Popular Science Review - How to Build a Nuclear Bomb

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Review - How to Build a Nuclear Bomb - Frank Barnaby

Just in case the title isn't provocative enough, the subtitle goes on "and other weapons of mass destruction". If you take this literally, it is going to be a bit of a let-down. This book is not a "how-to" guide to constructing WMDs (which is just as well). Nor, as the catchy title suggests, is it a flip tour of the megadeath world. Instead it is a sober (occasionally too sober) guide to just what the different weapons of mass destruction are, how they work, where they come from and how terrorist groups might obtain and deploy them.

Inevitably it makes uncomfortable reading. Anyone who lives in central London, for instance, should be chilled at the sight of a map showing the range of thermal, blast and radioactive deaths from a 1 kilotonne bomb set off in Trafalgar Square - and it's not that encouraging to learn that a critical mass of plutonium is smaller than an orange, or that any terrorist group worth its salt should be able to assemble a chemical or biological weapon. Though there's a chapter on "what can counter-terrorism do", the grim message remains that it's likely to happen sometime, somewhere.

The information in this book opens a nightmare picture of possible horror - and it's certainly an effective book, but we are left asking in the end, what is it for? What does the book actually do, apart from scare the reader half to death? Part of the grim message seems to be that there's nothing we can do about the chemical and biological threat. The author does hold out the hope that nuclear proliferation could be stopped - but only in the unlikely event of countries like the US giving up their weapons. And the fact remains, even if production stopped today, there's plenty of plutonium and other nasties out there that could still fall into the wrong hands.

This, then, combined with a rather pedestrian writing style that makes it possible to believe occasionally that you are reading a government document, is why this book only gets three stars. It is truly frightening reading, it puts a better perspective on just what would happen in the event of a terrorist WMD attack - but in the end there is nothing you can do about it. Not a thing. Shall we talk about something else...

Only in paperback

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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