The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Posted Mon, Jun 25 2007
The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
By William Langewiesch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 179 pages
There is no other way to say it: “The Atomic Bazaar” is an important book. An urgent book. A book about the likelihood that Pakistan or India or Iran or North Korea or a stateless terrorist clique will initiate a war by using a nuclear weapon. It is also a book worthy of study by journalists for two reasons: the techniques of author William Langewiesche (long-gaa-vee-sh) and his embedded profile of another journalist on the nuclear weapons beat, Mark Hibbs.
Langewiesche unfolds the saga of nuclear proliferation in a four-part narrative.
In part one he delineates how the 1945 bombings of Japan by the U.S. government opened Pandora's box and made the unthinkable thinkable.
In part two Langewiesche explains, step by step, how a terrorist can assemble the materials needed to build a nuclear weapon.
In part three he documents the rise of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist who earned a doctorate in metallurgical engineering during 1972, found employment at a Dutch energy consulting company in Amsterdam, realized that he could steal bomb-making materials without getting caught, then offered to generate a nuclear bomb for his native country, which feared attack by India.
By focusing on Khan, Langewiesche makes the often abstract topic of nuclear proliferation come alive. Far too many journalists who write about international relations forget the basic concept that people are interesting to other people – the consumers of journalism. Documenting Khan's actions and thoughts makes for far more interesting reading than sentences with impersonal constructions such as “the White House said…” or “the Pakistani government did…”
In part four Langewiesche focuses on Hibbs, an American journalist based in Germany who writes for expensive, technical newsletters with names such as Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel. Although the author deserves credit for his journalistic exposés about nuclear proliferation, he crowns Hibbs as the premier reporter alive when it comes to revealing the truth about the ultimate weapon. Hibbs figured out what Khan was doing and how both corporations and governments ignored the welfare of humankind to enable him.
In the section on Hibbs, Langewiesche shares the journalistic techniques of the master.
“Superficially, what he does seems simple enough,” Langewiesche relates. “He ferrets out details from a wide variety of sources, fits them into patterns in his mind and writes them up. But that requires unlimited patience, sound technical knowledge, an intense determination to avoid making mistakes and a sense of the plausible in a world full of lies.”
It helps, Langewiesche notes, that Hibbs “is not a crusader, and that though he privately regrets the spread of nuclear weapons, his reports take no political sides. It helps, as well, that the publications he writes for do not accept advertisements and understand that their value to their readers lies in delivering the news, even if that news embarrasses the industry or is otherwise impolite.”
Born in 1952 in upstate New York, Hibbs never studied journalism. His undergraduate degree combines literature and history. He worked as a cartographer in Boston before entering graduate school at Columbia University to study international diplomacy. He realized he learned languages well, so he honed his German, French, Dutch, Russian and Chinese speaking and listening skills. He moved to Europe without much of a career plan. There, he conducted research about the energy business for The Financial Times and occasionally wrote for Business Week magazine. All of that led to Platts hiring Hibbs to write for its high-end newsletters.
Every paragraph of Langewiesche's profile on Hibbs is worth studying.
Eventually, Langewiesche returns to his foreboding issue, ending the book not with a bang, but not with a whimper either.
“There will be other Khans in the future. It seems entirely possible that terrorist attacks can be thwarted – though this would require nimble governmental action – but no amount of maneuvering will keep determined nations from developing nuclear arsenals…Now and then a country may be persuaded to abandon its nuclear program, but in the long run, globally, such programs will proceed.” Every citizen on the globe, Langewiesche says, will have “to accept the equalities of a maturing world in which many countries have acquired atomic bombs, and some may use them.”.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.