Much of The Atomic Bazaar deals with the slippery political realities of the nuclear underworld. It pays close attention to Pakistan — an illustration of the "nuclear poor" in the book's subtitle — as a country where pro forma deniability is a superficial goal and nuclear empowerment a real one. This leads to the exemplary career of Khan (in a chapter called "The Wrath of Khan") and the high level of flamboyance at which he operated, until the Musharraf government found it expedient to silence him in 2004. He now lives under house arrest in a state of despondency, according to the book.
Even if "Khan's rapid success came as a particular shock because it so quickly transformed this runt called Pakistan into something like a runt with a gun," it still had a disproportionately daunting effect.
"Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now," Langewiesche writes of events in 1991, "the US was aware not only of Khan's peddling of nuclear wares to Iran, but also of the likely involvement of the army and government of Pakistan." And the US' onetime leverage of a formidable nuclear arms supply became a liability in dealing with smaller countries seeking nuclear leverage of their own. Now, he suggests, such countries could readily spawn characters like Khan, who "did not create his nuclear-weapons network so much as discover it as a condition of the modern world."
The fourth section of The Atomic Bazaar, called The Point of No Return, is devoted to an American journalist, Mark Hibbs, who, according to Langewiesche, "is largely unknown to the public, but must rank as one of the greatest reporters at work in the world today."
Hibbs writes impenetrably technical stories for the small, elite publications Nucleonics Week and NuclearFuel. And he is uncommonly well equipped to fill in the blanks in the history of nuclear proliferation. Hibbs operates deductively, tracks the movements of fuel and centrifuge components, draws the obvious conclusions and operates as a kind of unmuzzled spy. His vigilance may not be glamorous, but it is vitally important, according to The Atomic Bazaar.
It is only with eyes wide open that we can fathom the workings of this new nuclear world.
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