What do you think?
Rate this book
Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon
Saddam's Bombmaker is the true saga of one man's journey through the circles of hell. Educated at MIT and Florida State University, dedicated to a life of peaceful teaching in America, Iraqi scientist Dr. Khidhir Hamza relates how Saddam's regime ordered him home, seduced him into a pampered life as an atomic energy official, and forced him to design a bomb. The price of refusal was torture. With the cynical help of US, French, German, and British suppliers and experts, he secretly developed Baghdad's nuclear bomb and kept it hidden from UN inspectors after the Gulf War. The tale of his escape, his first bungled contact with CIA agents, and his flight abroad will keep listeners riveted toward a climax worthy of a well-crafted spy thriller.
Audio CD
First published November 1, 2000
4 people are currently reading
70 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 6, 2013
As the Wikipedia entry on Khidhir Hamza correctly points out:
"since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most, if not all of his information on the Nuclear Weapons program have been widely discredited, and former UNSCOM inspectors insist that he was never part of the Nuclear Program at all."
This book is worse than rubbish. It is made-up rubbish.
"since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most, if not all of his information on the Nuclear Weapons program have been widely discredited, and former UNSCOM inspectors insist that he was never part of the Nuclear Program at all."
This book is worse than rubbish. It is made-up rubbish.
November 29, 2017
I read this back in 2003 and really really enjoyed it. With recent info out now stating there was more fiction than fact, I still found it entertaining. I don't doubt that some of the horror and fear Iraqis felt during his reign were very real. As for Hamza's story, not too sure. Either way I still feel that there is something to take from the book.
dnf
February 16, 2024stupid stupid stupid it's my own fault for being insufficiently educated on the Iraq War going into this but I thought this was nonfiction (it is marketed as nonfiction!!) (and I am a sheep!!) so anyways I come to find out the author grossly exaggerated and even falsified the contents so the book is essentially a fictionalization BUT IT WAS USED TO JUSTIFY the United States's invasion of Iraq (ugh if I remembered anything from APUSH then maybe I would have known to be skeptical of this book before starting it) anyways stupid stupid stupid it feels sacrilegious to finish reading this idc how good the storytelling is
September 13, 2017
This book is not worth reading, but it is a curious footnote in history in and of itself for the misinformation it spread about Saddams "Weapons of Mass Destruction" when the book was released in 2001, two years before the Invasion of Iraq. At the time, this book was widely read by both the public and government officials as an inside look at Saddams weapons program. I'll leave this quote from Scott Ritter, US nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq:
"We seized the entire records of the Iraqi nuclear program, especially the administrative records. We got a name of everybody, where they worked, what they did, and the top of the list, Saddam's 'Bombmaker' was a man named Jafar Dhia Jafar, not Khidir Hamza, and if you go down the list of the senior administrative personnel you will not find Hamza's name in there. In fact, we didn't find his name at all. Because in 1990, he didn't work for the Iraqi Nuclear Program. He had no knowledge of it because he worked as a kickback specialist for Hussein Kamel in the Presidential Palace.
He goes into northern Iraq and meets up with Ahmad Chalabi. He walks in and says, "I'm Saddam's 'Bombmaker'". So they call the CIA and they say, "we know who you are, you're not Saddam's 'Bombmaker', go sell your story to someone else." And he was released, he was rejected by all intelligence services at the time, he's a fraud.
And here we are, someone who the CIA knows is a fraud, the US Government knows is a fraud, is allowed to sit in front of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and give testimony as an expert witness. I got a problem with that, I got a problem with the American media, and I've told them over and over and over again that this man is a documentable fraud, a fake, and yet they allow him to go on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and testify as if he actually knows what he is talking about."
"We seized the entire records of the Iraqi nuclear program, especially the administrative records. We got a name of everybody, where they worked, what they did, and the top of the list, Saddam's 'Bombmaker' was a man named Jafar Dhia Jafar, not Khidir Hamza, and if you go down the list of the senior administrative personnel you will not find Hamza's name in there. In fact, we didn't find his name at all. Because in 1990, he didn't work for the Iraqi Nuclear Program. He had no knowledge of it because he worked as a kickback specialist for Hussein Kamel in the Presidential Palace.
He goes into northern Iraq and meets up with Ahmad Chalabi. He walks in and says, "I'm Saddam's 'Bombmaker'". So they call the CIA and they say, "we know who you are, you're not Saddam's 'Bombmaker', go sell your story to someone else." And he was released, he was rejected by all intelligence services at the time, he's a fraud.
