Customer Reviews

Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network

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The nuclear five missed an opportunity to give up their arsenal and get everyone's covenant to stay away from the bomb. It is only natural that some states and some nations sought to avoid the "less than equal" status by joining the nuclear club overtly and covertly.

Pakistan is probably the only state that was smart enough to get the bomb but not wise enough to "control" access to technology. Individuals were more important than institutions. A Q Khan used the nation's need for a bomb to create a personal fiefdom that was beyond any institutionalized control. Benazir Bhutto, the PM of Pakistan, could not visit his laboratories and got her first glimpse of Khan's facility and work when the United States shared with her the results of their espionage!

A Q Khan used his intelligence and his ability to manage perceptions to create several myths:
(a) He was not the father of Pakistan's bomb. The bomb came from PAEC and its scientists Munir Khan and Mubarakmand. (Khan had a parallel initiative in Kahuta but did not have enough "cold test" experiences to do the honours). Khan was however the one to take the limelight and give an exaggerated impression of his role. The nation took to the flamboyant A Q K and ignored the true heroes of PAEC.
(b) He was not keeping Pakistan's interest in mind. Z A Bhutto was astute in stating that Pakistan's bomb should not take the image of an Islamic bomb. Khan ignored this, and for personal gain, in an uncontrolled manner sold technology (stolen from URENCO) to Iran, Libya and North Korea. For money. Without approval from Pakistan's policy makers.

Increasing insensitivity to oppressed causes, increasing unwillingness of majority to live with a homogenous minority, increasing conflict between nations and states have all enhanced threats from terrorism and threats from rogue states for humanity.

A Q Khan's clanedestine one stop shopping mall for nuclear technology to anyone with money (and often poor credentials) may have handed terrorists and rogue states their first chance to acquire technology that has so far been under the rigorous control of responsible States including the State of Pakistan. At relatively inexpensive prices.

A Q Khan has endangered the World and has significantly affected Pakistan's image as a responsible State.

Gordon Correra traces the history of Khan's rise and fall. The author must have worked hard to get all the facts from a very sensitive nation, on a very sensitive issue. The author continues to sustain the reader's interest and attention by an easy and narrative style. Yet the book has enough material for a serious researcher to pursue further.

A.Q. Khan was the world's leading black market dealer in nuclear technology and a hero in Pakistan: Khan was known as the Father of the Bomb and built a global network selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya. It's surprising to note that this is the first book-length survey of the rise and fall of the man and his role in spreading nuclear technology. It use interviews with politicians and key members of his own network to survey not only Khan's life and influence on the spread of nuclear technology, but the methods and intentions of the rogue states who bought from him. New details on how the CIA penetrated his network and broke his ring makes for a unique and eye-opening analysis which is a top recommendation for both general-interest collections strong in terrorist studies and military holdings.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

This book is an excellent piece of work on Nuclear Proliferation. Things that I would have liked to see in this book :

*) Substantiated material with actual interviews with intelligence officers. Author uses lots of qoutes from private conversations, but how did he get access to those ? That makes me question a bit the authencity of the research.

*) The book keeps on jumping back and forth, which is an excellent case to muddy the presentation. I would have liked a chronological order maintained in the book so that thought processes can be collected and processed efficiently.

Overall it is an eye-opener.

Gordon Corera's book "Shopping For Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A. Q. Khan Network" is an interesting read and offers a good history of what has gone wrong in the attempt to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. What is apparent from reading this book is that while A. Q. Khan is the face of what went wrong; if it hadn't been him then it would have been someone else. The book is divided into two fairly simple sections, "Rise" and "Fall". The "Rise" section covers the development of the bomb in Pakistan, as well as the development of Khan's network to sell the information. The "Fall" section details the discovery of the network, and the actions, often painfully slow, to deal with the issue by the U.S. and other western countries.

A. Q. Khan is an interesting person. Clearly he is very intelligent, but at times a bit careless and foolhardy. He used his circumstances and the political situation in the world skillfully to get the technology and money and other resources from numerous sources. He allowed the development in Pakistan to be looked at as the creation of an "Islamic Bomb" to other Muslim countries, but had no issue with dealing with North Korea as well, and so in his way he was simply a capitalist, dealing in a product which was not approved of in the west. He also used capitalism in the west to purchase what he needed. Companies would sell it to him, because otherwise someone else would, and if something was completely prohibited, then he would buy the components.

