Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor

Education consisted of a message saying, look, there are no secrets here. The attempt to keep this in as an American technology weapon is doomed to fail because it is now based on basic science, the engineering is known, there are any number of people in the world who can who can build a nuclear arsenal and there is no secret here and indeed there also is no defense, we cannot stop people from using this weapons against us. Therefore since the future of the world or may be the survival of the world is at stake we need to do something radical here and they came up with various idealistic ideas including basically the elimination of war through the unification of the governments world wide and military command structures. This of course did not happen. Instead what happen was the peace that came about for reasons they did not predict and that was the the balance of terror, mutually assured destruction which as you know, was the basis of the peace for the next 50 some years 50 years roughly. In the in the fight in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union mutually assured destruction meaning you hit me I hit you back; there is nothing you could do about it. This actually provoked the stalemate which continues today, we are not for that, we would of course already have seen the use of nuclear weapons as there is no morality really here at play anymore in the world. But it did work it did work. In conjunction with that was a diplomatic initiative known as the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty with the attendant to explore control regimes who whose purpose was to persuade countries not to pursue nuclear weapons and to allow them to pursue nuclear energy instead etc. That Non Proliferation Treaty is still the only serious diplomatic international treaty in effect today that fights against nuclear proliferation and it did to a large degree work for many decades. It did at least slow the spread of nuclear weapons and it slowed it and this is what's important to understand and recognize in the context of the Cold War. The Cold War was actually a very stabilizing event in that in nuclear terms in that it provided countries many countries around the world and you could say most countries even into it provided them with a nuclear umbrella from one side or the other. A pretty believable guarantee that if they if they were invaded to put it in simple terms, there would be a nuclear response from one of their patrons. They didn't need to build nuclear weapons because they had other weapons that believably would be used in their defense, not because of warm feelings toward them but because of the rivalries of the Cold War and the feeling that once the thing started the guy who comes first out of the gate is going to win. During that period, however the original five nuclear powers by this is not at all by coincidence that they are the same people who sit on the the permanent members of the UN Security Council, China, the Soviet Union now Russia, the United states, France and Great Britain, the club of five. Then what began to happen, still during the Cold War was other people began to join. There were various initiatives, but the ones who were successful, and I am talking about the establishment of national nuclear arsenals outside of the club of five, were the maverick nations. Well, maverick India was a Non Aligned nation, it's hard to call India a maverick but it certainly was an early it armed early, it developed nuclear weapons early, out side of the Cold War. It was not convinced of the Cold War guarantees and it was quite concerned about China, its neighbor. Israel, Israel of course is a maverick nation and it needed it felt that it needed and probably did need to establish a nuclear arsenal in self defense surrounded by extremely hostile and out numbered by extremely hostile neighbors. Whether that hostility was justified is an entirely different question, I am not talking about that. And of course South Africa, the sort of the ultimate maverick nation, they developed nuclear weapon nuclear arsenal and those three countries who were beyond the club of five there were other countries trying to Brazil comes to mind, then Taiwan, you name it, Argentina, Sweden, others who were pushing toward that and then backed down for various reasons with in the Cold War logic, the umbrellas. But the three nations that proceeded beyond the club of five were harbingers of events to come. And those events basically have to do with the demise of the Cold War, with the end of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet Union. The umbrella, now that happened in what, in little over ten years ago, the umbrella went away. It didn't happen over night. These things had changed both in geopolitical reality and also in the consciousness of the governments and their leaders, slowly. But we can see now that a movement is under way in the world, that it seems to be un stoppable, toward the increasingly toward the arming of small nations, the poor. It's also important to understand, as Oppenheimer himself said back in the 40's, nuclear bombs; atomic bombs deliver the most destruction per dollar of any weapon system imaginable. They are very cheap weapons on the scale of weaponry, in the terms of what they can provide. And, he said it then, it remains true today. These are very cheap tools. Tools for what is the question? And and it does seems so far that they are not seen by any government, no matter how radical, as tools for making war because of the threat of retaliation. These are tools for political power. They come with huge risks because of commanding control problems and other problems which could lead to nuclear war. There is no doubt that the risk of nuclear war does increase with the proliferation to the poor of the world now, to third world nations and any other nation. But there is no indication that those governments, no matter how radical, are any more likely to want to use those bombs than the United States or Russia have proved to be. It's in other words, they have cities to protect, they have subway to protect, governments, nations, roads, their own families, they have they provide all of these