William Langewiesche didn’t leave The Atlantic for more money. “Financially, it’s the same thing. They treated me extremely well,” he said over a beer in a Chelsea restaurant last week. His Atlantic Monthly articles remain some of the defining stories of our time—the unbuilding of Ground Zero, the crash of the Columbia space shuttle and the truth about the Green Zone in Iraq.
How does he like working for Vanity Fair? “I love it,” he said. In a little over a year, he’s written about the rise of prison gangs in Sao Paulo, aviation in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the killings of Iraqi civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines, which won a National Magazine Award in the Public Interest category.
His latest book, The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, is an attempt to enrich our perspectives about nuclear weapons. The book has two parts--the latter half is devoted to the story of how Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani metallurgical engineer, became the world’s greatest proliferator of nuclear weapons technology. The first half of the book describes the path one might take to smuggle highly enriched uranium (HEU) out of the former Soviet Union.
But the central question that occupies us now is how do we decide what country should have nuclear weapons? It’s generally thought that unstable or hostile governments shouldn’t be building nuclear arsenals. Langewiesche says that even countries like Iran and North Korea are very conventional players. They—like us--have power, wealth and cities to lose. No matter how radical a government may seem, it is still subject to swift and severe retaliation. “That’s proved to be a very effective deterrent and there is no reason to believe that it won’t continue,” he said. “But there are no guarantees.”
What is guaranteed is an increased level of risk. Langewiesche outlined a full range of options to deal with nuclear proliferation. We can do nothing and learn to live with it. Opening a dialogue or offering nonproliferation treaties are possibilities, but the effectiveness depends on the will of the country to obtain nuclear weapons.
Economic sanctions are another choice, but he said they don’t work and never have. By the time a country resists diplomatic pressure and becomes a pariah to acquire a nuclear arsenal, it has larger things at stake. Sanctions have the reverse effect of playing into nationalist and reactionary sentiments in countries and ultimately become more useful to the proliferators.
Surgical air strikes are yet another alternative. Iran has learned to circumvent this by locating facilities in areas that are hard to hit or in large cities. “A strike is very unlikely to have positive consequences for us,” he said. Finally there is the option to invade a country like Iran. He warned that the cost to our selves would be incalculable—and far worse than having a nuclear-armed Iran.
Nuclear proliferation is essentially unstoppable because the knowledge is out there. Acquiring these weapons is not the act of an irrational government—just the opposite. “In the case of Iran it is a very rational decision. It is an enormously effective arsenal for countries to acquire. These are the weapons of the poor. It is the cheapest bang for the buck.”
Langewiesche says that a nuclear exchange does not mean the apocalypse or the end of the world. While he concedes that the threat of nuclear winter is real, a Hiroshima sized bomb is not the end of the world, or even the end of a city. “When we talk about proliferation today we aren’t talking about major face offs. We are talking about regional face offs. It’s a different thing and we should not look at nuclear weapons in purely apocalyptic terms,” he said. This kind of thinking leads to the possibility of escalating a regional conflict into a global conflict.
He said many people think that to even consider a limited nuclear war as a possibility is to invite it and instead we should think of it as apocalyptic in order to avoid it. “I think this is false,” he said. “ It has to be within our political imagination to understand that we may actually see such use of nuclear weapons and not to go to full-out destruction because we are following an obsolete paradigm about what nuclear war means. It would be lamentable to go to the trigger too fast in response and end the world--which we could do because of fear and following a false and somewhat hysterical paradigm.”
The book describes the sleek and expensive U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility located at the main crossing point between Georgia and Azerbaijan. In stark contrast are the porous borders traversed by drug and diesel fuel smugglers with pack animals. The best way to smuggle a nuclear weapon, he writes, is to hide it in a bale of marijuana. We should worry about smuggled HEU because we are more likely to be hit by a garage made bomb than one manufactured by a government.
Langewiesche talked about how he met with a sub clan leader of a large Kurdish tribe in eastern Turkey near the Iranian border. While looking for the person who really controls the border, he described himself as a visiting English teacher on holiday. “To say you are a reporter doesn’t provide you with protection. They think you are a spy,” he warned. When he finally met the leader, he revealed his actual profession, but never mentioned the word uranium. “I didn’t need to,” he said. It seems that Langewiesche and the clan leader hit it off so well that that he offered to slaughter a sheep in his honor. Langewiesche declined the offer. “I didn’t want to spend the entire night there and eat sheep at dawn. I’ve eaten enough slaughtered sheep and goats and crap. I’ve been doing this for so long that I don’t derive any exotic pleasure from it. I don’t go native and I’m not a tourist. I go in and do my job.”
-Sherry Mazzocchi
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