Allah's Bomb; The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons

Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2007. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Georgiana Goodwin (jacket image). xxiii, [1], 312 pages. Endpaper map. Prologue. Introduction. Seventeen Chapters. Epilogue. Appendix A: How It All Started: The Historic Frisch-Peierls Memorandum. Appendix B: Glossary of Terms. Index. Al J. Venter birthname Albertus Johannes Venter (born 25 November 1938) is a South African war journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author of more than fifty books who also served as an Africa and Middle East correspondent for Jane's International Defence Review. Venter has reported on a number of wars in Africa, starting with the Nigerian Civil War in 1965. He has published two books on nuclear proliferation, in particular from South Africa to Iran. In the 1970s, Venter also reported in Uganda while under the reign of Idi Amin. Venter cumulatively spent several years reporting on events in the Middle East, fluctuating between Israel and a beleaguered Lebanon torn by factional Islamic/Christian violence. He was with the Israeli invasion force when they entered Beirut in 1982. He covered hostilities in Rhodesia, the Sudan, Angola, the South African Border War, the Congo as well as Portuguese Guinea,. He also spent time in Somalia with the US Army helicopter air wing in the early 1990s. He wrote one of the first books on the developing guerrilla wars in Central and Southern Africa. That was The Terror Fighters, published by the British company Purnells in Cape Town in 1969. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: The peril of nuclear proliferation is urgent and intractable, argues journalist Venter in this sprawling expos�, 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 account of the industry, complete with sketchy sidebars on nuclear science and engineering and diagrams of atom bombs, centrifuges and missiles. The welter of details about proliferation's intricate maze make Venter's book a useful introduction to this complex issue.