governments that are arming and moving in that direction provide wonderful targets for retaliation and they know it very well. The question is do countries wanted to do this? Should countries want to it? And again to say what I just said before the answer is depending on the location, accelerated by local concerns, you know the rivalries and fears, the answer incrementally is yes, yes, yes. These are wonderful weapons. Can they do it is the other question. Again, Oppenheimer said it back in the 40's, yes they can do it, this does not require basic science. The science has been known for a long time and the engineering was sold by the United States during World War II. The other question with would countries have the political will to go through with this project, also that answer was to provided by the United States during World War II. So can they do it? There was a fear following the demise of the Soviet Union that Russian scientists would run away from Russia in search of jobs, the Russian nuclear tech scientists and technicians and would sell themselves to the highest bidders. That fear has proved to be unfounded and the reason for that is not just that it would take a lot of courage and desperation really on the part of these people who were so coddled by Russian society and the secret cities of the Urals for so long to take such a radical step, displace themselves and their families become price, perhaps loose their lives, but also that the countries themselves that want to proliferate have plenty of local talent. There is no lack of people in the world who can who can enrich uranium or extract plutonium and build weapons and build the delivery systems for weapons. Take for example, in this book then goes into great detail that that the prime example we have today is Pakistan. A country which began its nuclear efforts before the end of the Cold War and that has continued ever since. Pakistan decided to go nuclear in response to India, the tensions of the sub continent; it was a perfectly legitimate decision. It made a lot of sense and in fact it has proved to be it can be argued, helpful to peace on the sub continent. There is less of a tendency now to go to war and between these between India and Pakistan and there is a greater sort of calm in the rhetoric. It's not a guarantee and we know that in at least one case described in this book, Pakistan came very close, within hours to go into war with India and the reason was poor commanding control. They did not know what was coming off the horizon at them. They had they had poor basically visibility of the enemy. And they operating under the principle of use it or lose it they almost used it. The American supplied intelligence set to calm them down to assure that that they were not under about to come under attack. So there are dangers. But take Pakistan, Pakistan is one of the most incompetent countries in the world politically. It is there is no question about this they prove their incompetence on a you know, yearly basis. They are proving it this week in Karachi and Islamabad. And we are talking about highly dysfunctional country. Yet Pakistan, like many other countries contains great expertise, individuals with I mean there must be 500 people in Pakistan who could lead an effort to construct nuclear weapons once a government decision was made to do so. In this case in reality there was one man A Q Khan, much talked about in this book, much described, who did it. Now Khan was a smart guy but he wasn't the brilliant scientist that the Pakistanis themselves believed or that in fact Khan came to believe of himself. His ego got completely out of control; it remains out of control today. He is under house arrest, he became a scapegoat, that's part of the story, but we won't get into that today. The larger point is that he was not exceptional. He was he was one of he was a very smart guy he was ambitious, he was a very good manager and and an aggressive man. But there were plenty of others in Pakistan who could have who could have done what he did. One guy rises to the top; he is certainly not the only guy. Khan has been portrayed in the West, by Time Magazine for instance and a little by just about all the media, as an evil guy, Doctor Death or whatever you want to call him doctor strange love. I deny that. Khan, in looking at that in looking at Khan in up close in Pakistan and elsewhere in Europe where we did some of his espionage, you find a man who was a very decent fellow, who was deeply patriotic and was perfectly confident and rational rational as the decision was to go nuclear in Pakistan. I think that one of the problems we have now in the United States as we look at this phenomenon, as we confronted over the decades to come because it will take many decades for this to develop is to calm down the talk of evil and for instance the axis of evil talk that we have been hearing in recent years. The if you look for instance at Iran which is, clearly today pursuing the nuclear weapons program, there is no doubt about it, everything else is put it as diplomatic nicety, but is it evil, no. In fact as in the case of Pakistan it's probably a very logical and correct decision within in Iranian terms to proceed with and and they live in a dangerous neighborhood. Pakistan has got nuclear weapons, India does too. Israel has nuclear weapons; the earth been threatened by the United States et cetera. North Korea, same thing, it makes sense. Now that's a nutty regime but the decision to go nuclear is not necessarily nutty. So but I would like to I would want to just read a few things from this book pertaining to Khan, just to lighten things up and get off the generalizations. This is not a book about generalizations but of specifics of the terrain, the description of the terrain of nuclear proliferation in the world today that is the proliferation by the poor. Let's see here. I will tell you, I will start first with Khan in his European days when he was working at a Dutch Centrifuged Plant and he became a spy in response to Pakistani demands, governmental requests in turn, in response to the nuclear tests of India. I went to meet the person who first blew the whistle on Khan, a guy named Fritz Veerman who is 62 now; he had worked