Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (Hardcover)

by Adrian Levy (Author), Catherine Scott-Clark (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Earlier this year, William Langewiesche's The Atomic Bazaar alerted readers to the blind eye the United States and other nations have turned toward Pakistan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb and to sell that technology to other nations, including the entire Axis of Evil. Levy and Scott-Clark (The Amber Room) work on a larger canvas, shaping their in-depth reporting into a compelling and more detailed narrative. They have not truly improved upon Langewiesche's portrait of A.Q. Khan, the metallurgist who became Pakistan's biggest and most valuable personality after smuggling atomic secrets out of the Netherlands. But they do substantially support the idea that the nuclear program influenced Pakistan's internal power struggles, and that American government officials led disinformation campaigns for 30 years in order to hang onto the nation as a dubious ally against first the Soviets and then al-Qaeda. The authors also hint at the possible involvement of Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby in an attempt to discredit an intelligence analyst who spoke frankly of the Pakistani threat during the first Bush administration. Building on a decade's worth of interviews, the husband-and-wife investigative term serve a stunning indictment of the nuclear crime of all our lifetimes, in which, the authors claim, the U.S. has been an active accessory. (Oct.)
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Review
Praise for "DECEPTION":
"An un-putdownable and explosive account of our most recent times that reveals how while our leaders in the West claimed to be securing our future they were ultimately responsible for one of the greatest deceptions of the age." - Simon Reeve, author of the "New York Times" best-seller "The New Jackals - Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism,"
Praise for "The ""Amber"" ""Room":
"Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy delve into the mystery of those vanishings, traversing half of Europe and five decades of history to arrive at a startling and controversial conclusion...The quest offers a detailed view into the communist system 15 years after the Berlin Wall tumbled and its still-pervasive impact upon individual lives and our understanding of history."--"Chicago Tribune"
"In 1941, in advance of the German invasion, the Amber Room was dismantled for protection but never seen again, leading to decades of conspiracy theories. Levy and Scott-Clark, British journalists, solve the mystery; their investigation reads like a Cold War thriller."--"USA Today" --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company (October 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802715540
• ISBN-13: 978-0802715548
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #364,450 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Geo-Political Realthink, December 6, 2007

By	Retired Reader (Maryland) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

In 1998 Pakistan succeeded in denoting its first nuclear bomb some 24 years after India had conducted its first nuclear event in 1974. In the view of Pakistan, developing nuclear weapons and their delivery systems was absolutely necessary as a credible deterrent to a nuclear armed India. This altogether fascinating book chronicles how Pakistan managed to acquire the technology and knowledge to build its own nuclear weapons.

At the center of this story is a remarkable scientist, A.Q. Khan, revered today in Pakistan as the "father of the bomb." It was Khan who used his considerable knowledge and expertise to establish a world wide `network' of friends, associates, and businesses that allowed Pakistan to create a nuclear weapons program. China (PRC) greatly assisted this program having `tilted' towards Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan confrontation. Khan worked tirelessly from 1975 to his forced retirement in 2001 to provide Pakistan with a nuclear deterrent capability.

The successive governments of Pakistan over the last 30 years have differed in many things, but all supported Khan and his weapons program. And, as this book makes clear, successive U.S. Governments over the same period did not directly support Khan's work, but they did nothing to hamper it either. Indeed geo-political considerations caused the U.S. not only to ignore Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapon technology, but to even ignore its export of that technology to countries such as Iran and North Korea, which according to this book's. authors, continues to this day. The title of the book, "Deception" refers not to Pakistan, but to the fact that every administration from 1976 on purposely misinformed the U.S. public on Pakistan's nuclear ambitions and activities.

Rather ironically, the U.S. Intelligence Community actually produced excellent intelligence on both Khan's program and the international trade in nuclear technology. His `network' was pretty well identified by 1985 and its activities were well documented. Unfortunately, as has been often observed, intelligence is only as good as the system it serves and in this case U.S. policy makers over an almost thirty year period were just not interested in this information.

