Deception Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons

"In President George W. Bush's State of the Union address in 2002, he pinpointed three nuclear hot spots as threats to the free world: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. What he did not admit was America's role in facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons to these "axis of evil" powers and the critical part played by a key U.S. ally: the Pakistan military government and its front man, the nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan." "In a masterful investigation, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark reveal the disastrous ideological short-sightedness that has informed American policy toward Pakistan over the last thirty years, enabling the nuclear scandal to evolve. Although seen as a crucial buffer state and ally - first against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, now in the "war on terror" - Pakistan instead betrayed the West, building a vast nuclear arsenal in large part with U.S. aid money and selling the technology to countries hostile to the West, while more recently giving shelter to the resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda." "Deception is the most complete account of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear network as it has extended from Islamabad around the world, and chronicles how Khan's operation, and his ultimate fall from grace, have been part of a much larger deceit. As Levy and Scott-Clark relate, every American administration from Jimmy Carter's to George W. Bush's has condoned Pakistan's nuclear activity - rewriting and destroying evidence provided by U.S. and Western intelligence agencies; lying to Congress and the American people about Pakistan's intentions and capability so that U.S. aid to Pakistan, prohibited to countries illicitly holding nuclear weapons, could be maintained; secretly supplying components and equipment to Pakistan in the full knowledge that they could be used in a nuclear program; even tipping off the Pakistani government about criminal probes into its nuclear program by U.S. agencies." "Deception puts our current standoffs with Iran and North Korea, and the quagmire in Iraq, in a startling new perspective, revealing that the lies about WMD in Iraq could only succeed if the truth about Pakistan was suppressed. And it charts how Pakistan has gone from being an ally to a rogue nation at the epicenter of world instability, and how by papering over the root cause of the nuclear crises that are upon us, the United States has helped usher in a new age of nuclear terror." "Based on hundreds of interviews over the past decade in the United States, Pakistan, India, Israel and the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Deception is a masterwork of reportage and dramatic storytelling by two of the world's most resourceful investigative journalists. Urgently important, and offering deep insight into the ways our foreign policy is formulated, it should stimulate debate and command a reexamination of our national priorities."--BOOK JACKET.Levy, Adrian is the author of 'Deception Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons', published 2007 under ISBN 9780802715548 and ISBN 0802715540.