Bush at World Trade Center site: Official White House photo by Eric Draper
Anthrax spores: Sandia National Laboratories
Powell: AP photo by Elise Amendola
Aluminum tubes: U.S. State Department
Bush on carrier: Official White House photo by Susan Sterner
Obama: Official White House photo
DIAGRAMS
Bridge crane: Tim James Rhodes, RA. AIA.
Implosion bomb cutaway: Tim James Rhodes, RA. AIA.
Little Boy cross section: John Coster-Mullen
Double flash graph: Tim James Rhodes, RA. AIA.
Special envoy Donald Rumsfeld met with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1984 in an effort to improve relations; arms deliveries followed. (Television image.)
U.S. F-117A Stealth fighter-bombers, nearly invisible to Iraqi radar, led a barrage of new high-tech weapons in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Retreating from attacking Kuwait in 1990, Iraqi forces ignited 792 Kuwaiti oil wells that burned out of control for eight months.
With improved weapons and digital and satellite communications, coalition forces pushed kill ratios from 100:1 to 1,000:1—a thousand enemy dead for each coalition soldier killed—heralding a revolution in war.
U.S. bombing of suspicious buildings at the outset of the war destroyed a major Iraqi uranium-enrichment facility.
After the war, U.N. and IAEA inspection teams found evidence of a full-blown Iraqi atomic-bomb program, including the iron core of a large electromagnet used for enriching uranium.
When IAEA inspectors identified the primary Iraqi nuclear-weapons facility at Al Atheer in 1992, they oversaw its complete destruction.
After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., U.S. diplomat Thomas Graham, Jr., assisted presidents George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin in treaty negotiations. Later he would travel the world negotiating successfully to make the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty permanent.
American weapons labs led the way in helping their Russian counterparts secure Soviet nuclear weapons. At their first meeting, Arzamas director Yuli Khariton (left front) told Los Alamos director Sig Hecker, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for forty years.”
With U.S. support, former Soviet states Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan relinquished their nuclear weapons to Russia and destroyed their missile silos.
In the late 1980s, outcast South Africa secretly built a small arsenal of uranium gun bombs that it stored disassembled in bank vaults.
The South African bombs fitted into ballistic casings for delivery by aircraft
North Korean extraction of plutonium from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor precipitated a crisis with the United States in 1994. (On a later visit, shown here, Sig Hecker, center, inspected the spent-fuel storage pool.)
The 1994 conflict nearly led to war on the Korean peninsula. Former president Jimmy Carter defused the crisis by visiting North Korea and meeting with its leader Kim Il-sung.
Iraq secretly destroyed its nuclear infrastructure but kept no records. Its resistance to inspections intensified after 1995. At the U.N., IAEA head Hans Blix (left) explored the challenge with his 1998 successor, Mohamed ElBaradei.
Before shepherding the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty through U.N. approval, Australian ambassador Richard Butler (right, with foreign minister Gareth Evans) led a 1996 commission on eliminating nuclear weapons. “We could do it in a morning,” he said.
Iraqi expulsion of IAEA inspectors in 1998 led to crisis meetings at the U.N. American bombing ended IAEA access, leaving the question of Iraqi nuclear progress seemingly unanswered.
India conducted a series of five nuclear weapons tests in May 1998. Shakti-1, shown here, was supposed to be a hydrogen device, but according to a U.S. study, its hydrogen secondary stage failed to ignite.
Pakistan responded to the Indian tests with a series of six tests in late May; one bomb, detonated in a tunnel, ventilated an entire mountain. (Television image.)
President George W. Bush first received news of planes crashing into New York’s World Trade Center during his visit to a grade school in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of 11 September 2001.
The World Trade Center burning: New York City, 11 September
In the Situation Room at the White House on 11 September, Vice President Dick Cheney worked the phones while National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other staff members advised.
In the rubble of the World Trade Center, President Bush called the nation to arms. Although regime change had been on the table for years, he had not yet decided to invade Iraq.
Letters to Congress containing weaponized anthrax spores (magnified here) and a contamination scare at the White House helped change Bush’s mind.
Secretary of State Colin Powell highlighted anthrax in presenting to the U.N. the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq.
To win support for its war, the Bush administration spuriously claimed Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. It cited as evidence aluminum tubes, which were supposedly imported to make centrifuges. They were actually casings for artillery rockets.
At the end of formal hostilities, President Bush landed on an American carrier off the coast of California and spoke in front of a banner announcing “Mission Accomplished.” Insurgent conflict in Iraq would continue to rage for years.
In Prague in the spring of his presidency, Barack Obama pledged to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons. “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon,” he said, “the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books, including novels, history, journalism, and letters. The Making of the Atomic Bomb won a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dark Sun, about the development of the hydrogen bomb, was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in history. A third volume of nuclear history, Arsenals of Folly, appeared in 2007. He has written about the roots of private violence (Why They Kill), the Holocaust (Masters of Death), the French-American artist John James Audubon (John James Audubon: The Making of an American and The Audubon Reader), mad cow disease (Deadly Feasts), and life on a family farm (Farm) as well as two personal memoirs (A Hole in the World and Making Love), and four novels. He lectures frequently to audiences in the United States and abroad. With his wife, Ginger Rhodes, a clinical psychologist, he lives near Half Moon Bay, California. His Web site is at www.RichardRhodes.com.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Rhodes
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rhodes, Richard.
The twilight of the bombs : recent challenges, new dangers, and the prospects for a world without nuclear weapons / Richard Rhodes.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59373-3
1. Nuclear arms. 2. Arms race. 3. Nuclear nonproliferation.
4. Nuclear disarmament. I. Title.
U264.R49 2010 327.1′747—dc22 2010003901
v3.0
The Twilight of the Bombs Page 48
