Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies »

David Albright is the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and was its founder. He has been quoted over 150 times in the New York Times and Washington Post and has appeared over 200 times on network television news shows, including Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Nightline, NBC Nightly News, and The Lehrer Report. He is one of the world's most respected and sought-out specialists on nuclear proliferation. He lives in Alexandria, VA.

With the revelation of Iran s secret uranium enrichment facilities, North Korea s brazen testing of missiles and nuclear weapons, and nuclear-endowed Pakistan s descent into instability, the urgency of the nuclear proliferation problem has never been greater. Based on his extensive experience in tracking the illicit nuclear trade as one of the world s foremost proliferation experts, in Peddling Peril David Albright offers a harrowing narrative of the frighteningly large cracks through which nuclear weapons traffickers such as Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan continue to slip.

Six years after the arrest of Khan, the networks he established continue to thrive, with black markets sprouting up across the globe. The dramatic takedown of the leader of the world s largest and most perilous smuggling network was originally considered a model of savvy detection by intelligence and enforcement agencies, including the CIA and MI6. But, as Albright chronicles, the prosecutions of traffickers that were much anticipated have not come to pass, and Khan himself was released from house arrest in February 2009.

Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea all use state sponsored smuggling networks that easily bypass export regulations and avoid detection. Albright illuminates how these networks have learned many ways to trick suppliers across the globe, including many in the United States, into selling them vital parts, and why, despite the fact that, since 2007, several dozen companies have been indicted with some pleading guilty for suspicion of participating in illicit trade, very few prosecutions have been achieved.

Peddling Peril charts the dealings of several of these companies. Albright also reports on the hopeful story of the German company Leybold s decision to become an industry watchdog, and shows how this story reveals just how effective corporate monitoring and government cooperation would be if more serious efforts were made. Concluding with a detailed plan for clamping down tightly on the illicit trade, Albright shows the way forward in the vital mission of freeing the world of this terrifying menace.

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Introduction 1

1 Out of the Cold 13

2 Pakistan Gets the Bomb 29

3 It's Just Business 52

4 Khan's First Customers - Iran and Iraq 70

5 Finding a New Hideout - South Africa 100

6 Libya: A Major Sale at Last 116

7 North Korea 154

8 Al Qaeda's Bomb 169

9 Uncovering Iran's Illicit Gas Centrifuge Program 185

10 Busting the Khan Network 206

11 Suppliers: First Line of Defense 227

12 Illicit Nuclear Trade Today and the Way Forward 244

Notes 255

Acknowledgments 281

Index 285