Big Bucks, Big Bangs

Chalmers Johnson

• Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea by Jeffrey Richelson
  Norton, 702 pp, £22.99, April 2006, ISBN 0 393 05383 0

Jeffrey Richelson is an expert on the American secret intelligence agencies, particularly on their peculiar devotion to spying without spies – their reliance on aerial or satellite imagery, intercepted communications, seismic and acoustic detection of nuclear bomb explosions, and other esoteric means of surveillance. Richelson’s politics are completely conventional. He sees the ‘West’, led by the United States, as being on the side of good in the world and its efforts to detect nuclear weapons in the hands of its adversaries as ingenious attempts to disarm what George W. Bush would call ‘evil-doers’. Richelson concludes his book by denying that ‘political leaders, including the president, dictated the content of the [National Intelligence] estimates to provide a “pretext for war” [in Iraq] or to “hoodwink” the American public.’ That proposition is not substantiated in this volume.