And here we are, someone who the CIA knows is a fraud, the US Government knows is a fraud, is allowed to sit in front of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and give testimony as an expert witness. I got a problem with that, I got a problem with the American media, and I've told them over and over and over again that this man is a documentable fraud, a fake, and yet they allow him to go on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and testify as if he actually knows what he is talking about."
November 27, 2007
Good thing we got rid of him. This is an account by the guy in Iraq who was in charge of developing nuclear weapons. How the general public doesn't know this guy or this story exists is beyond me.
December 14, 2016
While I very much enjoyed the read, I'm not too sure what to make of this whole book. The historic cornerstones seem to be authentic, but apparently the role of the author in the Iraqi nuclear program is vastly exaggerated. It can be easily verified that the Iraqis did purchase a French reactor in the 70's, which was bombed by the Israelis in the early 80's during Operation Opera. This is basically the scheme of the whole book. Known facts are mixed up with the accounts of Khidhir Hamza, which as an outsider are hard to verify. Doing a little bit of research it seems that he is vastly exaggerating his role and responsibilities and his accounts of the program are rejected by all major intelligence services, so all of this should probably be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Nevertheless it is written and structured in a very good way, and it is a fun read. I think the most important lesson I've learned from this book is, that we should focus on the people whenever dealing with nuclear proliferation. This was true when the Soviet union fell apart, and this is also true with the Iraqi program.
I guess intelligence services all around the world (but especially the Mossad) understand this also (and have been for a long time). While there are technical means to prevent Iran from getting the atomic bomb (e.g. Stuxnet), there are also all sorts of assassinations of nuclear scientists going on. It's not mentioned in the mainstream media, but there is a dedicated Wikipedia page with all sorts of references. I'm really surprised that all of this is going on, and nobody of importance gives a shit about it. At least I haven't heard about a debate, which discusses whether it is morally acceptable to kill people (without a trial, etc.) based on the assumption that they work on a program to attain a bomb that the killing party already has.
Nevertheless it is written and structured in a very good way, and it is a fun read. I think the most important lesson I've learned from this book is, that we should focus on the people whenever dealing with nuclear proliferation. This was true when the Soviet union fell apart, and this is also true with the Iraqi program.
I guess intelligence services all around the world (but especially the Mossad) understand this also (and have been for a long time). While there are technical means to prevent Iran from getting the atomic bomb (e.g. Stuxnet), there are also all sorts of assassinations of nuclear scientists going on. It's not mentioned in the mainstream media, but there is a dedicated Wikipedia page with all sorts of references. I'm really surprised that all of this is going on, and nobody of importance gives a shit about it. At least I haven't heard about a debate, which discusses whether it is morally acceptable to kill people (without a trial, etc.) based on the assumption that they work on a program to attain a bomb that the killing party already has.
May 28, 2023
I'm hoping everyone realizes by this point and everything we know about the Iraq War that this book is a work of fiction by a disavowed and proven liar.
Long before this book was published, it was proven and common knowledge that the Iraqi nuclear program had been inactive since the 1991 Gulf War and defectors like Hussein Kamel proved that. We know especially after 2003 that everything that Khidhir Hamza has said is false. He was a mid-level nuclear scientist, not the head of the nuclear weapons program he lied about being, not involved with experiments and was kicked out of his role for corruption and retired later in 1990. Before the Iraq War, his colleagues both from Iraq including Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri and in the US including nuclear arms expert David Albright have outed him as a fraud. Like most books by Iraqi dissidents and self-proclaimed insiders taking advantage to cash in during the Iraq War era and its lead-up in the late 90s and 2000s, and some to this day, this book is very misleading and naive readers should be warned to not be deceived by it.
Long before this book was published, it was proven and common knowledge that the Iraqi nuclear program had been inactive since the 1991 Gulf War and defectors like Hussein Kamel proved that. We know especially after 2003 that everything that Khidhir Hamza has said is false. He was a mid-level nuclear scientist, not the head of the nuclear weapons program he lied about being, not involved with experiments and was kicked out of his role for corruption and retired later in 1990. Before the Iraq War, his colleagues both from Iraq including Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri and in the US including nuclear arms expert David Albright have outed him as a fraud. Like most books by Iraqi dissidents and self-proclaimed insiders taking advantage to cash in during the Iraq War era and its lead-up in the late 90s and 2000s, and some to this day, this book is very misleading and naive readers should be warned to not be deceived by it.