with Khan at a its a company called URENCO who were making - enriching uranium. He drove me to the URENCO plant, Fritz Veerman's first return there in all these years. I write here, Veerman turned out to be a typically law abiding Dutchman with maddening manners, a driver of strictly respecting the speed limits even on four lane roads with no traffic ahead. Driving with him was a rare form of torturing not yet known to Pakistan, I soon understood that living with him would have been worse. His wife and children believed he was obsessed with Khan and they wished he would leave this subject alone but Veerman had been marked by Khan's actions and whether because of this brush with fame or because he was truly troubled by the spread of nuclear weapons. He could not stop repeating the story. He told me that he and Khan had been close friends. They were fellow geeks I suppose at least to the extent that centrifuge seemed to truly to excited them both. When ever Khan discovered something interesting on the FDO laboratory floor or Veerman did, they would troop off together to study it and share their joy. They shared other enthusiasms as well. When the weather turned warm and women in Amsterdam took to walking around in scanty cloths, the two friends would go sight seeing through the city in earnest appreciation of the female form. Khan in particular was easily smitten and would occasionally wander off on the trail of a woman despite Veerman's entreaties to return to work. I asked Veerman if you meant to say that Khan had frequented prostitutes, he answered as he often did to my questions about those times, were they the Willard and Plaintiff I don't know. As if he couldn't be sure of anything anymore. But Khan was almost certainly a good family man and for that reason a better spy. Veerman was still a bachelor then and was sometimes invited over for dinner, Henny Khan's wife was less gregarious and calm and a bit over shadowed by him but she was gracious and polite and the two girls were young and nice. The family spoke English at home. Veerman would arrive at the house carrying 10 pounds of cheese and more because some of his relatives were traditional Dutch cheese makers and Henny had a special fondness for this stuff. The meals typically consisted of barbeque chicken and rice, Khan had a special fondness for Dutch chicken which he believed was better than any he had eaten in Pakistan. Drinks were non alcoholic. The curtains were left opened at night in the style of righteous Dutch towns and the illumination was kept high. So any one passing on the street could see that inside the house everything was just right. Veerman believed nearly the same for a while though on several occasions he noticed classified documents on a desk in Khan's home in apparent violation of the lab's security procedures. Khan once explained that Henny was helping with translations. He was so clearly unconcerned with hiding the documents that Veerman assumed Henny had been checked out and approved and was probably being paid. Sometimes other Pakistanis came for dinner. They did not explain their jobs and Veerman did not ask. Much later when Veerman himself was accused of having helped Khan Dutch intelligence agents showed him photographs of the same man and told him they come from Pakistan's embassy and were its spies. It appears likely that at the very dinners Veerman enjoyed blueprints and other documents were collected and taken away. But everything seems so above board. So normal and brightly lit that Veerman was mostly just glad to be accepted as a friend. He was probably also proud. The pattern was similar to the lab where Khan formally and in writing asked Veerman to take detailed photographs of the centrifuges and their parts. Taking photographs was one of Veerman's regular jobs and because he had a European sense of hierarchy he unquestionably complied. To me, in the car he said Abdul was a doctor and I was just a normal person do you understand? I said yes and stifled a sigh. The story went on nearly in real time and finally it was Veerman who suspected that something was wrong about Khan. In those years Veerman liked a vacation in foreign lands especially when he could lodge with the local people and see life through their eyes. He was not much drawn to Pakistan but when one day Khan warmly suggested that he should visit and held out the promise that he could stay with Khan's friends and family Veerman jumped at the chance. Khan suggested places to see and provided Veerman with information about direct flights from London. Veerman began to make his plans. Khan must have had more than hospitality in mind. Veerman was not just some friend from work. Simple though he seemed, he was a highly specialized centrifuge technician full of useful skills and secret knowledge. In retrospect it's obvious that Khan hoped to tangle him up or seduce him somehow and to use him in the project to build the Pakistani bomb. The plan might have worked. But then Khan offered to pay for Veerman's flight. This was an incredible blunder. It's a scientific fact that no other people anywhere are as moralistic as the Dutch. Admittedly Pakistan has rather the opposite claim. But Khan had lived in Holland for how long? To state the obvious Veerman was shocked by Khan's offer which he immediately declined. He told me that a light lit up in his mind. Veerman realized that his friend Abdul is a spy. So now Khan goes back to Pakistan. And very quickly, very quickly starts his program and very quickly has success. I mean Pakistan went from nothing to nuclear arsenal in ten years. The United States moved faster during world war two. Okay, we are a much larger and more energetic country with far greater resources. The mystery to me today in listening to intelligence analysis of Iran is that they are talking about perhaps it will take another 10 years at the soonest before Iran has the bomb. Look, I don't want to to participate in the administrations use a fear to suppress civil liberties and pursue stupid policies overseas but the fact remains that if Iran wants to have a bomb badly enough Iran being a very competent society, they can certainly have it faster than ten years and the mystery is that it has taken them so long. It