Allah's Bomb: The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons Book

In 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad jubilantly announced that Iran had acquired nuclear power. In the same breath he predicted that Britain, Israel, and the United States will eventually disappear from the world like the Egyptian pharaohs. Iran leads another half dozen Islamic countries known to be seeking nuclear parity. The implications are enormous and profound.

Allah's Bomb is a chilling investigative look by a leading expert at the race involving Islamic countries to acquire nuclear weapons.

Here are some of the things you will learn:

The breakup of the Soviet Union led to huge stocks of uranium and plutonium being left in facilities that were insecure and often unguarded. Iran's agents immediately moved in and a massive nuclear smuggling cartel evolved, often with the collusion of Russia's mafiya.

Al-Qaeda has been vigorous in fostering nuclear links, to the extent that two Pakistani nuclear scientists visited Osama bin Laden at his Afghan mountain hideout. A series of Internet lectures on "Building the Bomb" has been one of the consequences.

Rogue Pakistani scientist Dr. A. Q. Khan's nuclear smuggling empire straddled the globe, with factories and distribution facilities producing nuclear weapons in several countries.

South Africa built an almost-complete uranium enrichment plant intended for the Libyan nuclear bomb program. It was about to be shipped to the Middle East through Mozambique when the eleven containers were seized.

In October 2006, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, disclosed that apart from thirty countries interested in acquiring nuclear parity, half a dozen of them were Islamic and included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Algeria.

Publishers Weekly

The peril of nuclear proliferation is urgent and intractable, argues journalist Venter (Iran's Nuclear Option, etc.) in this sprawling exposé, which examines the supply and demand side of the international nuclear black market. Iran, Venter contends, is the most determined and given its anti-Israel animus dangerous seeker of nuclear weapons, but al-Qaeda is in the market, as are possibly Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria and Egypt. Underpinning their ambitions is a dense web of suppliers, centered on the Pakistani proliferation entrepreneur A.Q. Khan. His network is a dark caricature of globalization, bringing together stolen fissile material from the former Soviet republics, European nuclear technology, Pakistani uranium-enrichment expertise, nuclear-capable North Korean missile designs and know-how from Russia, China, South Africa and elsewhere. With so much support and lax oversight by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Venter warns, covert nuclear-weapons programs like Iran's are far more advanced than is generally understood. Meticulously tracing who sold what to whom, Venter offers a comprehensive, if sometimes disorganized and repetitive, account of the industry, complete with sketchy sidebars on nuclear science and engineering and unhelpful (one hopes) diagrams of atom bombs, centrifuges and missiles. The welter of details about proliferation's intricate maze can be eye-glazing, but they make Venter's book a useful introduction to this unavoidably complex and dire issue. (Mar. 1)