From a perspective of stopping Pakistan and Khan, attempts were made, and even successful for periods of time, but what happened again and again was that more immediate concerns would trump non-proliferation goals. Whether it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the perceived terror threat after September 11th, time and time again the U.S. Government, and the Europeans would have their attentions focused elsewhere and Pakistan and Khan were not their biggest problem, and that Pakistan was too useful in dealing with other issues to crack down on them.

"Shopping for Bombs" covers a very interesting subject and the events within it will continue to shape our world for a long time to come. If non-proliferation is important, what can we do to keep focus on that issue, or is the genie out of the bottle now and we simply have to live with the fact that any country and perhaps any organization, can procure nuclear weapons if they have the funds and the will? It is not an easy question to answer, and the answers may not be easy to live with. The writing in this book was a bit repetitive for my tastes, but definitely readable. It probably could have been significantly shorter without the repetition of events, and perhaps it was put in to pad the book to about 250 pages. It does have a good set of notes though, and I would give it three and a half stars if I could, but they don't allow that so I am rounding down to three.

All the world knows that Dr. A. Q. Khan (Khan) stole but incomplete diagrams & he initailly thoughts he can make bomb with few technicians but this was his Deputy Dr. G. D. Alam (Dr. Alam) who told him that you can't do this without proper manpower.
Dr. Alam is the actual man behind this achivement for Pakistan and he is the man who achived this for Pakistan (Dr. Alam died on 5th December 2000). (This is Dr. Alam once said that "History don't lie" this is true.
This is the book 1st time mentioned Dr. Alam as his deputy, which means his investigation and research is very thorough, Dr Alam is the man who negotiated with all seller throughout the world for Pakistan's bomb, but refuse to help Dr. Khan sell the technology for personal gain)
Cheers'

I found it a fascinating of how one man could become a major dealer in nuclear technology.

The lax security in the European nuclear program allowed a Pakistani engineer Khan to steal the centrifuge designs. Khan took those designs to Pakistan to help create a nuclear bomb there. Soon Khan became the head of a major nuclear organization in Pakistan. Soon the Pakistani had developed centrifuges technology that could bypass the international controls on making nuclear bombs.

Here contrary to the writer, I am not so sure from his evidence the US atomic program for peace failed as he suggested. The appeal of Khan technology to rogue countries was they could bypass the checks here. So Khan sold this technology for large sums to Iran, Libya, North Korea and maybe one more.

Part of the problem stopping Khan was finding what was happening. Then it was his prestige in Pakistan. Plus the free world's need for Pakistani support both in the cold war and the war in Afghanistan after 911 but eventually in January 2004, under world pressure Khan was arrested and put under house arrest. So finally stopping Khan, leaving us with a problem of knowing how much damage Khan did!

Now it is a few years since the book was written. Iran is still trying to make a bomb. At best, Khan would have given it a boost. The Libyan spent much money for nothing and eventually gave up on nuclear bombs, so his contribution there was useless. North Korea appears according to recent information gave up earlier on this type of uranium enrichment technology and went back to the power reactor method. Maybe he helped with the bomb design. The last unknown country, I cannot comment.

Finally I am left wondering what happened to the money the Pakistani got from these countries? Khan lived a good life but he did not take much of the money. I suspect that it went to the Pakistan's nuclear program which I find a disturbing conclusion.

Overall if you are interested in this, you will find this a fascinating read.

George Tenet reportedly described A.Q. Khan as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden." Corera adds that Khan has had greater impact on nuclear proliferation than any other individual - yet, his story begins simply as the right man in the right place. Trained as a metallurgist in Europe, he began work in '72 at a research lab in the Netherlands at the forefront of Europe's efforts to develop the latest centrifuge technology for nuclear fuel, providing independence from the U.S.

Next to the research lab was a plant holding thousands of tall, slender centrifuges connected by a maze of metal piping. Each machine only enriched the gas a tiny amount - thus, the need for a connected cascade. Each centrifuge consisted of 100 parts, many engineered to within /001 of a mm. and able to withstand very high speeds. One tiny mistake and the centrifuge spins out of control, often crashing into other machines and destroying the entire cascade.

Khan's first job at the research center was to translate documents for a new German-designed centrifuge - the P2. Security at the site was lax, and within three years Khan's co-worker became convinced Khan was a spy. Authorities were alerted, but according to most accounts, the CIA helped convince them just to watch Khan and remove his access to secret materials. Realizing he'd been found out, Khan returned to Pakistan, taking thousands of pages of documents and even discarded parts with him.

