"Should Washington contemplate dealing with Iran militarily by invading possibly, it would, to my mind, be a monumental blunder: the biggest ever. For a start, the Iranians are not Iraqis. They have millennia of a proud history and heritage behind them. One must accept that the Persians were busy trying to civilize barbarians long before your and my forefathers were running around Europe living in caves and dressed in skins."--Al Venter
I don't suggest picking up a book about nuclear terrorism as a cure for insomnia. We often read fast-paced spy or crime thrillers deep into the night, our curiosity and anticipation barreling toward the final climactic scenes. But within a certain genre of non-fiction--such as war memoirs or natural disasters-- a reader's mounting dread exists right there at the outset. It's usually evoked by the title-- and the anxiety is amplified as one obediently marches through pages filled with disturbing facts, eyewitness accounts, and buttressed by the author's narrative prowess.
I admit to reading the new book, "Allah's Bomb: The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons," by veteran war correspondent Al Venter with only superficial familiarity about the topic. Like many, I have seen my share of mushroom clouds billow skyward with surreal, harrowing beauty on film and television-- the big one on "24" in a Los Angeles suburb detonated only six weeks before this book came out. And when I was young, I too participated in those rather playful Cold War duck-and-cover desk exercises at my elementary school. In the past few years, I have even read several books about the Manhattan Project and Einstein's early life. But I continue to remain baffled by the complex physics of how several kilograms of highly enriched uranium can produce a lethal, apocalyptic weapon--which, of course, Iran is committed to bringing to fruition, notwithstanding U.N. sanctions.
While Venter's book offers many sidebar digressions about the science and mechanics underlying nuclear weaponry and their delivery systems, its primary and vital purpose is to call attention to Islamic terrorism and its leaders' avowed goal to destroy as many American or European lives as possible by employing a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb using radiological waste.
For these militant jihadis, a nuke that will kill tens of thousands is their ultimate prize-- a true gift from Allah. A dirty bomb is their next best hope. The financial, psychological, and geo-political fallout from the successful execution of the latter will dwarf September 11 in horror and magnitude. Instead of airliners plowing into skyscrapers, the next tragic scenario might unfold in the low-tech arrival of a small, unmarked delivery van parked in Manhattan and carrying several 50-gallon drums of radiological waste and weapons-grade explosive device.
According to military and terror experts, it's not that difficult to assemble a dirty bomb given the proliferation of science and medical centers that rely on isotope-equipped machines. Many of these places can be easily penetrated. The labs have little if any security. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Steve Coll made a strong argument that safeguarding these facilities should be a top priority of Homeland Security rather than investing billions of dollars in technology in the hope of intercepting nuclear weapons at our borders and ports, or ringing our cities with glitched-plagued radioactive sensors with known technical shortcomings (for example, bananas, kitty litter, and smoke detectors all give off false positive readings.)
It's roughly predicted that a few hundred people might be initially killed if a dirty bomb detonates in lower Manhattan, but the harmful, long-lasting effect of radiation will make the area uninhabitable for generations. It will Katrinized and Chernobylized swaths of some of the most desirous real estate in the world.
In "Allah's Bomb," Venter presents ample evidence documenting Al-Qaeda's long-standing mission to build WMD. He quotes a defense specialist who says, "If al-Qaeda had remained {in Afghanistan}, it would have likely acquired nuclear weapons eventually," and then "adding that the revolutionary movement viewed the acquisition of WMD as a religious obligation."
American troops found in Afghanistan "instruction manuals to train recruits to make and use a wide variety of conventional explosives. There were pictures or schematics of intended targets, including nuclear power plants. In November 2001, CNN found an Arabic document titled 'Superbomb' in the home of Abu Khabbab, the code name of a senior al-Qaeda official. This document had sections that were relatively sophisticated and others that were remarkably inaccurate or naive. More than twenty-five neatly handwritten pages, its unknown author discusses various types of nuclear weapons, the physics of nuclear explosions, properties of nuclear materials needed to make them, and the effects of nuclear weapons."
Venter finally quotes from an article in the Washington Post. "Pakistani intelligence officials told {its reporters} that they believe two Pakistani nuclear scientists used an {Islamic} charity they had created as a cover to conduct secret talks with bin Laden. The scientists actually admitted to meetings with bin Laden, as well as his Egyptian second-in-charge, Ayman al-Zawahiri, together with two other al- Qaeda officials at a compound in Kabul. The scientists described bin Laden as being "intensely interested in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons."
