Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: second ministry, engineer regiment, nuclear intelligence analysts, United States, South Africa, North Korea (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive and author of several books on American intelligence including The Wizards of Langley, has written an authoritative and definitive account of U.S. nuclear espionage from the earliest days of atomic research in WWII to the present. Drawing on prodigious research—including newly declassified material—Richelson details the efforts of the U.S. intelligence community to track the nuclear activities of other states. The results of all this spy craft were at best uneven. With abundant technology—aerial reconnaissance, signals intercepts, seismic detection—but few human intelligence resources (HUMINT), the U.S. was consistently surprised by nuclear events in the Soviet Union, China, India and elsewhere. And we're still getting it wrong. Richelson analyzes how American intelligence first underestimated Iraq's nuclear program in the 1980s and then overestimated it in 2003. It's instructive that after 1998, the U.S. did not have "a single HUMINT source" in Iraq. Considering the intelligence community's "mixed record" and the continuing nuclear ambitions of rogue states like North Korea and Iran, Richelson concludes chillingly, "Trouble Is Waiting to Happen." More than a comprehensive and often compelling history of nuclear espionage, this is an important contribution to the debate regarding American intelligence that began on 9/11. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Richelson traces the evolution of U.S. nuclear intelligence efforts--both successes and failures--from the early days of World War II to the twenty-first century. The book's focus, as the author indicates early on, is primarily placed on the early nuclear programs of 15 nations and the U.S. effort to determine if they were trying to acquire nuclear weapons, how far they had gotten, and their attempts to improve those capabilities. Thus, the book examines the work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in identifying and providing the details about those nuclear programs as well as the agencies' efforts to monitor and evaluate nuclear testing--rather than their efforts to gather information on the nuclear arsenals. Each of the 14 chapters focuses on the nuclear activities of one or a small number of nations, Richelson drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with scientists and spies involved in nuclear espionage. This searching and informed analysis of our nation's nuclear espionage includes spy-satellite photographs from the national archives. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 704 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton (March 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393053830
• ISBN-13: 978-0393053838
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #496,419 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but not Great, March 31, 2006

By	Tech Historian - See all my reviews

What a frustrating book. First the good news, it is a marvelous history and worth the read. Richelson is the master in collecting data. He did it before on his books on the CIA and NSA and he does it again here.

However, much like his previous books, Richelson lacks the ability to pull the pieces into a coherent whole. (I'd like to generously attribute that to the author having too much classified knowledge.) And without the context (that is surely somewhere in his notes) the general reader is unable to do it for him.

In the 544 pages of the book there wasn't a single coherent description of the components of a weapons complex. It would have been helpful to start with the U.S. Manhattan Project and describe and diagram what were the key facilities necessary for a Plutonium weapon. How were these facilities different for a U-235 weapon? Why do we and other countries choose both? Why use electromagnetic separation versus thermal, etc. Then a description of how each of the other countries chose their paths would have been easy to understand. This didn't have to be a huge section of the book, 10 pages would have sufficed, but it would have turned the mind-numbing laundry list of facts into a coherent story.

In the same vein, what detection methods were developed in WWII (he mentions a few) and how had these methods grown more sophisticated over the years. No one single section summarizes the suite of these tools. You literally have to go through the book and make your own notes to realize that some means of verification literally are mentioned once, and then disappear. Did we really stop using them or are they now codeword classified?

Again, worth reading but could have been great rather than good.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a deceptively amazing book!.... get this book; it's important!, April 10, 2006

By	Jersey Al - See all my reviews

The header I wrote calls this a "deceptively amazing book".

For pages, there are lots of details about the level of effort it took to find out how each country built their version of the bomb. Country by country. The Soviet Union. France. Israel. South Africa. And all the frustrating suspicions about who was doing it and who MAYBE was doing it.

[Did you know that one of our airplanes was so close to a Soviet nuclear blast that the paint was scorched? The author, Jeffrey Richelson, reports that.]

There are some treasures early on... about my hero, Moe Berg, the Yankee baseball player and spy! Then there are some quibbles about RB-57's; he doesn't distinguish between the "D" model and the "F" model. But that's a quibble.

AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN.... IT ALL COMES TOGETHER. All that background detail about how the South Africans and the Indians successfully concealed their programs... all the ambiguities. On page 460... and thereafter... solid gold or better. How the Iraqis learned from all the mistakes of other countries and successfully deceived all the countries of the world... the deliberate construction of buildings first and THEN installing or constructing large equipment or tunnels or test facilities. How to make very specific nuclear facilities look non-descript. Use of twin facilities. Deliberate use of dual-use or triple-use (peaceful versus military versus nuclear) industrial items and machinery and materials to throw off outside observers. Use of remote electrical supplies. Burial of anything that might give away the nuclear facilities. I mean, like, the Indians even disguised piles of dirt from excavating test holes to look like wind-blown sand dunes! And how, in the absence of spies, we overlooked unofficial sources of information such as ethnic newsletters published openly.

AND THEN, Richelson talks about Iran and North Korea.... in context...

This is an amazing book! It is an essential part of the bookshelf of ANY enthusiast of the entire Iraq/ Iran/ WMD controversy.

Richelson even talks about my favorite country, Niger. (I had a short assignment there.) [There was this (amazing!) CIA/KGB volleyball game!!!!] [And, why, exactly, would the world's poorest country warrant so many top-level spies... and apparently they all knew one another!!] Anyway, Richelson goes into exhaustive detail about the real and forged documents. Everyone in the business knew what was forged right away... but there were plenty of real ones.

He never does any name calling... he just reports on meetings and the people. In a sense, also, Richelson does such a thorough job of reporting, that you feel the same sense of exhaustion as the actual players. You can understand why so many of the experts dropped out after a while. Richelson actually makes you feel as if YOU are one of the weapons inspectors. He effectively captures the frustrations, the elation, the fatigue of being there ... spying on the bomb!

I wish there was some way this book could be turned into a movie. Or maybe a serial like "24". It's really an on-going, never-ending spy thriller. Lots of twists and turns. Maybe a younger Michael Caine could play the lead.

This is a great book! An excellent story and an essential reference book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chilling and Timely, March 23, 2006

By	viktor_57 "viktor_57" (Fairview, Your Favorite State, USA) - See all my reviews

Half a century ago, the United States was the first country to develop and deploy nuclear weapons, uncorking a genie that has now spread to possibly a dozen nations with more crowing and sneaking to join the nuclear club. All this nuclear activity has been closely monitored by the U.S., as Richelson relates in his book "Spying of the Bomb", a timely account of the workings of American nuclear intelligence in monitoring the nuclear development and testing of 15 nations.

Each chapter of this book covers one or more of the 15 nations whose nuclear programs the U.S. has surveilled, using recently declassified documents, interviews, and actual intelligence to tell each nation's story from their first inquiries into nuclear technologies and materials, their decisions to proceed to the next stages, to the actual development and testing by their researchers and scientists. Richelson juxtaposes what the U.S. thought it knew with what was actually happening, highlighting the uncertain nature of intelligence gathering and analysis. Such discrepancies might be disadvantageous when dealing with friendly nations, but with overtly hostile nations, the lack of accurate information has proved disastrous and forebodes even worse consequences.

Richelson's book is a wake-up call not only to the intelligence-gathering community, but to all citizens of the world as well. When the most powerful nation lacks the information to accurately assess potential threats from hostile regimes, everyone in the global community is at risk, and we must hold not only the aggressors, but those who have the power to stop them, responsible.