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Product Description
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the cold war may have come to an end. But the deadly Soviet nuclear arsenal--thousands of warheads and hundreds of tons of plutonium--continues to sit virtually unguarded, presenting the world with a new and even more terrifying nuclear threat. And it's not just criminals, extremists, or terrorists who are now in a position to place us all at risk.
It is also Russia's high military command, who see their colleagues in other departments making millions off the privatization of industry; and it's the officers in charge of underguarded weapons stockpiles, unable to compete with the post-Communist new rich; and it's the very guards manning the night watch, whose bellies ache from hunger. . .
From the vaults of the National Security Council to the headquarters of the mysterious Twelfth Department in the Russian Ministry of Defense, veteran journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn take the reader on a tour of deadly potentialities: couriers crossing Central Europe with suitcases full of materials more lethal than any virus; a Siberian warehouse littered with the raw material of twenty-three thousand Hiroshimas; the fanatical terrorist who has already built one radioactive bomb. Then it is revealed how U.S. intelligence has realized with horror that among those involved in the business of nuclear smuggling is an organization born out of the old KGB, headed by a man described by one high-ranking official as "the most dangerous man in the world."
Based on firsthand reporting, classified documents, and the personal stories of the men and women on the front lines, One Point Safe makes it frighteningly clear that we're nowhere near as safe as we'd like to think.
Amazon.com Review
So you thought that the end of the Cold War erased the threat of nuclear annihilation? Think again; according to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, authors of One Point Safe, the world is a more dangerous place than ever. In 1993, in the Ural Mountains, two nuclear warheads disappeared from a weapons plant, and it took three days for officials to notice; in Moscow, more than 80 small bombs are missing from a nuclear arsenal. Who has these weapons? How did they get them? What is the West is doing about it? These questions are at the heart of the Cockburns' story, a chilling tale of the Russian mafia, international terrorists, and a small, heroic band of Washington bureaucrats struggling to make the West come to terms with the threat it faces.
One Point Safe often reads like a thriller, filled with hair-raising tales of nuclear thefts dating back more than 20 years. Descriptions of the 1994 U.S. effort to document the presence of nuclear components in Iraq is particularly vivid, while the Cockburns' behind-the-scenes tour of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's top-secret world is eye-opening, to say the least.
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