One Point Safe

by Andrew Cockburn, Leslie Cockburn

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.

Genres: History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 1997

About the author

Andrew Cockburn is the Washington Editor of Harper's magazine and the author of many articles and books on national security, including the New York Times Editor's Choice Rumsfeld and The Threat, which destroyed the myth of Soviet military superiority underpinning the Cold War. He is a regular opinion contributor to the Los Angeles Times and has written for, among others, the New York Times, National Geographic and the London Review of Books.

Reviews

[Andrew Donnellan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who was born after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I found this book an eye-opening insight into one of the less-discussed challenges of superpower collapse. One Point Safe is a fairly easy read and very accessible to a lay person such as myself. Even though it's now twenty years old, the issue of nuclear proliferation has come back into public consciousness, and post-9/11, the nature of international terrorism has changed dramatically - the risks of nuclear theft discussed in the book are as important as ever. The book could go further in some areas - most notably, it doesn't really discuss the risks of unlawful nuclear technology/knowledge transfer at all.

Overall a very interesting read.