THE ATOMIC BAZAAR
ALSO BY WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE
Cutting for Sign
Sahara Unveiled
Inside the Sky
American Ground
The Outlaw Sea
THE RISE OF THE NUCLEAR POOR
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2007
1
Copyright © William Langewiesche, 2007
Maps copyright © Jeffrey L. Ward, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is made to The Atlantic Monthly, where this book originated.
“Customs Officials Say Iraq Is Shopping for Centrifuge U Enrichment Hardware,”
by Mark Hibbs, reprinted by permission of Nuclear Fuel, a Platts publication.
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Map
ONE: THE VANGUARD OF THE POOR
TWO: NUKES WITHOUT NATIONS
THREE: THE WRATH OF KHAN
FOUR: THE POINT OF NO RETURN
Acronyms
THE ATOMIC BAZAAR
Hiroshima was destroyed in a flash by a bomb dropped from a propeller-driven B-29 of the U.S. Army Air Corps, on the warm morning of Monday, August 6, 1945. The bomb was not chemical, as bombs until then had been, but atomic, designed to release the energies that Einstein had described. It was a simple cannon-type device of the sort that today any number of people could build in a garage. It was bulbous and black, about ten feet long, and weighed ninety-seven hundred pounds. It fell nose-down for forty-three seconds and, for maximum effect, never hit the ground. One thousand nine hundred feet above the city it fired a dull gray plug of highly enriched uranium down a steel tube into a receiving lump of the same refined material, creating a combined uranium mass of 133 pounds. In relation to its surface area, that mass was more than enough to achieve “criticality” and allow for an uncontrollable chain of fission reactions, during which subatomic particles called neutrons collided with uranium nuclei, releasing further neutrons, which collided with other nuclei, in a blossoming process of self-destruction. The reactions could be sustained for just a millisecond, and they fully exploited less than two pounds of the uranium atoms before the resulting heat forced a halt to the process through expansion. Uranium is one of the heaviest elements on earth, almost twice as heavy as lead, and two pounds of it amounts to only about three tablespoonfuls. Nonetheless the release of energy over Hiroshima yielded a force equivalent to fifteen thousand tons (fifteen kilotons) of TNT, achieved temperatures higher than the sun’s, and emitted light-speed pulses of lethal radiation. More than 150,000 people died.
Their executioner was an ordinary pilot named Paul Tibbets, who was twenty-nine then and is still alive now, in Ohio. He neither abhorred nor enjoyed the kill: he was a flight technician, removed from the slaughter by altitude and speed, and coddled by a pressurized, well-heated cockpit. That morning the sky was quiet, with no sign of enemy opposition. The B-29 cruised thirty-one thousand feet above the city in smooth air. It lurched and nosed upward when the bomb fell clear. Tibbets banked steeply to get away and turned the airplane’s tail on the destruction. When the bomb ignited, now far behind and below, it lit the sky with the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen. The first shock wave came shimmering through the atmosphere and overtook the airplane from behind, causing a sharp bump measured at 2.5 g’s by a cockpit accelerometer. The bump felt about like the near miss of an antiaircraft burst, or the jolt of crossing a pothole in a jeep. A second shock wave then hit, but it was a reflection off the ground, like an echo of the first, and therefore even less intense. Tibbets tasted the fillings in his teeth. He saw the cloud rising over Hiroshima, and, as must be expected, he felt no regrets.
Still, Hiroshima was not good for him. Though he became a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force, and later the chairman of an executive-jet company, he suffered from the stigma of having killed so many, and he grew bitter about any implication that what he had done was wrong. It was unrealistic and probably unfair to expect him to repent, but over the decades American elites did just that, having first required him to drop the bomb. In his retirement he took to traveling around the country giving talks to war buffs and like-minded reactionaries. He showed up at air shows, I suppose to shake hands. In the 1990s, he waded angrily into a minor controversy about the Smithsonian’s display of the forward section of his airplane, the Enola Gay, and accused the elites of manipulating public opinion for their self-interest. He said he was a pilot and soldier, and by implication a simple man. He sold trinkets on the Internet, including, for $500, a beautifully rendered one-twelfth-scale atomic-bomb model mounted on a (solid, not veneer) mahogany base, and accompanied by an autographed data plate. For those with smaller budgets, he offered a sheet of thirty-six commemorative stamps picturing a B-29 soaring beyond a mushroom cloud, with excellent detail of boiling smoke on the ground. Tibbets may have been bullheaded, but at least he was consistent. When the writer Studs Terkel interviewed him in 2002, eleven months after the September 11 attacks, he did not bemoan the sadness of war or ruminate on the difficulty of facing a stateless foe, but opted true to form for a nuclear response. Against Kabul? Cairo? Mecca? He said, “You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they [he meant we] didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians!’ That’s their tough luck for being there.”
