Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, offers an uneven exposé on the “illicit trade in nuclear technology” and the threats it poses to American security. Following in the traces of such earlier investigations as Gordon Correra's Shopping for Bombs
(2006), Albright details how the “convergence of easy money and weak [export] controls on the sale of high tech equipment created a perfect storm” that was easily exploited by North Korea and such rogue proliferators as A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, who established a “transnational network of smugglers” to sell nuclear weapons capabilities to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Albright also examines the efforts of al-Qaeda to obtain nuclear weapons and the cat-and-mouse game between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency over that nation's nuclear ambitions. While acknowledging that nuclear proliferation is “difficult to detect and stop,” the author cautions against fatalism—“a deadly foe”—but the turgid prose and esoteric nuclear tutorials slow the narrative and likely will tax the understanding, if not patience, of lay readers. (Mar.)
