Mr. Frantz book is a punch to the guts. I'm glad I read it alone for I'm certain that anyone who overheard my groans, as I consumed each successive chapter, would have assumed I was about to die. But though the body will surely want to wind up in the fetal position while experiencing this devastating reconstruction of how a morally bankrupted, Pakistani scientist used stolen materials and intellectual property to build a nuclear program for his country, that same body will be well-served by sticking with the tale. It has a great deal to teach us about the workings of the modern world.
If asked to compile a list of the world's most destabilizing people, in the last 30 years, the name of A. Q. Khan might not often find its way into the top ten, eclipsed as he would be by dictators with flashier and bloodier resumes. But as The Nuclear Jihadist argues, no one man has done more to proliferate nuclear technology into the hands of terrorists and criminals than Khan. Considered by Pakistan to be a national treasure, Khan became the father of that country's nuclear weapons program after leveraging stolen, European secrets into a mandate from the Zilfikar Bhutto administration to create a weapons program that would rival India's own. Why did Pakistan trust in such a duplicitous scientist? Desperation, brought about by India's 1974 Smiling Buddha test which declared India a nuclear power. Desperate to punch its own weight with its secular sibling, Pakistan's government gave Khan the keys to the kingdom. In the early 1980s, they were rewarded for their faith and their funds when Khan's lab was able to produce weapons-grade uranium, launching Pakistan into the nuclear family of nations. But while this restored equilibrium -- as Pakistan saw it -- to the relationship between Pakistan and India, this was only the beginning of Khan's ambitions.
Was it profit or ideology that caused A. Q. Khan to sell on nuclear bomb kits to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea? Kits filled with materials and secrets... Kits filled with the end of the world as we know it. In the end, it doesn't matter what motivated the scientist, only that he did it and made the world a far more dangerous place for it.
His country may consider him a hero for seemingly liberating Pakistan from the restraints of the western democracies seeking to moderate it, but if these are the heroes celebrated by the East, than there is more of a gulf between the two halves of our world than even I thought. The Nuclear Jihadist may cover the state of US/Pakistan relations, the dirty dealings that have marked the last 30 years between the two nations, but the biography of A. Q. Khan that lies at the heart of this tale devastates and sickens. How could the Europeans have been so lax with their secrets? One mistake, one man not properly vetted and the world is reduced to this.
And that is The Nuclear Jihadist's ultimate lesson, that no secret is ever safe. It is the nature of bureaucracies that errors will be made, some small and some colossal. If we have technology of this sort in the world, then we must eventually expect it to wind up in the hands of terrorists because it's simply impossible to be 100 percent right about everything all the time. Mistakes will always be made. It's what we do about those mistakes that may mean the difference between the life and death of our species. An excellent and disturbing piece of journalism. (4/5 Stars)
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