At about this same point in time the U.S. learned of Pakistan's intent to use fuel reprocessing (aided by France) to make a bomb. France as convinced to stop the program, leading Pakistan to instead focus on Khan's knowledge of centrifuges. (Other advantages of using centrifuges were that much less space and power were required than reprocessing or gaseous diffusion - making the program much easier to hide.)

Khan knew Pakistan lacked the manufacturing skills ("couldn't make a pin"), but he also knew who the component suppliers were for the research lab where he had worked. Thus, he utilized a network of Swiss, German, U.K., U.S., China (bomb design), North Korea (missile design), and Niger (yellowcake) suppliers. By 1987 Pakistan had the bomb. Soon after, Khan began marketing his/Pakistan's skills - North Korea, Libya, and Iran. Throughout this period and on to the present, the U.S. knew of Pakistan's activities but refrained from taking strong action because their cooperation was needed to help defeat the Russians in Afghanistan, and then after 9/11 in terror-reduction efforts.

An IAEA inspection in '03 found Iran with 160 cascaded P1-design centrifuges and evidence of uranium enriched to between 36 - 70%. Iran's original efforts began under the Shah in 1976, were known about in the U.S., and reportedly led Saddam Hussein in Iraq to press for his own program (began by purchasing a reactor from France). Iran, like its mentor, Pakistan, eventually also decided to go the centrifuge route after the U.S. pressed France to renege on an agreement to provide Iran with a fuel reprocessing (enrichment) plant. In addition, taking a lesson from Iraq's reactor being destroyed by Israel, Iran built its facilities in a dispersed, underground manner.

Currently it is not clear what Iran's strategy is. It may simply be building a large, legal stockpile of power-plant level fuel - ready to upgrade to weapons grade on short notice in only 20% of the time required starting from scratch. Or, it may have a parallel setup that is creating bomb-grade material at the present.

Pakistan's proliferation activities continued after 9/11 - however, dissidents in various countries provided information that led to finding enrichment centrifuges on a ship bound for Libya. Libya decided to renounce its program, and the information garnered from them and their suppliers helped prove to Pakistan's leaders that Khan and his associates were running amok.

A.Q. Khan has now been under house arrest in Pakistan for several years, unable to even use the telephone. Hopefully his proliferation activities have all been undone. However, his network suppliers have by now learned how valuable their offerings are, and it is also known that he also worked with those wanting to start a program in Saudi Arabia.

This book is a must read for any aficionado of international politics. The issue of nuclear proliferation can never again be discussed without AQ Khan's name being preeminent (though by no means exclusive.) Corera does an excellent job of presenting the facts as known in a readable fashion and mercifuilly keeps the book relatively free of jargon. But the story begs too many questions, such as how could MI6 and the CIA have ignored the red flags Khan hoisted for so long, or how could Libya's efforts to build nukes have been missed? In fact, a cynical reader will have to conclude that not even the now-well-worn excuse of recurring intelligence failures from a bungling, underequipped agency is adequate to explain these events (as if Bush's WMD fiasco was not enough to convince one that the CIA merely serves to justify political decisions.)
The ease with which Khan created his vast worldwide empire, supposedly under the noses of Musharraf and Bush and Blair, is also extremely troubling, and must lead readers to the inescapable and obvious conclusion that this occurred with tacit understandings. Money was to be made by many, until Khan outlived his usefulness. And Corera's epilogue offers no warm and fuzzy solace at Khan's arrest; as long as countries see benefits outweighing risks and "superpowers" threatening regime changes willy nilly, the temptations to keep Pandora's Box wide open will be irrestistible. Indeed, his closing statements make a good case for more nukes in more hands being a stabilizing influence, rather than allowing a few white imperialists from imposing nuclear-balced hegemony on an increasingly recalcitrant and non-white world. I suspect that statues to Khan will someday proliferate amongst Third World nations as profusely as his centrifuges have.

And how in detail he aborted his nuclear bomb building project soon after Saddam was taken out of power in Iraq by the USA. You'll also learn interesting stuff like about how terrorist leader Gaddafi tried for over 20 years to get a nuke bomb for Libya but was happily unsuccessful.

This is a good book which illustrates how short term policy making by the U.S. and other world powers allowed a complex and effective nuclear proliferation network to occur. It also points out that capitalistic greed by companies based in Europe allowed the sale of components which can and were likely to be used for the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade fissile material, demonstrating the loop holes in international trade regulation.