didn't take Pakistan anywhere near so long. So what was it like? Why was it when Pakistan was developing this bomb it was an open secret. People knew this, the US knew it, the world knew it, the third world applauded. They should have applauded a world in which a few elite countries retain the right for - to nuclear weapons and deny it to everybody else certainly is not something that pleases the great majority of the world. If they have got it, meaning us, why shouldn't we have it, meaning the third world? So the emotion was like this or the scene we should say at the moment of real development in Pakistan. I am talking about Khan here. A Pakistani general asked him if he minded the descriptions of him in the West of an evil Dr. Strange Love, Khan answered accurately enough. They dislike our god, they dislike our prophet, they dislike our national leaders and no wonder they dislike anybody who tries to put his country on an independent and self reliant path. As long as I am sure that I am doing a good job for my country I would ignore all such insinuations and concentrate on my work, well almost. Concentrate he did, in the face of increasing export controls in 1990s Khan did not shy away but expanded his global procurement network and took it largely underground. At Kahuta he continued to improve the centrifuge plant, to tweak the laboratory's war head designs and to develop an alternative ballistic missile to the one being built by the PAEC and other Pakistani bureaucracy. He also led the laboratory into the design and manufacture of a variety of conventional weapons including surface to air missiles, anti tank weapons, multi barrel rocket launchers, laser range finders, laser sites, reactive armor mine sweeping charges and armor piercing tank rounds. On the civilian side Kahuta launched into the manufacture of electronic circuits, industrial switches and power supplies and compressors for window mounted air conditioners. In 1992 it even established a biomedical and genetic engineering division. Further more it began to hold seminars and conferences on topics related to the enriching of uranium including six International Symposia on advanced materials, two International Symposia on mechanical vibrations, the International Conference on phase transformations, three vacuum courses, some in cooperation with the Pakistan Vacuum Society and finally every bomb builder savored the National Conference on vibrations in rotating machinery. In other words Khan was going great guns and he was having fun. Pakistan's nuclear position remained efficiently ambiguous but once the American sanctions had been imposed Khan was freer to praise himself for what he had done. The word filtered to the streets until even ordinary people knew of this grand man and some recognized him as he whisked by in his cavalcades surrounded by loyalists and guards. Medals and awards were showered upon him and every one of them he counted and every one he felt was justified. Ultimately he received six honorary doctoral degrees, 45 gold medals, 3 gold crowns and twice Pakistan's highest civilian award. He played his fame for what it was worth. This was the era when he began to buy houses and luxury cars and to go around bestowing grants on hospitals, mosques and schools. He shared his wisdom openly on many public occasions. He sat on the governing boards of more than two dozen Universities and Institutes. He was personable, charming and sometimes apparently humble though in the way politicians can be, without being humble of all. When people visited him at his office he gave them pictures of himself. When those people were reporters he allowed them the phone. Reporter, "you seem to be very fond of learning different languages, in fact you appear to be almost a linguist. In how many languages have you attained proficiency and how? Any comments on this rather strange blend of being an exceptionally brilliant scientist and the linguist?" Khan, "I know a few languages. First of all Urdu was my mother tongue. Then after the partition I had to learn Hindi which I can still read and write. Later I learned some Persian. When I went to Europe I learnt German and Dutch, I know both languages quite well. While in Europe I also took some lessons in French and of course English has been my second language all these years. I wish I could learn Russian and Chinese but I couldn't find the time busy building bombs." Reporter, "do you have any hobbies and how do you relax after a strenuous day?" Khan, "I used to go fishing, fly kites and play hockey in my young days. Then I played volleyball at University. Now it is so difficult to do these things. I do some walking and play with our dogs and cats, it is very relaxing. I also read quite a bit, we go to bed very late usually after midnight as my wife is also doing something, knitting, reading etc." Reporter, "thank you Dr. A. Q. Khan." So that was a scene for Khan in Pakistan and I won't read a lot more of this. The point is that he was getting out of control personally and this led to his downfall. He became a very easy target for Pakistani government. As I am sure many of you know he proceeded from building Pakistan's weapons systems, nuclear weapons, to selling the technology on the black market, grey market of the world to any nation who is interested in buying it. There were many nations, the most the farthest down the path is Libya. Libya bought pretty much a full assembly system for the enrichment of the uranium. But Libya being an incredibly incompetent country left these devices in box just sitting in the desert. I mean Libya is I think if Libya is being sort of having the deflection of Texas, meaning a lot of oil money and not a whole lot of you know ability or brains to go behind that. They are just having some oil underground and so you see in Libya something we do see in Texas. I saw in my years living down there in Texas - East Texas, the stupidity associated with oil wealth. So these guys left the stuff lying in the desert and eventually for other reasons, the Americans and particularly the British persuaded Gaddafi to join the standard line and to open he wanted to looking for trade with Europe, he gave these useless boxes up, they have already brought. But it