Deadly nuclear club growing more slowly than feared
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In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms.
"They are not too hard to make," he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. "They will be universal if people wish to make them universal."
That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.
But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six decades since Oppenheimer's warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread of atomic weapons? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for a future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?
Two new books by three atomic weapons insiders hold out hope. The authors shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.
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Neither book endorses the view held by Oppenheimer that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secrets.
Thomas Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the air force, and Danny Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation" to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and - most important - the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states.
"Since the birth of the nuclear age," they write, "no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise."
Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and China helped spawn five more nuclear-armed states.
It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel's nuclear arms.
Secret cooperation extended to the secluded sites where nations tested their handiwork in thundering blasts. The book says, for instance, that China opened its sprawling desert test site to Pakistan, letting its client test a first bomb there on May 26, 1990.
That alone rewrites atomic weapons history. It casts new light on the reign of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister of Pakistan and helps explain how the country was able to respond so quickly in May 1998 when India conducted five nuclear tests.
"It took only two weeks and three days for the Pakistanis to field and fire a nuclear device of their own," the book notes.
In another disclosure, the book says China "secretly extended the hospitality of the Lop Nur nuclear test site to the French."
The authors build their narrative on deep knowledge of the arms and intelligence worlds, including those outside the United States. Stillman has toured heavily guarded nuclear sites in China and Russia, and both men have developed close ties with foreign peers.
In their acknowledgments, they thank American Cold Warriors like Edward Teller as well as two former CIA directors, saying the intelligence experts "guided our searches."
Robert Norris, an atomic weapons historian and author of "Racing for the Bomb," an account of the Manhattan Project, praised the book for "remarkable disclosures of how nuclear knowledge was shared overtly and covertly with friends and foes."
The book is technical in places, as when detailing the exotica of nuclear arms. But it reads like a labor of love built on two lifetimes of scientific adventure. It is due out in January from Zenith Press.
Its wide perspective reveals how states quietly shared complex machinery and secrets with one another.
All trails of atomic-weapons information stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Reed and Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.
Moscow freely shared its atomic-related intelligence thefts with Mao Zedong, China's leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao's weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.
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