Tibbets spoke from experience, and in a narrow sense he was right: it was indeed just tough luck for all the innocents who died under his wings in 1945. Those people, however, did not constitute collateral casualties—any more than the victims in the World Trade Center did. In fact Hiroshima had been chosen primarily as a civilian target and had in part been exempted from conventional firebombing to preserve it for the most dramatic possible demonstration of a nuclear strike. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was hit by an even more powerful device—a sophisticated implosion-type bomb built around a softball-sized sphere of plutonium, which crossed the weight-to-surface-area threshold of “criticality” when it was symmetrically compressed by carefully arrayed explosives. A twenty-two-kiloton blast resulted. Though much of the city was shielded by hills, about seventy thousand people died. Quibblers claim that a demonstration offshore, or even above Tokyo harbor, might have induced the Japanese to surrender with less loss of life—and that if not, another bomb was ready. But the intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.
It’s too bad, but such is the world we live in. And cities are soft targets. More accurately, they are flammable, dense, and brittle. This goes for New York, with all its high-quality concrete and steel, and even more for the new urban conglomerations of Asia. Beyond this there are significant differences in the dynamics of nuclear blasts, dependent largely on the size of the explosion and the altitude at which it takes place. A Hiroshima-sized terrorist attack at street level in Times Square would shatter midtown Manhattan and raise a cloud of radioactive debris which would settle downwind, lethally, perhaps across Queens. By comparison a North Korean airburst of the same size a half mile above Seoul would cause still larger destruction, but result in less radioactive fallout. These variations, however, become mere details when they are measured against the common result: any city hit by a nuclear bomb will fall badly apart. And a Hiroshima-sized device now lies well within the capacities of any number of nations.
When such a device ignites, the nuclear chain reaction endures for a millionth of a second. During that interval, a lethal burst of neutron particles shoots outward, penetrating walls and people in the immediate vicinity, but losing energy within a few hundred yards, as the neutrons collide with the air. Simultaneously, and for seconds afterward, a pulse of electromagnetic gamma rays, similar to light but far more powerful, flows at dangerous levels through the city to a distance of about two miles. All this would be serious enough, but it is just the start. Even in combination, these two forms of radiation (known as the initial radiation) account for only about 5 percent of the energy released by the bomb. Another 10 percent is released well after ignition, by the radioactive residue that may fall to the ground or go drifting off through the atmosphere. But all the rest of the bomb’s energy—85 percent of the yield—is transformed into air-blast and heat. Nuclear bombs of the Hiroshima size destroy cities by smashing and burning them down.
These primitive effects kill almost everyone who would otherwise be dying quickly of acute radiation, then spread out to kill many more. They begin within less than a millionth of a second, when the fission process releases massive amounts of invisible X-rays, which at low altitude are absorbed by the air within a few feet. The resulting heat, rising to tens of millions of degrees, raises the pressures within the vaporizing weapon to several million times that of the surrounding atmosphere. Still within the first millionth of a second, an ultrabright fireball forms, consisting of gasified weapons residues and air. The fireball brutally expands and simultaneously rises. Within three seconds of a twenty-kiloton explosion, it reaches its maximum size, about 1,500 feet across. If it touches the ground (whether because the ignition point was on a street, or at less than 750 feet overhead), it vaporizes the earth and all structures that it encounters and begins to loft large quantities of dirt and debris into a violently rising, intensely radioactive column.
Rising in that column along with all the ash and earth are hundreds of by-products of the fission, many of which are radioactive, but a good number of which decay so rapidly that they reach the end of their radioactive lives before they settle again to the ground. Rapid decay is a common characteristic of the most radioactive fission by-products. Seven hours after ignition, the emissions of the fallout are approximately one-tenth as strong as at the one-hour mark; after two days, the radioactivity has bled away to merely one-hundredth of the same one-hour value. Such decay accounts for the fact that people living downwind under even the thickest fallout will probably be able to escape safely (though they may suffer medical consequences in the long run), if only they can avoid exposure for the first few hours following the blast. Avoidance is difficult for those not specially prepared to protect themselves, and as a result many people will grow sick or die from the fallout. But residual radioactivity turns out not to be the greatest danger of a twenty-kiloton bomb.