would be unlikely to expect most countries to be as incompetent as Libya. Now, so I think we can take, in other words as a given that nuclear proliferation in third world will continue and the reasons for it are logical. We need to understand those reasons. That doesn't mean we need to accept it or applaud this process. There are dangers associated with it. It is clear that the efforts of the Non Proliferation Treaty should be continued and so forth. But when looking at our options, how we are going to resist this? It's best to understand the danger before necessarily becoming sort of apocalyptic in our view of this process and therefore deciding ourselves to go to war, for instance against Iran. The question as always in such with such a decision is what level of damage are we going to do, not to Iran, but to ourselves. Part of that factor's in the understanding of what of what for instance an Iranian nuclear weapon or arsenal would be like. There is no reason to believe, as I had said before, that a country like Iran is going to be anymore likely to use the nuclear arsenal than the United States and the Soviet Union have been. That doesn't mean that it won't happen. But it means that there is nothing particularly special about Iran, doesn't matter what their ideology is and whether they say they want to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth or all of that sort of rhetoric. The reality is they have got a lot to lose, they are a fixed target and they know it. This brings up the next point, which is also covered in this book. What about terrorism, what about state less terrorism? Now the logic changes completely because unfortunately the key word is state less, the terrorist groups we know have nothing to lose. Losing life is nothing for anybody; it shouldn't be anything for us either. But they have no infrastructure to lose. They don't have a nation to lose, they don't have territories, cities, any of that to lose. So deterrence, to assure destruction breaks down when comes to terrorist groups, again, this is you know this reality and there is no denying it is a reality can be wielded as a sword over the American people and the European people to promote all sorts of self destructive policies. It brings out the worst pathos in any political system to have some fear like this being promoted. That doesn't and so let's not join that, let's resist it however. We need to one needs to recognize that it's very real that if one of these groups got hold the weapon, they would use the weapon on short order. There is no reason to believe they would hold back from that. The experience in Iraq tends to show that they would go to war. Now how are they going to get the weapon is the problem that's the question. Is Iran or some other third world country, North Korea, Pakistan after the coming revolution, whatever it is, are these countries these third world unstable countries with hostile ideologies, are they going to hand an assembled device over to a state less group to use for them and use that state less group as a proxy bomber. There is no evidence that they would dare to do this. And the reason is that when a nuclear explosion takes place there is enough knowledge of design of bombs and the specifics of nuclear explosions that they can expect the policy makers, those who control the weapons, the governments of those countries. And those weapons are controlled by the very core of the governments, not by fringe groups. But they would understand they must understand that that weapon that they had handed over would be traced back to them immediately within hours and retaliation will be swift and severe. They have there is no advantage to go into Al Qaeda or some other groups to do your bombing for you if you are a nation, you are going to get hit in response. And people know that, governments know that, they may even have an over blown understanding of that, they may have an over blown evaluation of the expertise of European Nuclear Forensics experts and intelligence, they tend to see us in sort of Ãœbermensch conspiratorial terms. But I think they are probably right about that, we would know right away. And so there is very little risk of this happening. It's a possibility; nobody knows the future but small small. If you were a terrorist and in this book I have put myself into that position, okay lets go to ground, out in the world and wandered through much of the globe looking at this rough parts of the world and if you were terrorist and wanted to hit New York or Washington or London or some similar place probably not right here, you would not logically count on being able to get hold of an assembled device. You would have to make it yourself. Now countries when they want to go nuclear have to build, have to manufacture the fissile material because it doesn't do them any good to have one or two bombs, they need to have an entire arsenal and be able to sustain it, provably this is political muscle, what matters is the industrial plan more than the weapons itself, which is we can see the pressure in Iran today to prove that point. But so they cant get hold of enough fissile material in the black market for more than one or two bombs then it doesn't too much good. A terrorist group is totally different, they cannot expect to get an assembled device and they cannot expect to manufacture enriched Uranium weapons greater than 90 percent. They cannot expect to be able to handle Plutonium which is a very difficult material to handle. They have to get hold of it somewhere already manufactured and the place they would turn to, still today, probably is Russia. This book deals a lot with that problem. It's a long standing problem. We know that it was probably most severe, that is the problem of the insecurity of Russian stockpiles of fissile materials, weapons grade, greater than 90 percent. It was that danger was greatest probably right after the fall of Soviet Union 91', 92', 93' in that area. The Americans realized it and went in with a massive program to provide better locks and doors, it has been quite successful. The Russians themselves have gone a long way, as you know, towards authoritarianism under Putin, they themselves not only are putting in are valuing this this product