsavory sorts who might tend borders for us or keep an eye open for suspicious machine-shop activity in Third-World slums.
Langewiesche never draws this parallel directly, although he makes both points clearly in separate sections of The Atomic Bazaar. And therein lies the book’s chief fault. As usual, the long-form reporter’s work is richly researched and scrupulously reasoned. But The Atomic Bazaar gathers several long articles Langewiesche wrote as national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and it lacks a book’s integrative logic. Langewiesche, who’s since become international editor for Vanity Fair, at least might have composed an introduction to pull together the various strands the book’s sections unravel.
This wasn’t a problem in 2002’s American Ground, which united a series of articles from The Atlantic about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and work at the site of the World Trade Center collapse. In American Ground, Langewiesche shifted smoothly between accounts of the day and tales of its aftermath. But The Atomic Bazaar leaps from one threat to another, entirely different threat, and from “What if?” to “What happened?” First, Langewiesche assesses a terrorist group’s chances of stealing highly enriched uranium from an indifferently guarded Russian nuclear complex. Then he recounts how a Pakistani metallurgist acquired and retailed plans for a Dutch-designed uranium-enriching centrifuge to Third World nations.
The terror scenario plays out credibly, with Langewiesche scouting Russia’s Mayak nuclear production facilities and a mountain pass on the Georgia-Turkey border, all the while imagining the challenges a terrorist team must overcome. It would have to enlist insiders at Mayak, and get away undetected with 100 pounds of HEU. Then it would have to travel several days to a country into which it could disappear while assembling the weapon.
Langewiesche considers an elaborate, U.S.-built Georgian border station a Maginot Line emplacement any terror group would bypass. This he cites as an example of our mistaken trust in corrupt governments, when it would make better sense for security services to pay clan leaders and other unofficial guardians. “Of course it is possible that they are doing this, and being so discreet that for once they leave no evidence of their passage,” Langewiesche concedes, “but if you were moving a load of HEU across international borders, you could gamble they are not.”
It seems just as likely that terrorists would skip Langewiesche’s Mayak-Georgia-Turkey axis, simply because it is the most predictable. And that’s where the rest of The Atomic Bazaar comes into play. Langewiesche presumes no government would aid a terror group, but he makes it clear that successive corrupt Pakistani governments enabled Abdul Qadeer Khan to set up a rogue marketplace for bomb-making equipment. Worse, it appears that the U.S. government disregarded the evidence, both clandestine and printed, because it was more important to coddle Pakistan.
So who’s to say that someone, official or not, in Pakistan or in one of Khan’s client nations, would not give or sell HEU to a terror group? Couldn’t such a person escape, without a care, before the retaliation?
Credit The Atomic Bazaar for prompting such questions. It is likely to reach a wider audience than the original articles, if only because Langewiesche is on the inevitable book tour, and the topic of nuclear terror might garner attention for a news cycle or two—like, say, breaches of airport security in the 1990s. Both the questions he raises and those he begs deserve answers, before we confront the next Ground Zero.