Why do nations choose to develop nuclear weapons, the author wonders. “Is it because of external threat and strategic defence? International prestige and diplomatic power? Bureaucratic striving? Populism, nationalism, and the need to impress constituents on the streets?” The answer, in the case of India, is all of the above, ‘with added emphasis on strategic Defence after India’s humiliating 1962 defeat by China,’ says Langewiesche.

“India’s programme was pursued in semi-secret, closely linked to a public programme of nuclear-power generation and partially masked by it: It would not use enriched uranium as the fuel for its weapons but rather would build them around cores made of plutonium, a by-product of uranium reactors that can be chemically extracted from their radioactive wastes,” he explains.

“On the receiving end, the difference between enriched uranium and plutonium would not matter: The former had been used against Hiroshima, the latter against Nagasaki, and either material suitably compressed in a few fission bombs could release enough energy to devastate…”

Meanwhile, Pakistan had its own plans. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had declared “that Pakistanis would eat grass if necessary, but they would have their bomb.” One month after the surrender of Pakistan’s army in Bangladesh, in December 1971, Bhutto “called a secrete meeting of about 70 Pakistani scientists under an awning on a lawn in a town in the Punjab and asked them for a nuclear bomb… the assembled scientists responded enthusiastically — and indeed promised delivery within an impossible five years,” narrates Langewiesche.

May 18, 1974, the Buddha ‘smiled’ in a Rajasthani desert. Far away in Amsterdam, A.Q. Khan was then working in FDO (Fysisch Dynamisch Onderzoek), an engineering consulting firm. FDO specialised in ‘the design of ultracentrifuges — rapidly spinning tubes that are used to separate and concentrate certain isotopes in gasified uranium, ultimately to produce enriched uranium.’ The designs were offered to Urenco (short for Uranium Enrichment Company), founded by the governments of Holland, Germany, and the UK ‘to provide fuel to the nuclear-power industry’. Khan sent a letter to Bhutto, offering his ‘services’.

Bye the end of 1975, Khan “succeeded in copying the plans for the most advanced uranium-enrichment process known to the West. Over the decades to come, the Urenco centrifuge design would provide the foundation for Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons programme, reemerge in the Libyan and North Korean programmes, and appear (apparently by independent routes) in Brazil and Iraq as well. It would also move directly from Pakistan to Iran.”

Khan worked through grey markets, rather then black, notes Langewiesche. “With a few exceptions the equipment and materials had multiple uses.” For instance, “In Holland a company in the automotive transmission business sold sixty-five hundred high-strength steel tubes to Pakistan — tubes that could serve as the basic components of centrifuges. The Dutch government knew of the deal and advised against it, but the company sent the tubes anyway (initially claiming that they were for irrigation) and argued that no export licence was required under Dutch law.” Khan used ‘front companies, false end-user certificates, and third-country destinations’ to obscure the intended use, and his shopping list was long: “Machine tools, magnets, exotic steel, vacuum pumps, ball bearings, instrumentation of all kinds…” When someday the nuclear arming of the poor is near to completion, with ‘a few dozen fourth-rate countries’ joining the ‘club’, people would continue blaming the Dutch for having allowed Khan to obtain dangerous knowledge and run away, the author observes. There will be other Khans, he cautions. “No amount of manoeuvring will keep determined from developing nuclear arsenals. North Korea, Iran, perhaps Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Brazil… In the long run, globally, such programmes will proceed.”

Disturbing read.

May 11, 1998. It was the Buddha’s birthday. “Truckloads of Indian Army personnel were deployed to villages in western Rajasthan with orders to evacuate all residents from their homes. At 3.45 pm, under a cloudless sky, a tremor suddenly jolted the ground beneath the feet of the evacuees, and large cracks appeared in their simple mud-brick homes,” writes Christopher Kremmer in Inhaling the Mahatma ( www.harpercollins.com). “The impact was felt 100 km away. Three nuclear devices including one hydrogen bomb, the world’s most devastating weapon, had been placed in bomb shafts deep beneath the desert near the town of Pokhran, 550 km southwest of New Delhi. Two days later, two miniaturised nuclear bombs designed to be dropped from aircraft or fired by artillery guns were detonated at the same site.”

It seems the US spy satellites had failed to detect preparations for the tests. “Neither the Indian Cabinet nor even the defence and external affairs ministers, whose portfolios were most directly affected, were consulted on the decision to test…Only five people knew.” Read on: “Newspapers called it an ‘explosion of national esteem’, and Hindu nationalist organisations carried sand from the test site to every corner of India, promising to build a temple to a new national goddess, Atomic Shakti (strength).” Worryingly, Pakistan followed suit weeks later with its own series of tests, “in an eerie fusion of politics, religion and science.” And, in both countries, “public opinion polls showed support for nuclear weapons running at 90 per cent.”

Breezy narrative.

Barter bomb

Can we eradicate the threat of nuclear weapons, ‘in the same way that the world has cooperated in wiping out diseases such as polio’? Possible, though it certainly may require a long-term policing effort, says Jasper Becker in Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea ( www.oup.com ).

Though “once a technology has been invented it is hard to uninvent it or to stop this knowledge from spreading,” the world can quickly agree on remedies to disarm a criminal state that tries to hold its own people as hostages and threaten its neighbours with nuclear weapons. What is needed is the right political will, he adds.

In one of the chapters in the book, titled ‘nuclear warlord’, Becker takes us back to 1998… when suspicion surfaced in the CIA that North Korea might have tested a bomb in Pakistan. “The ties with Pakistan started in the 1970s and developed into a strong partnership in the early 1990s when both countries ran out of foreign exchange…”

The two countries agreed on a barter deal, as follows: “North Korea would provide Pakistan with the technology to build the medium-range missiles it needed to strike India. In return, Islamabad would provide the centrifuge designs stolen by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s bomb…”

Terrifying.

Fission and fusion

Nuclear weapons appear first in an essay on WMD (weapons of mass destruction) by Christian Enemark included in Strategy and Security in the Asia-Pacific edited by Robert Ayson and Desmond Ball ( www.vivagroupindia.com ). “A weapon that relies on nuclear fission alone is called an atomic bomb. A weapon that relies on both fission and fusion, called a thermonuclear bomb, is much more powerful,” describes the author.

“Nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom into two or more parts. The fission of multiple heavy nuclei creates a chain reaction that releases massive explosive energy. A nuclear weapon requires an adequate quantity of (critical mass) of fissionable material (plutonium or highly enriched uranium) to create a self-sustaining chain reaction…”

Educative, if you wouldn’t mind the chill down the spine.

D. MURALI

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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