Unclear Physics

Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.

For some years I have been puzzling over the question of why some countries that want nuclear weapons succeed in building them and others don't.... What happened with the failures, Libya and Iraq? A good deal of sporadic reading has long persuaded me that one way or the other both countries had or had acquired sufficient means to pursue a program—in the case of Libya there were financial resources and in the case of Iraq both financial and scientific resources. The Libyans started with almost nothing, but the oil boom enabled them to buy what they needed. Yet both countries had leaders—Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi—whose feelings about these weapons were ambivalent and always secondary to preserving the ideology of the regime. Now there is an excellent new book, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons, by the Norwegian political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, that is the most detailed study of these two programs that I have seen.(New York Review of Books) An insightful account.(Foreign Affairs) Path-breaking.... Braut-Hegghammer makes a major contribution to the burgeoning field of international nuclear history... as well as to the theoretical literature in security and proliferation studies.... A rich harvest of findings that complements and goes beyond that provided by previous studies.... Thoughtful and provocative in its analyses, and sometimes revelatory in its display of new evidence, this is an excellent addition to the literature on proliferation studies and the most authoritative account we have to date of the ill-fated Iraqi and Libyan nuclear programmes.(International Affairs) A remarkable comparative history of the Iraqi and Libyan nuclear weapons programmes.... [Braut-Hegghammer's] account draws on interviews and rare documents to provide the fullest picture currently available of both programmes.... A thorough, well-researched history of two nuclear programmes, a history that is interesting in its own right but also significantly complicates simple theoretical models about regime type and proliferation. It ultimately reminds us that reality is often far more interesting than the stories we make up.(Survival) [An] exhaustively researched and compelling history.... Braut-Hegghammer's work stands as a valuable reminder that sociology trumps technology when it comes to estimating the potential of a clandestine nuclear-weapon program. The culture that animates a nuclear enterprise matters.(The Nonproliferation Review)