A caveat is in order, the authors of this book are journalists and very good ones at that, but as such they are heavily dependent on interviews with individuals who may have their own agendas to pursue. Therefore, many of the specific details of this book are questionable. Yet it appears that overall this book presents an pretty accurate picture of how Pakistan created a nuclear weapons program under the noses of the U.S. and Western Europe.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The history of nuclear proliferation, October 28, 2007

By	Gavin Bradshaw (New York) - See all my reviews

A fascinating account of AQ Khan - self-styled "father" of Pakistan's bomb - and his extraordinary relationship with Pakistan's military rulers, who encouraged him to supply nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran; then denied that they had any part in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The authors' central thesis that, successive US administrations ignored the intelligence regarding Pakistan's nuclear programme and lied to Congress in order to obtain funding for Pakistan at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and, more recently, during the 'war on terror' is supported by compelling evidence. A big book - but an easy read - I bought it at an airport and read it on two flights. If (when?) a major US city is destroyed by terrorists using a nuclear bomb, readers of this book will at least have the benefit of knowing whom to blame.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Did We Outsmart Ourselves, Again?, October 30, 2007

By	Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Deception" tells the story of American and English self-deception about Pakistan's nuclear intentions and accomplishments, the consequences of which might not become clear for decades to come. During a 30-year time period, Pakistan went from pleading for an American nuclear umbrella to creating and testing its own bomb, to running an international proliferation effort that aided Iran ('87), Iraq ('90), North Korea ('93), and Libya ('97). The authors also allege that this proliferation was not just a renegade activity by A. Q. Khan, but actually part of Pakistan's foreign policy, plotted and supervised by its military. Regardless, "Deception" contends that the "real scandal" was how successive U.S. (and U.K.) administrations covered everything up, at the expense of several who wanted to speak frankly.

Also of interest is the information on how Khan learned how to make fissile material in the first place. After earning a Ph.D. in metallurgy he went to work with a low-security rating for a Netherlands' consortium that was developing centrifuges for separating fissionable U-235 from yellow-cake - despite coming from a nation known to be seeking nuclear weapons. While there he sought and obtained a position translating German material on a new centrifuge to Dutch and English, thereby providing access to top secret material. The information was split into twelve pieces with the intent of limiting any single person's access to only a few portions; Khan, however, obtained the entire document through offering to get it retyped on site (management had been prepared to send the material back to England for typing; Khan had befriended the secretaries numerous times).

The new gas centrifuges required six foot tall aluminum tubes that were injected with a gas refined from yellow-cake. The heavier U-238 spun to the outside and slid down to a waste pipe; fissionable U-235 gathered at the center and was sucked out while the centrifuges spun at 70,000 rpm. Any sort of imperfection (including a fingerprint) likely led to the centrifuge shattering. (Many Pakistani centrifuges were lost during an earthquake around 2004.) Gaseous diffusion required all pipes and motors be made from nickel and aluminum allows, kept free of grease and oil, and a very large production facility.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's government had been humiliated by India's development of an atomic weapon, and was seeking to build its own. Khan's proposal to create the fissile material through much cheaper centrifuges instead of the much more expensive and complex gaseous diffusion method used by the U.S., China, Russia, and France, was well received, and he headed back to ('75) Pakistan with three suitcases full of stolen documents. He estimated that passing the uranium hexafluoride through centrifuges 65-70 times would provide 90% enriched uranium.

The next year Pakistan began shopping for the needed equipment - a fact noted by U.S. and U.K. intelligence analysts. Carter (anti-proliferation) was lobbied by Brzezinski to turn a blind eye because of Soviet efforts in Afghanistan and possibly Iran. Reagan did likewise. Worse yet, Reagan officials buried awareness of Beijing's gift of bomb blueprints and technical assistance. By Reagan's departure, Pakistan had a tested device ('84), partly also thanks to hundreds of millions of American military assistance to Pakistan's military that was diverted to their nuclear program.

Bush I then cut off aid after the Russians left Afghanistan, spurring Pakistan to make up the shortage with black-market deals in technology.

The final chapter deals with Musharraf's increasingly tenuous position in Pakistan - caught between the increasingly militant internal Taliban and al Qaeda, vs. the U.S. Meanwhile, large amounts of parts and centrifuges from Pakistan have disappeared, and responsible people in the U.S. are worried that Pakistani bombs (or at least working centrifuges) will be obtained by terrorists.

The biggest question of all remains unanswered - "Why didn't the U.S. pursue obtaining information from Khan on the status of Iran's nuclear program, or at least reveal what it did obtain?"