the weapons graded HEU more than it did before. They are increasingly nationalistic but they also have increasingly have given power to the FSB, the descendants of the KGB, the secret police. In other words they are controlling not only their nuclear arsenals, I mean their nuclear stockpiles more tightly than before and actually even without American aid but they are also controlling the roads and the cities much more tightly than before. The Russian stockpiles set primarily in the 10 former secret cities east of the Urals, now the closed cities and still very closed and guarded cities. I went there to that area to look at it and let me tell you something that I have it was known very much when I arrived that the FSB, the local FSB was extremely aware of what I was doing. They were monitoring, not to be paranoid about this but over the years I know when people are monitoring me when or not, I certainly was being watched and to some extent followed around and questioned. A terrorist going in there is not just going to walk in the door and go out and and he sort of execute a command over which is what some people in Washington promote as a night mare scenario. They might be able actually to to employ Chechens or somebody to hit one of these cities and the stockpiles. But the stockpiles those cities are guarded by Russian troops, now those Russian troops as it has been widely said, are drugged at the time and they are on drugs and they are you know committing suicide and we talk about very, very low morals, the drags of the Russian military is that's getting pretty low. But they still know how to shoot weapons, at least enough to make noise. So if a group went in and tried to hit, to steal through force of arms a a 100 pounds which would be key thing of nuclear material for a bomb they and if they make any noise at all, a single shot is fired, they are not going to be able to get away. If they could grab the stuff they have got hundreds of miles of Russian roads to negotiate and Russia is not a push over country anymore. They will not be and they would know this, they would know if they don't know that's so much the better but they are going to know this. What they can do and the real weak point is corruption, if they could get hold of 100 pounds of greater than 90 percent HEU and have and do it in such a way that the Russians wouldn't - don't know it, for let's say at least three days and preferably never, but let's give them say three days the Russians don't know it, gives them time to get that loaded out of the country. Two bricks, 50 pounds each of greater than 90 percent HEU is enough to make a Hiroshima style bomb. They will make it in a garage somewhere in the world. You grab that stuff, if you do it through corruption, if you do it by pay offs, let's say you got $5 million to spend on this project, you might be able to do this. I think it's a very real concern. However close analysis on the ground, rather than just scare mongering says, yeah it's a very real concern; it's a low probability, high consequence event if it ever happens. But it's still very difficult to do. Some Middle Easterners are not going to be just walk into Yekaterinburg and start you know paying people off to buy weapons, to buy a fissile material. He would have to work through Russian mafia, even you know medium he work through allows for the of possibility of betrayal. There is it would be very difficult to keep this secret, but it could be done it could be done in Russia today and there is nothing the US can do about that and we are not for reforms in you know Russian society and I have when I was on the ground in Eastern Urals I saw plenty of evidence inside the secret cities, of the closed cities, of massive corruption there as well as else where in Russia. So we know this is a very real problem. The problem for us is that if that - speaking as sort of American citizens with the government acting on our behalf is that once that happens if that ever happens and by the way there is no evidence yet that it has ever happened if it ever happens, in fact there is reasonable evidence that it has never happened though you really don't know what you don't know of course, but we know well, with some certainty it didn't happen in the past during the most vulnerable period. If it ever happens though American defenses just fall all apart. We basically throw up our hands because of this. There is a problem within the US government, this goes for the US intelligence agencies let along the others, of seeing the world in very governmental terms. We the US government, when we look at an area where other governments, hostile governments we call them, don't have control and most obviously because there is massive narcotics trade or there may be civil wars or there may be other things going on I mean rebels of various kinds, Kurdish, separatist you name it. We say chaos, chaos there is nothing we can do there. So what we do is we go in and we prop up the governments of these countries in a specific attempt to to intercept a potential HEU load, we prop them up in very governmental ways, we build the border post and sorts of things you might see between the United States and Mexico in an attempt to to control the border and smuggling. Of course you go one kilometer and no problem. The view that the world beyond government is a world of chaos is one of the most fundamental errors of the US government or the US people today. The reality is of course that non governmental part of the world are growing in size and virulence year by year, governments are slowly losing their meaning and their control of the world. But to say that anarchy is replacing them is wrong. And what's happening in other words, on my experience and through much traveling and working in such parts of the world, to name just think of Anbar province in Iraq or Baghdad for that matter is that true anarchy really doesn't exist or hardly exist. It might exist for a few months during acute revolutionary period. But actually the places that look anarchic to our government and where they where our governments throws up its hands in despair are in fact often usually highly organized, but in an organic non governmental way. This these structures are structures