Deception

Book Review

Reviewer: Amaan Rasheed
Book Name: Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons
Author: Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clarke
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Walker and Company, New York
Pages: n/a
Price: n/a

This is the yet another scoop by the well-known husband-wife duo, this time about the closely guarded decades old secret nuclear program of one the key country in south-Asia enjoying a great strategic importance (sharing its borders with China, India, Afghanistan, and Iran)and a unique position in the oil-rich Islamic world i.e. the Pakistan.

Mostly based on the numerous interviews by the authors while working with The Guardian and Asian times. This is the most thorough account about how Pakistan which ranked 122^nd in life expectancy 162th in literacy became only the seventh to join the nuclear club.

Divided into not-so-sharp 20 chapters, this book revolves around a physicist with a doctorate in metallurgy with exceptional language skills known all over the world (for good or bad) and revered in Pakistan as the “Father of the Bomb” Dr. A.Q Khan. While working in Holland in 1972 he managed to come across the classified blueprints for a radical new technique which provided a hitherto unknown way of producing nuclear weapons, and eventually did so in eight years against the watchful eyes of IAEA and other nuclear states.

All this when India, Pakistan’s arch-rival had managed to acquire a nuclear bomb -for free from US, Canada and France- Giving Dr. A.Q the unprecedented fame in Pakistan.

this book revolves around a physicist with a doctorate in metallurgy with exceptional language skills known all over the world (for good or bad) and revered in Pakistan as the “Father of the Bomb” Dr. A.Q Khan.

This book is about the deception of the Pakistan to the world about its nuclear program, and how she supported KRL(an organization named after khan ) to orchestrate the “Nuclear bazaar“ and proliferate the doomsday technology among other countries like north-Korea, Iraq, Libya ,Iran etc. and how Pakistan under Zia (General Zia-ul-haq) channelized money meant to fight Russia to its nuclear program.

This work provides the rear insight into the grand deception of the US about how she winked at the incessant intelligence information about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions and in effect facilitated Pakistan to get its nuclear teeth by exploiting her own state department and other agencies, using them to cover the footprints of the Pakistani agents happily and precariously procuring nuclear components all over the world, in quid pro quo Pakistan was to help US in bleeding Russia in Afghanistan.

Though through in details this work with its prosaic features and plain narration style is difficult to go through and mostly reads like a newspaper with hundreds of characters playing in and out making it difficult to follow them, further the narration is unnecessarily dragged to prohibitive 650 pages and some passages feels like the simple copy-paste work from other related accounts.

Overall a “must-have” for anyone interested in matters nuclear.

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