So back to the first small fraction of a second. As the fireball grows, it reradiates some of the energy in the form of two thermal pulses. The mechanisms behind these pulses have to do with the intense temperatures and internal dynamics of the nuclear fireball, the understanding of which must surely rank among the most coolly analytical of practical human knowledge. The first pulse is short and weak and accounts for only 1 percent of the fireball’s thermal radiation. It consists of ultraviolet waves, and at a short distance may sunburn human skin but poses no serious danger except for damage to the eyes of the few people who happen to have been focusing in exactly the wrong direction at exactly the wrong time. By contrast the second pulse is massive, accounting for all the rest of the fireball’s thermal radiation, and continuing for an eternity—perhaps two seconds. It consists primarily of visible light and infrared emissions and, in a nuclear explosion even of this relatively modest size, is capable not only of burning eyes and skin, but of igniting combustible materials and wooden structures as far as a mile ahead of the fireball’s front.
Then comes the blast. It begins as a shock wave at the fireball’s birth and propagates outward initially at supersonic speeds. Within the first tenth of a second it overtakes the now slowing expansion of the fireball and bursts through the fireball’s surface. Sharply pressurizing and heating the atmosphere, the shock front slows to the speed of sound and continues outward, with enormous destructive power. If the bomb was exploded in the air, there are actually two shock waves, the primary one, then a reflection off the ground. Roughly one and a quarter seconds after detonation, and a third of a mile away from the ignition point, the reflection catches up to the leading shock wave and merges with it into a single vertical front. If the bomb was exploded on the street, as it might be, say, in New York, there is no reflective wave, and the shock front travels from the very start as one. Either way the effects are about the same. Though people can withstand greater pressure spikes than the shock wave delivers, the structures they inhabit cannot. Three seconds after detonation, the shock wave is just under a mile from the ignition point and, in the case of a twenty-kiloton bomb, is breaking structures with a hammer blow of air pressure, and then tearing them apart with outflowing winds of 180 miles an hour. The violence is such that fires that may have been ignited by the thermal pulse are snuffed out. Ten seconds after detonation, the shock wave has moved two and a half miles out and has weakened significantly, but is still capable of making projectiles of glass, tearing doors from their frames, and collapsing some concrete or cinder-block walls.
There is a moment of calm.
The fireball is no longer visible, but it is still extremely hot, and it is vigorously rising into the atmosphere. A result of its rise, and of a partial vacuum that has just been formed by the displacement of air, the winds now reverse and begin to flow back toward the epicenter at speeds up to two hundred miles an hour, ripping apart damaged structures that have somehow so far remained standing. These “afterwinds” raise dirt and debris into the base of the telltale mushroom cloud now beginning to form. The broken city lies like kindling, and whether because of electrical shorts or gas pilot lights, it begins to burn. Depending on conditions, the fires may spread and join, to create the sort of firestorm that was seen in Hiroshima, though not Nagasaki. Either way, the destruction of the city is complete, and in overfilled places such as New York or Seoul—or Mumbai—it is likely that several hundred thousand people have lost their lives.
From the start in the 1940s, the physicists who developed these devices understood the potential for physical miniaturization and a simultaneous escalation in explosive yields past the twenty-two kilotons of Nagasaki, and indeed past a thousand kilotons, into the multimegaton range—the realm, when multiplied, of global suicide. Moreover they realized that the science involved, however mysterious it seemed to laymen, had already devolved into mere problems of engineering, the knowledge of which could not be contained. Within a few years humanity would face the risk of annihilation—an objective reality that compelled those who understood it best to go public with the facts. In the months following the Japanese surrender, a group of the men responsible for producing the bomb—including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, and others—created the Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists (FAS) to educate U.S. political leaders and the American public about the realities of nuclear weapons. Washington at the time harbored the illusion that America possessed a great secret and could keep the bomb for itself to drop or not on others. The founders of the FAS disagreed. They argued that with the destruction of Hiroshima the only two significant questions had emphatically been answered: could a practical and deliverable device actually be built, and if so would it be put to use? The attempt to go through with the construction of an atomic bomb—to do it for real, and particularly to manufacture the few hundred pounds of bomb-grade fuel that were necessary—had amounted to a national-scale gamble that only the United States could have risked during war in advance of affirmative answers to those questions. But now that Hiroshima had demonstrated the practicality of the venture, the calculation had changed, and it was obvious that other nations could make the investment in full certainty of the return. Some would be friends of the United States, and some would be enemies. Any number of physicists and engineers worldwide were capable of guiding them through the process. The FAS warned the American people in stark and simple terms. In essence they said that the whole world would soon be nuclear-armed. They said, there is no secret here, and there is also no defense. The nuclear age is upon us, and it cannot be undone.
