America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise

Reviews

The Greatest Threat to Us All

The New York Review of Books

By John Cirincione

March 6, 2008

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
by Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 386 pp., $28.95

The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
by Jonathan Schell
Metropolitan, 251 pp., $24.00

Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons
by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark
Walker, 586 pp., $28.95

America and the Islamic Bomb:The Deadly Compromise
by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento
Steerforth, 292 pp., $24.95

1.

Charles Gibson of ABC News began the New Hampshire debate among the Democratic presidential candidates with a question on nuclear terrorism. Though not discussed in any detail in the campaign, he said, it remains "the greatest threat to the United States today." He was right and, as some of the candidates noted, the threat has grown worse during the Bush administration as terrorist groups have thrived while efforts to lock up vulnerable nuclear materials have languished. The resulting discussion confirmed both the collapse of Bush's security strategy and the need for clear conceptions to replace it.

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'Father of the Islamic Bomb'

A.Q. Khan brought the nuclear bomb to the Muslim world – while the West looked the other way

The Christian Science Monitor

By Mary Wiltenburg

January 15, 2008

Friends saw what they wanted to see. Manufacturers in Europe and North America mostly saw dollar signs. Foreign intelligence agencies underestimated the Pakistani scientist. And Western heads of state figured they faced bigger threats than a social-climbing metallurgist.

Abdul Qadeer Khan surprised them all. For 30 years, Mr. Khan worked – first quietly, then increasingly brazenly – to establish his nation as a nuclear power and himself as a broker of the world's most dangerous technologies.

By the time he made a televised "confession" in 2004, after diplomatic pressure forced Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to place Khan under house arrest, he had sold those secrets to Iran, North Korea, and Libya – and possibly others.

Today, poorly secured nuclear materials are the single greatest security threat facing the United States. Presidential hopefuls debate the best course of action in case of a nuclear attack on a major American city. Analysts call this a reasonable possibility. Our "second nuclear age" is Khan's legacy.

No wonder, then, that the globe-trotting tale of the audacious, megalomaniacal "father of the Islamic bomb" has been the subject of a mountain of investigative reporting and a shelf full of books.

Now three fine additions – "America and the Islamic Bomb" by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, "Deception," by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, and The Nuclear Jihadist by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins – take Khan's story a step further.

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Washington Post Book World: A.Q. Khan's Atomic Vision

November 18, 2007

"... America and the Islamic Bomb is a ground-level look at the operational failures of U.S., British and other intelligence services in assessing the Khan network. Relying on government documents and interviews, David Armstrong and Joseph Trento reveal multiple scuttled investigations and chronicle the infighting within several U.S. administrations, beginning under Reagan in the 1980s, over what to do about Khan and, more broadly, Pakistan, whose cooperation was deemed vital in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

"Rivetingly, Armstrong and Trento also recount the deals that Khan made through a Dubai-based company, Gulf Technical Industries, to supply uranium centrifuges to several countries. And they tell the story of Operation Aquarium, a successful British effort to uproot the tentacles of Khan's illicit purchasing network from Malaysia to Spain and France. It shows what Western intelligence services can do when they have clear direction and international cooperation."

The [Wilmington] News Journal: Our Eyes Were Wide Opened as Pakistan Boiled

November 12, 2007

by Harry F. Themal

In 1979 I interviewed Jane Fonda and others connected with "The China Syndrome," and within two weeks of the film's release, Three Mile Island near Harrisburg had the same scenario of a nuclear reactor's near melt-down.

No sooner had I finished reading "America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise" than Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf shuts down the constitution in a dangerous country that has nuclear weapons and the systems to deliver them.

This new book makes it clear that administrations since Jimmy Carter have been guilty of "closing eyes to despotism and nuclear proliferation" as Pakistan's cooperation was sought to fight the Russians, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The United States turned a blind eye not only to Pakistan's own development of a nuclear bomb but to the black-market smuggling of technology and material to other countries. Although this has been well documented for decades, "America and the Islamic Bomb" not only synthesizes others' findings but also finds new evidence of the short-circuiting by the U. S. and Britain of investigators' exposure of that nuclear smuggling.

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Publishers Weekly Review

This chilling exposé from National Security News Service bureau chief Armstrong and author Trento (The Secret History of the CIA) chronicles American foreign policy in relation to nuclear weapons development worldwide, and particularly in Pakistan. Beginning with Truman’s Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and ending with George W. Bush’s hunt for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, the history is as interesting as it is infuriating. Operating under Cold War paranoia in the 1960s and ’70s, the U.S saw Pakistan as a conveniently located ally and so, in addition to providing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, helped jumpstart the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, which gave the country its nuclear capabilities. What followed was decades of mismanagement, culminating in the revelation that Pakistani national hero A.Q. Khan was deeply involved in the nuclear black market; the authors contend that the U.S government knew all about Khan’s negotiations with Libya, Iran and North Korea, but ignored it to keep Pakistan an ally, first against the Communists and now in the “War on Terror.” This accessible history should raise awareness of the many devil’s bargains that the U.S. has struck in the seemingly vain hope of keeping control over perhaps the greatest man-made threat to humanity. (Oct.)

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