The shocking, three-decade story of A. Q. Khan and
Pakistan’s nuclear program, and the complicity of the United
States in the spread of nuclear
weaponry.
On December 15, 1975, A. Q.
Khan—a young Pakistani scientist working in Holland—stole
top-secret blueprints for a revolutionary new process to arm
a nuclear bomb. His original intention, and that of his
government, was purely patriotic—to provide Pakistan a
counter to India’s recently unveiled nuclear device.
However, as Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark chillingly
relate in their masterful investigation of Khan’s career
over the past thirty years, over time that limited ambition
mushroomed into the world’s largest clandestine network
engaged in selling nuclear secrets—a mercenary and illicit
program managed by the Pakistani military and made possible,
in large part, by aid money from the United States, Saudi
Arabia, and Libya, and by indiscriminate assistance from
China.
Most unnerving, the authors reveal that
the sales of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North
Korea, and Libya, so much in the news today, were made with
the clear knowledge of the American government, for whom
Pakistan has been a crucial buffer state and ally—first
against the Soviet Union, now in the “war against terror.”
Every successive American presidency, from Jimmy Carter to
George W. Bush, has turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear
activity—rewriting and destroying evidence provided by its
intelligence agencies, lying to Congress and the American
people about Pakistan’s intentions and capability, and
facilitating, through shortsightedness and intent, the
spread of the very weapons we vilify the “axis of evil”
powers for having and fear terrorists will obtain.
Deception puts our current standoffs with Iran and
North Korea in a startling new perspective, and makes clear
two things: that Pakistan, far from being an ally, is a
rogue nation at the epicenter of world destabilization; and
that the complicity of the United States has ushered in a
new nuclear winter.
Based on hundreds of
interviews in the United States, Pakistan, India, Israel,
Europe, and Southeast Asia, Deception is a masterwork
of reportage and dramatic storytelling by two of the world’s
most resourceful investigative journalists. Urgently
important, it should stimulate debate and command a
reexamination of our national priorities.
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