Some of the solutions they proposed may now seem quaint. Albert Einstein, for instance, called for the creation of an enlightened global government, complete with the integration of formerly hostile military staffs, and the voluntary dismantling of sovereign states. But the founders of the FAS were not naive so much as desperate and brave. In essence they said, if you knew what we know about these devices, you would agree that at any price the practice of war must stop. It was a rare call for radical change by men at the top of their game, and a measure of the collective dread.
Indeed there was no secret. The spread of nuclear weapons to competing states was accelerated by espionage, but by no means dependent upon it. Each of the new nuclear powers was capable on its own of building the bomb—just as the American scientists had warned. And yet events turned out to be difficult to predict, even for such thinkers as these. Simply put, after more than six decades the predicted apocalypse has not yet occurred, and a nuclear peace has endured for all the wrong reasons—an unenlightened standoff between the nuclear powers, each of them restrained from taking the first shot not by moral qualms but by the certainty of a devastating response. The very lack of defense that so worried the scientists in 1945 turned out to be the defense, though treacherous because it required mutual escalation. But these are latter-day corrections to the concerns of enormously competent men, whose basic message remains valid today. Even after sixty years of success, the nuclear standoff is still a temporary answer to a permanent threat. Furthermore, detailed knowledge of nuclear bomb-making has fully escaped into the public domain, placing nuclear arsenals within the reach of almost any nation. Once countries make that choice, their rivals will hear the same call. The United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, South Africa, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and soon perhaps Iran. At least twenty other countries are in position to proceed. In the long run it hardly matters that some countries have been persuaded to abandon their nuclear ambitions, and that one—South Africa—has laid down its arms. Nuclear proliferation moves in fits and starts and sometimes slips backward, but incrementally proceeds. Diplomacy may help to slow the spread, but it can no more stop the process than it can reverse the progression of time. The nuclearization of the world has become the human condition, and it cannot be changed. Fear of it becomes dangerous when it detracts from realistic assessments of the terrain. The risk of an all-out exchange has been reduced since the end of the Cold War, but by no means can it be ignored. At the same time, and as a result of the Soviet Union’s demise, the world has become a more fractured and complex place, where nuclear weapons have even wider utility than before, and new nuclear players are emerging to challenge the rules of the game.
Recently in Moscow I spoke to an experienced Cold War hand who had navigated through the collapse of the Soviet Union and had emerged high in the nuclear bureaucracy of the newly entrepreneurial Russia. In his corduroy suit, with his untrimmed eyebrows and heavy, sometimes glowering face, he bore traces of the past, but mentally he was a man of the times. He kept poking his finger at me, and accusing Americans of losing perspective over a nuclear Iran. He wanted to do nuclear business with Iran, in electric-power generation. He wanted to do nuclear business with all sorts of countries. He claimed that with one Russian submarine reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium he could light up all sorts of cities. He meant with electricity. He proposed a scheme to mount such reactors on ocean barges to be pushed to places like Indonesia, then pulled away whenever the natives run amok. This way he could keep his uranium from fueling native bombs. He did not deny the incentives for lesser nations to acquire nuclear devices, but he thought he could handle them, or perhaps he didn’t care.
We talked about history. Speaking of the main international agreement intended to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, he said, “The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was the child of Russia and the United States. And this child was raised to fight against other countries, to resist the threat of proliferation. We’re talking about the 1970s now. No one thought that proliferation could come from Arab countries, from Africa, from South America. The treaty was aimed at West Germany, at Japan. It was aimed at dissuading the developed countries from acquiring nuclear weapons—and it worked because they accepted the U.S. and Soviet nuclear umbrellas.”
I thought he was bullying the history a bit, but making an important point. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, was an effort to preserve the exclusivity of a weapons club whose membership consisted originally of only five: Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. To other countries the treaty promised assistance with nuclear research and power generation in return for commitments to abstain from nuclear arms. The arrangement cannot be said to have “worked,” as the Russian claimed, but it did help to slow things down. More important, however, and independent of the treaty, were the Cold War alliances that, by offering retaliatory guarantees, eliminated the need for independent nuclear-defense capabilities in those nations willing or forced to choose sides. Sweden abandoned its nuclear-weapons program, as did Taiwan. Moreover it was not by chance that the first successful newcomers beyond the original Club of Five were South Africa and Israel, which were maverick states, and India, which was formally unaligned. But things have changed. The remnant alliances of the Cold War have lost much of their power, and they now offer poor assurance of a nuclear response: the umbrella has frayed or, in many cases, entirely gone away. Simply put, large parts of the world are exposed once again to the universal appeal of atomic bombs—the fast-track, nation-equalizing, don’t-tread-on-me, flat-out-awesome destructive power that independent arsenals can provide.
