The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear MasterMind
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In The Bomb in My Garden, Dr. Obeidi reveals how he circumvented the international safeguards specifically intended to bar developing nations from obtaining the knowledge and materials needed to build nuclear weapons. He recounts his many "shopping trips" abroad, during which he inveigled, bribed, and cajoled scientists and engineers at companies throughout the United States and Europe into assisting him. And he details the complex system of front companies and financial institutions he used to pull it all off.
Dr. Obeidi also provides an intimate portrait of unrealized promise and a nation's decline into madness. In relating his transformation from an idealistic young engineer into a tyrant's reluctant cat's-paw, Dr. Obeidi offers a rare glimpse into the workings of Saddam's inner circle. In chilling detail, he describes the fever dream of intimidation, paranoia, and absurd demands that characterized his years under the thumb of Saddam's sociopathic son-in-law Hussein Kamel. And he describes the bittersweet sense of triumph he and his team experienced on achieving in a matter of months what, by all objective standards, was a technical near-impossibility.
Written with the pace and drama of a spy thriller, this eye-opening account will serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. At the same time, it provides a powerful reminder of how what is best in a nation and its citizens can become hopelessly perverted when the reins of power are left too long in the hands of self-serving and unscrupulous leaders.
Publisher: Wiley (TP)
Published: 09/01/2004
Pages: 242
Weight: 1.06lbs
Size: 9.52h x 6.18w x 0.92d
ISBN: 9780471679653
Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/20/2004 pg. 58
People Weekly 10/01/2004 pg. 58
New York Times 10/31/2004 pg. 21
About the Author
MAHDI OBEIDI oversaw Saddam's top-secret centrifuge program and later became director-general of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization. The few remaining components and plans for the uranium enriching centrifuge that he voluntarily turned over to the United States during the war still represent the largest collection of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
KURT PITZER began the Iraq war embedded with the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division and jumped his embed when Baghdad fell. He met Obeidi there and helped him turn his secrets over to the United States. A journalist with more than a decade's experience, he has reported from the Balkans, the Middle East, and Afghanistan for the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and numerous magazines.