Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea

by Jeffrey T. Richelson

Spying on the Bomb is an "engrossing" ( Wall Street Journal ) global history of the American-led effort to spy on every nation with nuclear ambitions. A global history of U.S. nuclear espionage from its World War II origins to twenty-first century threats from rogue states. For more than sixty years, the United States has monitored friends and foes who seek to develop the ultimate weapon. Since 1952 the nuclear club has grown to at least nine nations, while others are making serious attempts to join. Each chapter of Spying on the Bomb chronologically focuses on the nuclear activities of one or more countries, intermingling what the United States believed was happening with accounts of what actually occurred in each country's laboratories, test sites, and decision-making councils. Jeffrey T. Richelson weaves recently declassified documents into his interviews with the scientists and spies involved in the nuclear espionage. Spying on the Bomb reveals new information about U.S. intelligence work on the Soviet/Russian, French, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, and South African nuclear programs; on the attempts to solve the mysterious Vela Incident; and on current efforts to uncover the nuclear secrets of Iran and North Korea. The book also includes spy satellite photographs never before extracted from the national archives. 46 photographs; 4 maps

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Espionage, Military Fiction

768 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2006

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

nothing if not thorough. i kinda suspected the USA intelligence game was almost entirely satellites + SIGINT + defectors, that we rarely built out successful networks (minus Oleg Pinkovsky), and this certainly reinforced that notion, though i doubt Richelson could reveal much in the way of HUMINT ops if they did exist. makes the whole Iraq thing look a bit less stupid and hubristic and spastic, though in no way free of spasms nor hubris nor the stupe.

[Tech Historian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but not great.

What a frustrating book. First the good news, it is a marvelous history and worth the read. Richelson is the master in collecting data. He did it before on his books on the CIA and NSA and he does it again here.

However, much like his previous books, Richelson lacks the ability to pull the pieces into a coherent whole. (I'd like to generously attribute that to the author having too much classified knowledge.) And without the context (that is surely somewhere in his notes) the general reader is unable to do it for him.

In the 544 pages of the book there wasn't a single coherent description of the components of a weapons complex. It would have been helpful to start with the U.S. Manhattan Project and describe and diagram what were the key facilities necessary for a Plutonium weapon. How were these facilities different for a U-235 weapon? Why do we and other countries choose both? Why use electromagnetic separation versus thermal, etc. Then a description of how each of the other countries chose their paths would have been easy to understand. This didn't have to be a huge section of the book, 10 pages would have sufficed, but it would have turned the mind-numbing laundry list of facts into a coherent story.

In the same vein, what detection methods were developed in WWII (he mentions a few) and how had these methods grown more sophisticated over the years. No one single section summarizes the suite of these tools. You literally have to go through the book and make your own notes to realize that some means of verification literally are mentioned once, and then disappear. Did we really stop using them or are they now codeword classified?

Again, worth reading but could have been great rather than good.

[Dwayne Freedom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Details U. S. Efforts to Spy on all new comers the Nuclear Weapons Party

Jeffrey Richelson does a great job of researching the details behind all the clandestine nuclear detonations in the atmosphere, including the Vela Incident where he was given misleading information by the IC on the Jumpseat Satellite; a SIGINT satellite not an IMINT satellite. This spacecraft did have a bhangmeter on it, but was useless for the Vela Incident due to its Molniya orbit and lack of coverage of the Southern Hemisphere.

[LaShana Claude]

Engineers-Water Treatment Operators- Libyans- New Yorkers (circa 2009)
Stop using blanket statements and putting them in groups.
People are hurting especially foreign militant groups.

I used to think engineering was impossible but we're are on the cusp of a new dream that doesn't exclude but includes King as a member of one family under one God. Pray for the Police, the polite and the unpolite while justice reins and is distributed with divisiveness in mind.

[Jennifer Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book on intelligence efforts around nuclear development. It can be easy to get lost in the details.

[Ayushman · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only criticism would be that this book needed to be as analytical as it was descriptive; and that suffers from the (inevitable) secrecy around these matters.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really two books in one. The first is the story of the nuclear programs of nations other than the United States and Great Britain: those of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, France, India, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan, Pakistan, Libya, North Korea and Iran. In the 1940s, the Bomb was a miracle of technology; it was beyond the reach of even such a technological leader as Germany; nowadays, even a country not known for its technological prowess like Libya can start building one. The second is the story of the United States' intelligence and reaction. In 1944, an American baseball player who was also an OSS spy went to a lecture Werner Heisenberg gave in Zurich; he was under the instructions to find out whether the Germans were close to building an atomic bomb, and if they were, shoot Heisenberg; he found out that they weren't, so he didn't. President Herbert Hoover's main occupation was a mining engineer; he has worked in the Kyshtym area in the Urals, where four decades later the Soviets built a plutonium production plant; the CIA made use of his papers, which had a map of the area. American nuclear intelligence gathering relied on technology a great deal: seismographs, underwater acoustic sensors, aircraft fitted with filters to capture nuclear fallout, overflights first by the Lockheed U-2 (which was even launched from an aircraft carrier twice to observe a nuclear test range in the French Polynesia) and later by satellites. The big question was and still is, how to interpret this data. On September 22, 1979 a satellite monitoring nuclear tests showed a double flash characteristic of a nuclear explosion somewhere over either the South Atlantic or the Indian Ocean; we do not know to this day, whether this was a nuclear test by South Africa, Israel, both, a bug in the satellite, or a meteoriod striking its sensors. In 2001, Iraq ordered 60,000 aluminum tubes from China; which the CIA intercepted; were the tubes to be used in uranium enrichment centrifuges, or as rocket artillery shells? A debate between different U.S. government agencies raged in 2002; on February 5, 2003 the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the tubes in a speech before the United Nations Security Council as proof of Iraq trying to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that Powell was wrong: the tubes were to be used in rocket artillery. On December 12, 2002 George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, said that the case of Iraq pursuing weapons of mass destruction was "slam dunk"; in fact, it was anything but. Whatever the United States may do, the genie is out of the bottle, and it is hard if not outright impossible to shove it back it.

[Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an astoundingly good book on how American intelligence works, as applied to one of the most important problems it's been asked to address. Updated with more information in this edition, it is a carefully researched review of 60 years of intelligence collection and analysis about other countries' work on nuclear weapons.

Richeson has made a career of getting significant information declassified as part of a research program on national security. And yet he is not a sensationalist, and he doesn't take the perspective that it was somehow wrong that these things were done in secret at the time. Instead he provides context of what was done when, and how the US spent it's financial and intellectual capital on a problem that mattered (and arguably still does).

I have met some of the people he covers in the book, and have been aware of some of the work he describes. He does a particularly good job of covering the Chinese bomb program, and of addressing the Vela incident of 1979.

This is a book that was worth reading twice.

[Adam DeConinck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Officially on the "abandoned" list, at least in terms of reading it all in a row. Very interesting but too dense for me to treat it like a regular nonfiction read. Will probably go back to it from time to time for specific interesting things.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed overview of the history of nuclear weapon proliferation. Some chapters jumped around between multiple countries and disparate dates (especially for some of the smaller programs), which made it difficult to read sometimes.

[Zack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative, but not written in a very engaging manner.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in nuclear proliferation.

[Lucas Arnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as part of an internship in nuclear history. Well-written with close attention to information sourcing, but known to contain inaccuracies on an inherently secretive issue.