which could be exploited in ways we could talk about I mean this is not a policy recommendation book, simply a book of observation. But the first step is to recognize that such power exists and in fact it can be very easily discerned. Now I will read you a little section which I have not read before on this, so far as of yet brief book tour. But I will just try to sign in, all right. This is about about just that issue. It starts with Iraq. I have a Kurdish friend in Iraq who moves through war with the grace of a dancer. In 2004, at a time of increasing attacks, when Westerners living in Baghdad are urgently hiring Western Security Companies to install surveillance cameras and elaborately beef up their household defenses. He gave me advice about my own modest quarters which had a rocket shattered front end and a pack of feral dogs living on the street outside. He had advised me before to avoid dissection of a formal security plan and simply leave the broken glass on the ground and in the stairwell leading down from the roof. Now, he added, just feed the dogs. Some months ago, I made the first of two brief trips to the mountains in the extreme Eastern Turkey in the Kurdish inter-land along the border with a Iran. That border lies across one of the simplest routes to Istanbul from the close cities of the Euros to Russia down the Caspian and across North Western Iran. Istanbul is a prime destination for the assembly of a nuclear weapon. The landscape is immense with high snowy peaks and valleys expand great distances, but the dividing line runs along rounded mountains that can be crossed and about five hours on foot and regularly are. This is the prime smuggling county I mentioned earlier where very night the packed trains run bringing in untaxed diesel fuel from Iran and opium from Afghanistan. The local villagers may seem sleepy but they are wide awake. After just a few days of wandering around it became apparent to me that the entire region is tightly sowed up and nothing moves there without notice and that any transport or activity requires approval. The authority is of course not the Turkish government. The Army maintains several check points on the road which serve not to stop the traffic but to collect bribes. In one of the villages a young man told me that the Army runs patrols in night and sometimes shots the smugglers horses, may be. The young man misdirected me away from the smuggling trails one of which I later followed long enough to verify that it was easily walkable. Primarily the Army is here to fight this sporadic Guerrilla War against Kurdish separatist who occasionally ambushed a patrol or plant a mine, then retreat higher into the Turkish mountain. The main garrison is in a village called Baskale which is better known for its heroin labs. When Pakistan was building centrifuges for its nuclear weapons facilities some of the more sensitive parts passed through here, it's going the other way. Baskale has a large yellow house and a central compound which belonged to the leader of a clan that is dominant for miles around and extended family name the [0:42:28] (Ertosi) which consist of a 150,000 to 200,000 people. The house is only sometimes inhabited when the [0:42:35](Ertosi) chief wants to show a presence in the community. One afternoon I was invited in for tea. The host was a back bearded, heavy set, middle aged man who would arrive from Ankara for a few days. He was merely a son of the chief but was important enough to have guards and flunkies around. We sat against the walls of a large bare room with photographs of dead [0:42:53] (Ertosi) at one end and a big screen television at the other. The television was tuned to a banned Kurdish station broadcasting via satellite from London. My translator introduced me as an English teacher on holiday which through our host off a a little off balance, I think. He wore a heavy gold chain and a diamond ring. He had an array of cell phones in front of him on the floor, several of which rang. Between the calls I asked him about the diesel trade. He said a little but clamped up when I got in to the practical details. To my translator, he said, why does an English teacher want to know so much? We moved on. Weeks later, I returned to the area and sort out a certain sub clan leader I had heard about. He was a powerful man, the hereditary chief of 20,000 Ortosi who occupied the most active stretch of the border. He did not have a telephone. I found him in a hamlet perched among patches of snow high in the mountain side. It was late at night and the air was cold. We sat among ten of this men in a small stone room around a wood burning stove. He was a small man, 60 years old with sharp hooded eyes and a hop nose. He was dressed like a Kurdish Peasant with a tweed jacket down to his knees. His hands were hardened by manual labor. We avoided mention of the narcotics or HEU and and talked instead in transparent code about the business in diesel fuel. He said, the government cannot control the border, the Kurds just naturally do. We talked about how. The details did not matter right now. No stranger could cross without his knowledge. We talked about women, wives and life. He told me that he has a son who works in foreign insurance company in Toronto and a daughter who works as a doctor in the Turkish city Van. He said that in general he prefers daughters to sons. He wanted me to understand that Kurds treat women right and they get some feeling for the tradition they have of kidnapping their brides. He described his own administration of justice and the advantages of traditional Kurdish law. We spoke at length about his clan which he was proud. At various points he said, the other clans are afraid of us because we are brave and the other clans are afraid of us because we live close to nature and the other clans are afraid of us because we have nothing to lose. He said, you do not need to be afraid of me. You can ask me anything you want. I thanked them for that. Others in the room were nervous about some of my questions but he was not. As the night passed he offered to slaughter a sheep in my honor. I sensed that we got along well enough and that on the second visit I could have broached the subject of uranium whether as a