In 1946 Robert Oppenheimer sketched our times clearly, not by making predictions about it, but by describing the technology then at hand. In an essay entitled “The New Weapon,” he wrote, “Atomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested; they profoundly upset the precarious balance between the effort necessary to destroy, and the extent of the destruction.” Elaborating, he wrote, “None of the uncertainties can becloud the fact it will cost enormously less to destroy a square mile with atomic weapons than with any weapons hitherto known to warfare. My own estimate is that the advent of such weapons will reduce the cost, certainly by more than a factor of ten, more probably by a factor of a hundred. In this respect only biological warfare would seem to offer competition for the evil that a dollar can do.”
In Moscow, the Russian continued in the same vein. Speaking first of the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, he said, “We understood that these weapons could never be used, paradoxically because both sides had so many. For us the stockpiles were not wealth. They became a burden that our countries had to bear. But at the same time, globally, nuclear technology was growing cheaper and more efficient, and it was becoming an option for many countries.” He meant the technology both of electric-power generation and of bombs, which is nearly the same. He said, “Undeveloped countries.”
I said, “Like Iran.”
He batted this away. “Many different countries. Nuclear-weapons technology has become a useful tool especially for the weak. It allows them to satisfy their ambitions without much expense. If they want to intimidate others, to be respected by others, this is now the easiest way to do it. Just produce nuclear weapons. The technology has become so simple that there are no technical barriers, and no barriers to the flow of information, that can prevent it. This is a reality you Americans need to understand.”
I said, “Clearly.”
He said, “Once a country has made the political decision to become a nuclear-weapons power, it will become one regardless of international sanctions or incentives. You needn’t be rich. You needn’t be technically developed. You can be Pakistan, Libya, North Korea, Iran. You can be…”
You can be South Korea, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, South Africa again, Brazil—the list of aspirants, both real and potential, is long.
But he was searching for a country even more absurd in his estimation. He said, “You can be Hungary.”
Then he said, “At some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.”
From a lofty view there is justice in a world where the weak become stronger, and the strong have no choice but to accommodate the gain. Practically speaking, however, the poor, for a host of reasons, are more likely to use their nuclear weapons than the great powers have been, at least since the United States terrorized Japan. At the extreme is the possibility, entirely real, that one or two nuclear weapons will pass into the hands of the new stateless guerrillas, the jihadists, who offer none of the retaliatory targets that have so far underlain the nuclear peace—no permanent infrastructure to protect, no capital city, and indeed no country called home. The danger first arose in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, and it took full form after the September 11 attacks of 2001. The U.S. government’s subsequent manipulation of the fear is deplorable and tragic: far better to accept the risk soberly, and to examine it realistically, than to dash around making blind wars, limiting liberties and commerce, and generally self-destructing in advance. Nonetheless the fact remains: with so little to lose from nuclear retaliation, and in need of ever more dramatic acts in their war against the West, these jihadists are the people who would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear device.
Of course they may also pursue their war in other spectacular ways, including small-scale bombings, poison-gas assaults in enclosed public spaces, and more difficult biological attacks. Within the nominally nuclear realm, they may choose to set off “dirty bombs,” which would use conventional explosives not to induce a fission reaction, but to scatter ordinary, detectable radioactive materials through a few city blocks, causing public hysteria—all the more so in societies where even outdoor tobacco smoke is called a threat. Dirty bombs would be mere nuisance bombs if people would keep their calm. But of course people will not. The potential effectiveness of such a device was loudly signaled by the clamor about dangerous dust around the World Trade Center site, and it was reinforced more recently by the outraged reaction to an attempt by a U.S. agency to raise the acceptable threshold of radiation for reinhabiting an area after a dirty-bomb attack. The outrage must have been noticed by the people who count. Furthermore they must know that even just in the United States there are large quantities of nonfissionable but highly radioactive materials contained within machines, primarily in hospitals and at industrial sites, and that the machines, because they are expensive, are sometimes stolen for resale. In fact in the United States alone there are hundreds of thefts of radioactive material every year. As to why no dirty bomb has yet been assembled and used, analysts provide earnest explanations, but largely to avoid throwing up their hands in wonder.
In any event a true atomic bomb—a fission device such as the one that destroyed Hiroshima—is an entirely different weapon, far more difficult to obtain or build, but hugely more effective if used. Beyond the immediate havoc that would be caused by the blast, the ongoing reactions to the 9/11 attacks offer the merest indication of the massive self-devouring that would subsequently occur. In Western capitals today there are quiet people, serious people, who, while recognizing the low probability of such an attack, nonetheless worry that the successful use of just a single atomic bomb could bring the established order to its knees—or lay it out flat.