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"I am lucky to be alive," writes Khidhir Hamza on the opening page of this memoir, which reads like a thriller. Hamza describes how he helped Saddam Hussein design a nuclear bomb over the course of 22 years. He has an amazing story to relate, and with the help of collaborator Jeff Stein, he tells it remarkably well. It begins with his cloak-and-dagger escape from Baghdad in 1994, then goes back in time to describe the education he received earlier in the United States. Hamza returned to his native Iraq, and Saddam seduced him into accepting the comfortable life of an atomic scientist trying to build a bomb for a megalomaniac. Hamza presents a terrifying, almost psychotic portrait of Hussein himself: the dictator--a man with "yellow, lifeless eyes"--has a paranoid fear of germs and a taste for Johnnie Walker Blue Label. He's prone to drunken rages and relies on sedatives to keep control of himself: "His personality grew more erratic with the ups and downs of the drugs, the liquor, and the pressures of command." Hamza recounts a story told by one of Saddam's doctors, in which the strongman was found "stomping about his palace bedroom in a blood-splotched shirt" near the body of a woman whose throat was slit.
Hamza was eventually kept under house arrest, and even threatened with torture. His escape was an astonishing feat, and the message he brought to the West is vital: "I have no doubt that Iraq is pursuing the nuclear option." The Gulf War slowed development, but failed to shut it down. The coalition that knocked Saddam out of Kuwait has fallen apart, and United Nations inspectors no longer try to keep him in check. Hamza urges policymakers to confront Saddam, and suggests that the CIA redouble its efforts to help topnotch scientists flee from their virtual captivity. If rogue nations experience a brain drain, he says, their capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction will suffer. Saddam's Bombmaker is hard to put down and essential reading for anybody interested in national security. --John J. Miller
From Publishers Weekly
"Behind every closed door in Baghdad is a scientist or an official who would like to leave," writes Hamza, the former head of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, who defected in 1994Dand was initially dismissed by the CIA as an alarmist; to this day, he remains the only member of Saddam's inner circle to escape and survive. Early in his career, Hamza believed the bomb would serve only as "diplomatic leverage" and would never be completed, much less used. However, as Saddam gained greater control, the nuclear program became his obsession and he appointed Hamza as his right-hand man. Hamza's keen sense of pacing (balancing personal memoir with political history) and his clear and vivid writing serve to indict Iraq under Saddam, painting a detailed and convincing portrait of what it's like to live in a country under a violent dictator where there is no viable opposition or independent judiciary. In the West, Saddam became synonymous with terror only after his invasion of Kuwait, but for Iraqis that terror began far earlier. Hamza recalls colleagues who were tortured and killed, and doctors weeping as they told him of being forced to watch the killings of Shiites, whom Saddam feared politically, or the gassing of Kurds, designed both to eliminate this minority and to test biological weapons. Agent, Gail Ross. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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