messenger from the United States or from its foes. That's about as closest the book that I want to write, it comes to policy recommendations. There are people in US government who have read this and wanted to talk to me and have talked to me about exactly what I mean by the exploitation of the organic power structures and this is a very specific fight against a possible shipment of HEU. We know that as of now a group that gets a whole of 100 pounds of this stuff is going to be able to move it with great likelihood not absolute certainty to an assembly point. You pick your assembly point, some large third world city with industrial activity, I have to like Istanbul but it could Karachi, it could be Mombasa, it could be Mexico City, it could be lots of places, about 20 or 30. Those places also have organic power structures. These are places which again appear to the Americans to be chaotic, I mean Istanbul. But in fact it's very hard to find any area - I have systematically looked for this in Istanbul where true chaos ran, in fact I had never found that, just plain doesn't exist, Istanbul is not a chaotic city. It's just a non governmental city. And and which a very different thing. If we could learn to tap into that it would be to our advantage. Beyond that the assembly of a weapon takes six months to a year, any semi competitive group of five people or so could do it. You need a propellant expert. You need a guy who knows machining and work with machine tools well. You need to have a front organization that will cover the industrial noise. All that can be done relatively easily and cheaply. Once you have the weapon you are talking about something of the size may be a cart. Not a a military kind not militarily useful depending on would sneer at, but good enough. They just need one. You can expect that a nuclear weapon built in a garage by a group from a 100 pounds of HEU 90 percent could at the most well let me put it this way I will give you a range and then I will stop talking. If you take two two bricks of 50 pounds each of HEU 90 percent, you put one brick on the floor, on the ground out there and you take the other brick on your arm, climb a tree, go above the first brick on the ground and you take your second brick and just drop it. As the two bricks come together they are these the HEU will occasionally and randomly be firing the occasional neutron. There comes a point of criticality where where that will then cause a further chain reaction as well known to be the the anatomy of a nuclear explosion. And if that second brick is dropping from the tree, this is the world's most primitive atomic bomb, it will at some point there will be a reaction. If the bricks are pretty far apart there will be a big enough explosion to kill you and the tree you know I mean and may be take out some of the neighbors, but not huge. These explosions, the heat generated by the reaction of the blow the two masses apart and before they can get going too far. If by chance the neutron doesn't fire until the two bricks are directly touched, now we are talking about an explosion, this is very primitive thing which could take out a few city blocks, a true atomic explosion. It's not going to be a Hiroshima stuff explosion, 15 kiloton-17 kiloton range; it will be a one-two two, something relatively small. Now if you can do that by just dropping one brick on another it doesn't take that much to to develop some improvements to make sure those two things really get nicely and tight together before they have a chance to be blown apart. And now you are talking about the Hiroshima bomb. A a canon type device as the Hiroshima bomb was, not a compression device as Nagasaki was. And it is possible, conceivable, that on a good day for the terrorists they could do with the garage made bomb get to a 15 kiloton Hiroshima style level of real explosion. I think also in this book it it doesn't discuss the - what that would mean. And I think it's important to understand that if and to put it really sort of facetiously, it's not that big an explosion. What happened to Hiroshima wasn't all that. The amazing thing about Hiroshima, despite the horror, of all the people were killed etc, the devastations, we have all seen the pictures, read - purchased book and so forth is that so many people survived and fairly close to the epicenter. A terrorist bomb going off in the midtown Manhattan is going to take out if they can achieve that level of explosion it's going to take out may be you know, 10 15 blocks depending on the construction, I mean incinerate a few buildings in the immediate few blocks and then absolutely destroy the buildings with within the same 20 blocks. And beyond that it goes you know glass being turned into projectiles. And and all sorts of other problems. Radiation from fall out turns to be it turns out to be not much of a problem. So we are talking about a very, very serious event, something that we should be doing every thing short of going to war blindly or suppressing civil liberties and commerce blindly in advance, to avoid. But we were still not talking about the end of the world. Is a paradigm shift necessary in the post Cold War world when third world proliferation is is the proliferation that counts. And that is that we are not talking about mega ton exchanges. We are talking, in the case of Pakistan and India or so forth third world country, a limited exchange, terrible when that happens. Millions of people get killed, terrorists of that nation terrible when it happens several 100,000 people killed. But it's not the end of the world. The problem is if the world decides to go to self destruction in response. And this book is an attempt to avoid the to the the fear mongering that that we have seen around this subject and not to say that it's not a problem, that it won't happen but to say, so learn to look at it squarely and calmly, to accept that the world is a dangerous place. And this may in fact we are likely to see at some point in the future, may be not in our lives no body knows when we will see another nuclear weapon being used. May be only one, may be several but it would be best if we prepared ourselves with sort of a view of what that reality would really look like at this time. That's it.