The story of nuclear proliferation

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Syed Fattahul Alim
The western world's concern about the proliferation of the bomb-making nuclear technology is rooted not simply in the genuine fear of falling the world-destroying weapon into wrong hands, for example, the megalomaniacs, paranoid political leaders or crackpots who might use the doomsday weapon irresponsibly. There is also the issue of power balance, for once this technology is acquired, even an economically backward country may use it to blackmail the mightiest country on earth, thereby destabilise the global balance of military power.
However, China, for example, was against the very idea that the nuclear technology should be confined among the members of a small elitist nuclear club. On the contrary, it said the exclusivity of the nuclear power among the privileged possessors of the technology would only contribute to an unhealthy competition among the small number of nuclear powers to get the better of the other and thereby escalate the arms race. The rivalry and ensuing cold war between the erstwhile superpowers speak volumes for such assertion. The superpower rivalry to control the world led to the division of the world into two power blocs which were at each other's throat for decades until one power collapsed under its own weight.
So, what should be the correct approach to the nuclear issue? This is an issue of big debate among both the peaceniks and the war hawks. While the debate is continuing, some third world nations, defying the browbeating of the elite nuclear club, have been continuing in their efforts to acquire nuclear technology just for the sake of prestige, if not for making a bomb.
Is then the premonition of one of the fathers of the first Atom Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, that the bomb-making technology may become universal is proving true? William J broad of the New York Times tells below the interesting journey of the Bomb since it all began in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in the USA as revealed through two new books that have laid many unknown secrets bare about the exciting journey of the Bomb from one country to another.
"In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms.
They are not too hard to make," he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. "They will be universal if people wish to make them universal."
That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.
But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six decades since Oppenheimer's warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?
Two new books by three atomic insiders hold out hope. The authors shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.
Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force, and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation" to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and - most important - the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states.
"Since the birth of the nuclear age," they write, "no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise."
Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and China helped spawn five more nuclear states.
It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor I. Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel's nuclear arms.
Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.
That alone rewrites atomic history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.
"It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fire a nuclear device of their own," the book notes.
In another disclosure, the book says China "secretly extended the hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French."
Its wide perspective reveals how states quietly shared complex machinery and secrets with one another.
All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamoured of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.
Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China's leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao's weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.
The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.
Alarmingly, the authors say one of China's bombs was created as an "export design" that nearly "anybody could build." The blueprint for the simple plan has travelled from Pakistan to Libya and, the authors say, Iran. That path is widely assumed among intelligence officials, but Tehran has repeatedly denied the charge.
A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists "were observing and participating in" the French program of weapons design.
The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, "two nations went nuclear." And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel's own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test "2,600 feet under the Negev desert." The next year it built its first bomb.
Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.
The authors charge that South Africa at one point targeted Luanda, the capital of neighbouring Angola, "for a nuclear strike if peace talks failed."
South Africa dismantled six nuclear arms in 1990 but retains much expertise. Today, the authors write, "South African technical mercenaries may be more dangerous than the underemployed scientists of the former Soviet Union" because they have no real home in Africa.
"The Bomb: A New History," due out in January from Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, plows similar ground less deeply, but looks more widely at proliferation curbs and diplomacy. It is by Stephen M. Younger, the former head of nuclear arms at Los Alamos and former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon.
Dr. Younger disparages what he calls myths suggesting that "all the secrets of nuclear weapons design are available on the Internet." He writes that France, despite secretive aid, struggled initially to make crude bombs - a point he saw with his own eyes during a tour of a secretive French atomic museum that is closed to the public. That trouble, he says, "suggests we should doubt assertions that the information required to make a nuclear weapon is freely available."
Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman see politics - not spies or military ambitions - as the primary force in the development and spread of nuclear arms. States repeatedly stole and leaked secrets because they saw such action as in their geopolitical interest.
Beijing continues to be a major threat, they argue.
"Dr. Younger notes how political restraints and global treaties worked for decades to curb atomic proliferation, as did American assurances to its allies.
"Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil all flirted with nuclear programs, and all decided to abandon them," he notes. "Nuclear proliferation is not unidirectional - given the right conditions and incentives, it is possible for a nation to give up its nuclear aspirations."
The take-home message of both books is quite the reverse of Oppenheimer's grim forecast. But both caution that the situation has reached a delicate stage - with a second age of nuclear proliferation close at hand - and that missteps now could hurt terribly in the future.
Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman take their title, "The Nuclear Express," from a 1940 radio dispatch by Edward R. Murrow, who spoke from London as the clouds of war gathered over Europe. He told of people feeling like the express train of civilization was going out of control.
The authors warn of a similar danger today and suggest that only close attention to the atomic past, as well as determined global action, can avoid "the greatest train wreck" in history.