As Venter details in "Allah's Bomb," several other key factors contribute to the global nuclear terrorism mess we are currently in. They are: 1). the breakup of the Soviet Union led to huge stocks of uranium and plutonium being left in facilities that were insecure and often unguarded. Iran's agents immediately moved in and a massive nuclear smuggling cartel evolved, often with the collusion of Russia's mafia; 2.) rogue Pakistani scientist Dr. A. Q. Khan's nuclear smuggling empire straddled the globe, with factories and distribution facilities; and 3.). in October 2006, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, disclosed that apart from thirty countries interested in acquiring nuclear parity, half a dozen of them were Islamic and included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Algeria.
Had the U.S. not taken on Iraq in the first Gulf War and spearheaded U.N. sanctions and weapons inspections, it was quite likely that Saddam Hussein might have been the first Middle Eastern country besides Israel to have built a nuclear bomb. While Israel's destruction of the Osirak nuclear facility near Baghdad in 1981 set back Saddam's WMD program for many years, the dictator was more than willing to devote his country's resources to rebuilding a clandestine WMD infrastructure.
Because the dictator resorted to bluffing while failing to come clean with U.N. inspectors that his WMD program was not operational, he might still be alive-- and there might be no war in Iraq today. Yet it was in the interest of the Bush White House to exaggerate its own faulty military intelligence, and so it created even greater fiction out of fiction.
In the fall of 2002, top officials in the Bush administration took to the Sunday television talk shows and made an "airtight case" that Saddam was in possession of nukes--or quite close to acquiring them. On NBC's "Meet the Press," Vice President Dick Cheney accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past 14 months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms. National Security Adviser Rice emphasized that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
But the big question today is Iran, even as the U.S. is bogged down in Iraq, and while the Bush White House continually reframes the reasons why Iraq is so critical to U.S. national security. (The new ticking time bomb, and one endlessly voiced by the administration, is "that we must win in Iraq so that we don't have to fight the terrorists here in America.") Despite last Saturday's passage of the U.N. Security Council's third sanctions resolution against Iran for refusing to halt its uranium enrichment program, Iran defiantly announced that it would continue its nuclear program.
There will be political fallout from an unchecked nuclear Iran. It will most likely lead to an unchecked nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with cash-rich Saudi Arabia the next likely candidate to embark on a nuclear weapons building spree. Then Egypt will follow suit. Most importantly, can Israel co-exist with a nuclear Iran, especially with the holocaust-denying Iranian president committed to "wiping Israel off the face of the map"?
The big wild card, of course, in all this is the inflexible duo of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Will both decide to cap theis failing, dismal eight-year tenure by attacking Iran's nuclear facilities? (Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker recently maintained that the Pentagon has already drawn up its secret battle plans.) Or will this administration allow Israel to be the tip of its spear and stay out of the attack?
Getting South Africa, then Libya to dismantle their nuclear weapons programs proved to be a diplomatic triumph of sanity and global good fortune. Whether an unpredictable North Korea is next in line remains to be seen. Perhaps with more pressure by China and additional financial carrots by the U.S., the hermit kingdom will stand down. But Iran is a different story. Because, the main reason, as Venter explains in "Allah's Bomb," has a lot to do with the nature of Iranian society and politics which makes Iranian leaders resistant to negotiations with the West, especially regarding the thorny issue of nuclear weapons -- and furthermore why we know so little about their intentions and true extent of their nuclear capability.
He writes, "A dilemma that faces the West is its consistently failed attempts to penetrate Iran's security mantle, including the machinations of that country's secretive Pasdaran or IRGC (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran's most secret security body), to whom the nation is subject. The reality is that to make headway in Iran, almost any kind of breakthrough would have to start and end with a single premise: If you are not Iranian and, specifically Shiite, you are excluded from just about everything in this theocracy that, fundamentalist Saudi Wahabism apart, is unique in the world of Islam.
"Nor are you allowed to forget that Iran--that Great Persian Empire of yesteryear--stems from some pretty awesome historical traditions. Its early leaders embraced swathes of empire that at one stage stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent, each one of them acquired by conquest. This includes almost all of the present-day Middle East, which is one of the reasons why the average Iranian looks down his nose at his Arab neighbors.
