Going Nuclear: William Langewiesche on The Atomic Bazaar — Jun 26th 2007

By James Marcus

In his earlier books, William Langewiesche focused on large and fundamentally empty spaces: the Sahara desert and the sky (as transformed by the invention of flight). Recently, however, he has been drawn to more chaotic subjects. In American Ground he described the monumental ruin at Manhattan's Ground Zero, while The Outlaw Sea envisioned the ocean itself as a kind of watery Wild West. Now, in The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, he take on the burgeoning threat of nuclear proliferation. Netscape's James Marcus began a conversation with the author by asking him about the genesis of his new book.

William Langewiesche: The real basis for this book came from sitting in Baghdad, where I've spent a lot of time since 2003, and observing the catastrophe that has resulted from demonizing a political opponent.

Netscape: You're talking about Saddam Hussein.

Langewiesche: Right. I was working for The Atlantic when I began this book. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion, we published a story with a cover illustration of Saddam Hussein--and it was an image of a demonic figure. I remember saying to my friends at the magazine, "We shouldn't be doing this. Let us not demonize this guy. It's a mistake."

Netscape: And why was it a mistake?

Langewiesche: If you believe that the very acquisition of a nuclear weapon by a Third World country is a sign of inherent evil, then you're in trouble. The fact is that nuclear weapons are extremely effective systems for achieving political power. And the decision to acquire them (though loaded with risk, of course, for the individual country) is actually a logical, rational move.

Netscape: And what if Saddam Hussein had actually possessed nuclear weapons?

Langewiesche: If you look at the specifics, at the tangible details on the ground, there's no evidence that Saddam Hussein would have been any more willing to use these weapons than we have been. Saddam Hussein was an extremely rational man. Sure, he was a bad guy, he killed lots of people. But it was all about consolidating his power. He was not going to use these weapons and see his country wiped out due to a nuclear response.

Netscape: Deterrence was working, in other words.

Langewiesche: Right, and that's what led to The Atomic Bazaar. I kept thinking that nuclear proliferation is now inevitable in the Third World, and we can't be fighting a war like this one every ten years. I mean, let's look at Iran. Should we be willing to go to war to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons? The answer, quite clearly, is no. It's not a moral issue, it's a pragmatic one: we lack the capacity to win that war. So like it or not, countries are going to be acquiring these weapons, and it's best for us not to demonize them. Like or not, we have limits to our power.

Netscape: So the genie really has been let out of the bottle.

Langewiesche: Proliferation cannot be stopped, all the more so since the Cold War is over. We're also much further away from the colonial mentality of subservience. So this issue is going to come up again and again and again. And we're going to have figure out how to think about it, rather than becoming hysterical. The current attitudes toward nuclear proliferation are, at some extreme, a recipe for self-destruction.

Netscape: Do we throw up our hands, then?

Langewiesche: No, that doesn't mean we should accept it. That doesn't mean we should abandon diplomatic efforts to slow it down. But we have a whole range of options available to us, and we should understand exactly what we're fighting, and what it will cost us. This is not a dogmatic book.

Netscape: The first two chapters seem to send a mixed message. They make the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by terrorists sound both alarmingly easy and reassuringly difficult.

Langewiesche: Again, the mixed message is part of the reality. Our public conversation relies too heavily on argument instead of description.

Netscape: And how does that factor into our conversation about proliferation?

Langewiesche: Let's take the left wing. Their basic argument is, we abhor nuclear weapons, and therefore we believe that there should be total, global disarmament: that will take care of the problem. It's a very formulaic, out-of-touch approach.

The right wing, of course, loves this stuff. They can manipulate it to boost the military budget, threaten civil liberties, and all the other nefarious things they do in the name of safety. Now, we need to acknowledge that the right is manipulating the possibility of a nuclear terrorist strike in the most despicable way. But that's not to say that there isn't an actual possibility.

Netscape: So what's the golden mean here, the middle path?

Langewiesche: We should acknowledge the possibility but not manipulate it. We should learn how to live in a world full of risk.

Netscape: Your description of the secret "nuclear city" of Ozersk in Russia is absolutely fascinating. This couldn't have been the easiest piece of reporting, though, given the cloak of secrecy that surrounds the place.

Langewiesche: I had to be a little careful. The FSB [Russian's Federal Security Service] is all over the place, but I don't think they ever figured out what I was doing. In any case, I'm used to that kind of terrain by now. On the scale of anxiety, Pakistan was way worse.

Netscape: Way worse in terms of general paranoia?

Langewiesche: That's right. But like I said, I've seen worse: I had major problems in Sudan, and I just got arrested in the Congo a few weeks ago. Accused of being a spy, the whole bit. In Russia, I wasn't really worried. I like the Russians. The challenge there was to talk around the subject, and not to be intimidated away from it.

Netscape: Without knocking the efforts of various regulatory agencies, you suggest that the ideal non-proliferation strategy will include working with tribal leaders, drug traffickers, and other off-the-grid types.

Langewiesche: If we want to interrupt the smuggling of fissile material, yes. I know it's very difficult politically for our government officials to do that. But we need to make contacts--lay trap lines, is the phrase I use in the book--throughout the wilds of the world. And that includes a number of key opium smuggling routes.

Netscape: Doesn't that open to the door to all sorts of ethical quandaries?

Langewiesche: Oh, sure. You can just imagine some congressman from Utah getting morally outraged about this: "We are doing business with drug smugglers!" But I'm not talking about paying people off, or providing them with weapons. It's something much simpler: if these people have something of value, we should be the first in line to buy it.

Netscape: We can do business, basically.

Langewiesche: That's right, we can do business. We don't care if you're peddling opium. Now, there are parts of our government that do care, of course, and they're going to try and arrest you.

Netscape: I see some potential friction there.

Langewiesche: Look, most governments today tend to look at the world in purely governmental terms. Fifty years ago, when much of the world was purely governmental, that made sense. But now you see a world in which the nation-state means less and less, and is increasingly a formality. We have a very difficult time acknowledging that.

Netscape: Certainly your last two book have described a borderless and (in some sense) lawless world.

Langwiesche: Oh, we don't have a difficult time acknowledging the lawlessness of the world--we're much concerned by it. What we're really conducting, in fact, is a global War On Disorder. But here's the confusing part: many of these disorderly places are not actually disorderly. They're just non-governmental. With the exception of a few weeks here and there, during periods of acute revolution and turmoil, there is some sort of organic power structure in place. It can be nominally criminal, or ideological, but it's always there. There's always something. And we do have the ability to tap into these power structures and work with them, even if we don't like them.

Netscape: Do you see more of that happening down the road?

Langewiesche: I see no sign that our current government is ever going to be capable of doing that. They're going to be increasingly disengaged in their world of formalism, and we will suffer the consequences.

Netscape: Let's move on to the second part of the book. A.Q. Khan, who created Pakistan's nuclear program, is often depicted as a supreme villain--a kind of Pakistani Dr. Evil. But your portrait of him is much more nuanced. Describing his final period as a national icon and philanthropist, you write: "He had certainly lost perspective on himself. But the truth is that he was a good husband and father and friend, and he gave large gifts because in essence he was an openhearted and charitable man." Is he both--a ruthless weapons merchant and a decent guy? Not to mention a patriot?

Langewiesche: By any definition, Khan (left) was a patriot and an extremely effective agent for Pakistan's formal government policies. He was a damn good man to be running a nuclear weapons acquisition program. Was that evil? I would say that we shouldn't be thinking in those terms at all.

Netscape: Is it a plus that Pakistan now has nuclear weapons?

Langewiesche: It's obviously not desirable that countries acquire nuclear weapons. But if it's going happen, we need to look at these things with less outrage, less moralistically. And look, the argument is made in Pakistan (and it's not totally without foundation) that the acquisition of nuclear weapons has brought peace to the subcontinent. It does seem to have reduced the likelihood of conventional war between Pakistan and India. Both sides have calmed down a little bit. At least until the day when it all falls apart.

Netscape: So Khan--who fell from grace and has been living under house arrest since 2005--is looking better and better.

Langewiesche: If you look at Khan in professional terms, he did nothing wrong. He was an extremely good builder of nuclear weapons--and we have our own, of course. Is he deplorable on that level? No, I don't think so. On a personal level, it's indisputable that he went kind of crazy, in the same way that politicians or movie stars go crazy.

Netscape: He got the celebrity disease, in short.

Langewiesche: With that many people incessantly kissing my ass, I would go crazy too. I think it's an observable fact that by the end of eight years in office, our presidents have gone crazy as well. All of them! The best of them recover relatively quickly, and others don't. The current guy is nuts, and probably Clinton was nuts too. I mean, how do you cope with it?

Netscape: No doubt it's hard to keep your balance in that situation.

Langewieshce: Khan didn't keep his balance. On a personal level, he was obnoxious as hell, with a highly inflamed ego. That confused him, and it's made what he's going through now much worse. He feels deeply, deeply betrayed by the political leadership of Pakistan.

Netscape: Elsewhere in the book, you address the complaints of Third World proliferators like Khan, who question "the fairness of discriminatory nonproliferation tactics, and a world order in which the established nuclear powers keep trying to 'disarm the disarmed.'" Is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 discriminatory? Is it therefore useless?

Langewiesche: The NPT is a highly discriminatory document. The question is: so what? That doesn't mean we should abandon the NPT, since it's the only effective diplomatic instrument we have. On the other hand, we also need to acknowledge that this discriminatory aspect of the nuclear world order is a major component in fueling proliferation around the globe.

Netscape: Paradoxically enough.

Langewiesche: That's right, and there's nothing we can do about it! In an ideal world, of course, we would all disarm. But that's never going to happen. People can march in the streets, feel good about themselves, then go home and have coffee--but it's not an effective way of looking at this problem. And since we're not going to disarm, we're stuck with a discriminatory world order in which the have-nots are resentful. That's the way it is.

Netscape: Your ultimate message seems to be that nuclear proliferation is now a fact of life. What we need to do, then, is adjust to this new reality rather than attempt to stuff it back into the tube.

Langwiesche: We should resist nuclear proliferation, but acknowledge that ultimately, we won't be able to stop it. We also need to calculate what the various, escalating options will cost us. At one end of the spectrum is the NPT, which costs us very little aside from resentment, which would be there anyway. And at the other end, we have military intervention, which (as we've seen in Iraq) can be extremely self-destructive. In between there is a range of options, each of which has a price tag. We need to think calmly and rationally about these things, rather than apocalyptically. The Cold War paradigm of all or nothing is over. What we're looking at now is something in between.

Tags: a.q. khan, nuclear proliferation, pakistan, the atomic bazaar, william langewiesche

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