Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies
by David Albright

–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

After the major powers acquired nuclear weapons in the early years of the Cold War, the expected proliferation around the world didn’t happen. One big reason is that building nuclear weapons from scratch isn’t easy. The technology is exceedingly complex, the price tag high. But the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) deserves some credit too. In formally recognizing the five nuclear states as of 1968, the treaty exacted a pledge from signatories to stop spreading nuclear technology.

And yet some 40 years later, David Albright’s Peddling Peril has a rather disconcerting story to tell. In spite of the NPT, interested states – and even groups – were able to buy facilities and components piecemeal without drawing the attention of weapons inspectors, or even the sellers of those parts.

The NPT, like so many Cold-War-era international arrangements, was concerned primarily with interactions between states. The Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who is the focus of Albright’s intriguing albeit wonk-ish study of the current state of proliferation, “took advantage of this loophole on an unprecedented scale,” before he was finally stopped in 2003. Albright, who runs the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, DC-based think tank focusing on nuclear weapons proliferation, credits Khan with creating the illicit trade in nuclear weapons technology all on his own.

First, however, Khan helped Pakistan develop its nuclear capacity. In the 1970s, he was living outside Amsterdam with his Dutch wife and working for a contractor involved in building gas centrifuges – the tubes that spin uranium gas at high speeds to create the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. Khan was a spy, and over his years working in Europe he collected the information and some of the components for building the centrifuges back in Pakistan.

As soon as Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister, appointed him head of Pakistan’s nuclear project, Khan set about collecting the rest of the parts while also filling gaps in his knowledge. He sent buyers around the world to get critical, albeit small, pieces of the nuclear puzzle. They found willing sellers, and most purchases were legal because nobody expected Pakistan to build a centrifuge plant one piece at a time – which is more or less what happened. As Albright puts it, “the convergence of easy money and weak controls on the sale of high tech equipment created a perfect storm that Khan and his associates exploited.”

Khan went on to play a central role in Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium by selling used gas centrifuges and then allegedly providing more advanced design plans for free. His network also sold Libya 10,000 centrifuges, basically handing the country an entire off-the-shelf nuclear program – and the ability to produce four nuclear weapons a year.  (Libya came clean in the wake of the Iraq war.)  North Korea worked from designs courtesy of Khan, who offered centrifuges and access to Pakistani expertise.

Peddling Peril ominously observes that with the exception of al Qaeda, just about everyone who tried to get help from Khan eventually got it. And even al Qaeda might have succeeded were it not for 9/11. At the time, an NGO known as Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN) that was ostensibly conducting relief work in Afghanistan was actually providing cover for work on developing nuclear weapons. Though the United States government has, according to Albright, “released little information about UTN’s activities,” he thinks that UTN would probably have “provided extensive and ongoing assistance to nuclear efforts in Afghanistan” if not for American intervention. And while these efforts seem to still be halted, Albright says al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations haven’t indicated that they’ve given up on attacking a Western target with a nuclear weapon. At any rate, al Qaeda’s efforts to create a smuggling network within Afghanistan demonstrate that in this new age of proliferation, even a technologically backward state can host a nuclear weapons program.

Now, with Khan no longer selling nuclear secrets and materials but with parts of his network still in place, North Korea seems to be the biggest facilitator of illicit nuclear programs. Though the country denies any involvement in the Syrian building that Israeli warplanes destroyed in September 2007, Western intelligence authorities have identified it as a reactor based on a North Korean design. And in addition to state-sponsored proliferation networks, Albright reports that purely profit-driven networks also arise.  What all proliferators have in common is the knowledge that suppliers anywhere in the world “can be tricked into selling them sensitive goods.”

So where does this leave a nonproliferation regime? Ideally, writes Albright, we shouldn’t have to rely solely on intelligence services to come in after the fact, as with Khan, or to rely on military interventions, as the Israelis did in both Iraq in 1981 and more recently in Syria. As proliferation is no longer about states offering direct assistance to other states, efforts to stop proliferation must go beyond enforcement at the state level. So the suppliers of materials like aluminum tubes that can be used to build centrifuges (but also have legitimate uses) need to be the “first line of defense.” Peddling Peril highlights the German and British model, in which companies and governments cooperate to “identify illicit procurement attempts before an enquiry becomes a sale” as something the United States should emulate.  It might not be foolproof, but at least the companies that supply products have better knowledge and experience with identifying illicit buyers and the front companies that they often use. That is, just as efforts to procure nuclear technology have become more diffuse, so too must the efforts to prevent that proliferation.

Excerpt: “States such as Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea continue to use their nuclear programs to create state-sponsored smuggling networks that seek the most effective ways to bypass export regulations, hide the end user, and avoid detection.  For-profit, transnational smuggling networks can periodically arise and rival sophisticated suppliers in their ability to sell nuclear facilities and capabilities.  All these networks have learned that suppliers in any country, inclying the United States, can be tricked into selling them sensitive goods.  By using trading companies, intermediary shippers, and complex payment schemes, these networks can use any country as a transshipment point.  They can successfully target any supplier, making their orders through a nearly endless stream of unwitting intermediaries.

Further Reading: On Nuclear Terrorism by Michael A. Levi and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy Andy Zeigart.