"Not referring to Iranians as Arabs is the very first lesson that prospective Western diplomats destined for a Tehran posting are taught. The fact is, in order, to make any kind of headway in contemporary Iran, you need to speak Farsi. Arabic--in any of its multifarious dialects--simply won't do. There is also an almost inbred, millennia-old paranoia that the visitor is likely to encounter the moment he steps off the curb. Some call it the Esfahan Syndrome, named after that fine central Iranian city south of the Caspian that seems always to have produced good carpets. Today, Esfahan plays hosts to one of the country's biggest underground nuclear establishments, said by some to be secreted half a mile down and, as a consequence, impervious to anything short of a ground or subterranean burst, high-order thermonuclear strike."
And so, one asks, where does that leave the West and Iran? Are we, in fact, headed toward a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations? Is war inevitable?
In an email exchange with Venter, I posed the following questions: What should the U.S. do if continued U.N. sanctions against Iran fail to halt that nation's uranium enrichment program? And what about Israel--should or shouldn't it take pre-emptive actions against a country whose president repeatedly vows to destroy it.
Here's Venter's lengthy response:
Should Washington contemplate dealing with Iran militarily by invading possibly, it would, to my mind, be a monumental blunder: the biggest ever.For a start, the Iranians are not Iraqis. They have millennia of a proud history and heritage behind them. One must accept that the Persians were busy trying to civilize barbarians long before your and my forefathers were running around Europe living in caves and dressed in skins.
Further, while there is a huge segment of the Iranian population that despises or even hates the mullahs and their followers, these folk would quick rally to the national cause if they were to perceive an invasion by a foreign power such as the U.S. Iraq's Saddam Hussein tried to invade and though he at one stage used chemical and biological weapons in that frightful six-year war that left a million dead on both sides, the Iranians stuck it out and prevailed.
So there is actually very little that the United States can do if Iran achieves its prime objective of developing the bomb. There is every indication that the mullahs have been working at it for more than 20 years. This is tied to evidence from defectors, buying trips by Iranian businesspeople and diplomats abroad, the activities of the Guards Corps as well as dissident Iranian nationalist movements who have blown the whistle [as they did at Natanz and Arak, about which the West knew nothing until it was highlighted by them].
It is interesting that it is all coupled to Tehran's ongoing intransigence when dealing with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Apart from the people who hold the power in Iran, who really knows what is going on? Or what other such facilities exist? Even direct thermonuclear strikes are unlikely to affect facilities so far underground, so they are secure.
The issue of United Nations sanctions on Iran - Security Council or otherwise - is irrelevant to that country's theocratic rulers. Neither they nor President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make any final decisions of national consequence. In fact - and this is important - Ahmadinejad is actually subservient to the country Supreme Spiritual Guide, Seyyed, His Excellency Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i.
This Seyyed (he is a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed) decides all. That includes whether or not to proceed with developing weapons of mass destruction or if Iran will enrich uranium. It is the Supreme Spiritual leader, as head of the Islamic Republican Guards Corps (IRGC) who controls the security of the state. The Corps is there to do his bidding and it does so with astonishing fluency coupled to a ruthless brutality that we know very little about because Iran -together with North Korea - remains one of the most xenophobic nations on earth.
The bottom line is that the people of Iran are ruled by from the barrel of the gun, efficiently wielded by trusted members of Iran's Guards Corps. On what the UN decrees, the fact is, very little inside Iran is likely to change. It has some of the largest reserves of oil on the globe and certainly the biggest resources of natural gas. Further, there are countries that are in everyday need of these commodities, Beijing being the most prominent, followed closely by Europe and India. UN sanctions will ultimately fail because Iran has the one commodity that everybody wants: fuel. It also has oodles of money to pay for whatever else it might need. In any event, we've had sanctions leveled on the mullahs before and they made almost no difference. The unholy truth is that greed has always motivated nations and individuals who are willing to put aside ideals for material benefit.
As for Israel, about all that we can be certain about is that the Jewish State is not going to have its people subjected to annihilation twice in one century. A lot of serious Israeli spokesmen have lately warned that even before Tehran was shown to possess nuclear weapons, the kind of pre-emptive measures needed to be taken to prevent the destruction of the country was on the cards. Ehud Olmert, the present Israeli Prime Minister said as much in a television interview with a German station late last year - he was only one of many who have leveled the threat.
As Venter outlined in both his email and "Allah's Bomb," there are no quick, easy answers in any of this. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend reading his book if you want a concise, informative, and clear-eyed view of just how precarious the world has become with the atom unleashed in the Middle East--and why the West should be worried, yes, very worried. One need not be a Cassandra to prophesize that we are only in the early stages of the Age of Terror.
An interview with Al Venter as well as the complete first chapter of "Allah's Bomb: The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons" can be found at www.politixxx.com.