October 30, 2020
I read /Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon/, by Dr. Khidir Hamzi.
https://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/...
Having already recently read /The Devil’s Double/ by Latif Yahia, I had already been transported to the world of Saddam’s Iraq before and during the invasion of Kuwait, with riches for a select few and torture and death for many others:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ma...
This book is another fascinating story of someone privileged on the inside who eventually managed to escape alive to tell the tale. There are several other stories being told simultaneously in /Saddam’s Bombmaker/. For example, Dr. Hamzi goes into significant detail on Iraq’s nuclear-bomb-making ambitions and how Iraq ultimately did make one nuclear bomb, along with chemical and biological weapons. Luckily, Saddam and Iraq could not deploy the former.
https://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/...
Having already recently read /The Devil’s Double/ by Latif Yahia, I had already been transported to the world of Saddam’s Iraq before and during the invasion of Kuwait, with riches for a select few and torture and death for many others:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ma...
This book is another fascinating story of someone privileged on the inside who eventually managed to escape alive to tell the tale. There are several other stories being told simultaneously in /Saddam’s Bombmaker/. For example, Dr. Hamzi goes into significant detail on Iraq’s nuclear-bomb-making ambitions and how Iraq ultimately did make one nuclear bomb, along with chemical and biological weapons. Luckily, Saddam and Iraq could not deploy the former.
October 4, 2013
Dr. Hamza is an Iraqi who was educated at M.I.T. as a nuclear physicist, before ending up as an instructor at a small college. But it wasn't long before Saddam Hussein recruited him to return to Iraq and ultimately head up his program to build nuclear weapons.
This book reads like a spy thriller, but with the reader's constant awareness that it is a true story. Hamza describes life under Saddam's regime and the descriptions of Saddam's brutalities is chilling.
Equally chilling is the ease with which Hamza and his staff were able to buy parts and technology for their nuclear program. Ultimately, Hamza makes the case that a cache of nuclear weapons can easily be rebuilt by a rogue state--and quickly, provided that they retain the scientists who understand the technology. He makes a case for going after the people with technological skills in various rogue states and bringing them back to the U.S.
This book reads like a spy thriller, but with the reader's constant awareness that it is a true story. Hamza describes life under Saddam's regime and the descriptions of Saddam's brutalities is chilling.
Equally chilling is the ease with which Hamza and his staff were able to buy parts and technology for their nuclear program. Ultimately, Hamza makes the case that a cache of nuclear weapons can easily be rebuilt by a rogue state--and quickly, provided that they retain the scientists who understand the technology. He makes a case for going after the people with technological skills in various rogue states and bringing them back to the U.S.
June 16, 2007
Higher-up in Saddam's Iraq describes Saddam's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Books like this were used to present the case for the Iraq War. Even when reading this book well before the plans for the invasion were announced, I found a lot of the perceived "threat" to be pretty minimal. At one point the author describes how much of the Iraq nuclear program was developed after a group of Iraqi scientists spent a couple of days at the science library at some elite school in the East and made photocopies of things they thought were interesting. Good ol' American intelligence system, they are never wrong.
February 27, 2008
I've had this book for a few years and this was my second read of it.
This is an autobiographical account of a scientist who was working on Saddam's nuclear bomb project. It is an interesting inside look at how Saddam's reigime worked. Apparently there has been some doubt cast on the authenticity of the story - particularly whether the author was as involved as he says he was, but it still makes for a good read.
This is an autobiographical account of a scientist who was working on Saddam's nuclear bomb project. It is an interesting inside look at how Saddam's reigime worked. Apparently there has been some doubt cast on the authenticity of the story - particularly whether the author was as involved as he says he was, but it still makes for a good read.
May 14, 2013
This was very well written and (despite a slow biographical start) was extremely fascinating and gripping. I loved the technical aspects of Dr. Hamza's research and development and the political intrigue. Later, the story changed into something more akin to a spy thriller. I really enjoyed this book and the author's honesty.
March 17, 2008
I heard the author speak on NPR and had to read it. Such an interesting first hand view of Saddam Hussein. Reminds me of memoirs written by people who knew Hitler.
October 26, 2009
Saddam Hussein WAS trying to build a nuclear weapon, and he was crazy.
July 3, 2009
Reads like a fiction thriller.
April 25, 2010
Informative
December 19, 2010
An excellent story of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program. I have been to many of the locations and this book brought back many memories.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews