William Langewiesche

In the nuclear age, arms are the ultimate commodity. And now they are easier and cheaper to acquire and make than ever before - which means that for poor nations or non-state terror groups, weapons of mass destruction are up for grabs. William Langewiesche looks at how nuclear weapons have gone wholesale. He visits the smuggling routes in Turkey and closed Russian 'nuclear cities' where highly enriched uranium is on sale. He meets technicians, smugglers and spies. And he tells the extraordinary story of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist who stole plans to build Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

Hiroshima was destroyed in a flash by a bomb dropped from a propeller-driven B-29 of the U.S. Army Air Corps, on the warm morning of Monday, August 6, 1945. The bomb was not chemical, as bombs until then had been, but atomic, designed to release the energies that Einstein had described. It was a simple cannon-type device of the sort that today any number of people could build in a garage. It was bulbous and black, about ten feet long, and weighed ninety-seven hundred pounds. It fell nose-down for forty-three seconds and, for maximum effect, never hit the ground. One thousand nine hundred feet above the city it fired a dull gray plug of highly enriched uranium down a steel tube into a receiving lump of the same refined material, creating a combined uranium mass of 133 pounds. In relation to its surface area, that mass was more than enough to achieve 'criticality' and allow for an uncontrollable chain of fission reactions, during which subatomic particles called neutrons collided with uranium nuclei, releasing further neutrons, which collided with other nuclei, in a blossoming process of self-destruction. The reactions could be sustained for just a millisecond, and they fully exploited less than two pounds of the uranium atoms before the resulting heat forced a halt to the process through expansion. Uranium is one of the heaviest elements on earth, almost twice as heavy as lead, and two pounds of it amounts to only about three tablespoonfuls. Nonetheless the release of energy over Hiroshima yielded a force equivalent to fifteen thousand tons (fifteen kilotons) of TNT achieved temperatures higher than the sun's, and emitted light-speed pulses of lethal radiation. More than 150,000 people died.

AMERICAN GROUND - one of the most controversial pieces of 9/11 publishing - is the result of Langewiesche''s nine months in the Dantesque world of Ground Zero. With ''truth, unclouded by sentiment'' (NEW YORK TIMES), he documented the lives of the engineers, labourers, rescue workers and city officials as they brought order to a land of chaos, anatomising the physical details of the collapse and revealing the contests of politics and personality that were its aftershock.

Un apasionante reportaje sobre la anarquía en las tres cuartas partes del mundo. En este tenso y apasionante reportaje, William Langewiesche otea un horizonte en el que encuentra anarquía, caos y delincuencia. Cuarenta y tres mil buques gigantescos surcan las aguas entre incontables barcos que transportan, sin apenas regulacion, las materias primas y los productos que forman parte de nuestra vida, la mayoria sin lealtad a ninguna bandera y cambiando identidad y nacionalidad a voluntad. Naufragios y contaminacion, la dura vida de muchas tripulaciones casi esclavizadas, el aumento de una moderna version de la pirateria o la nueva forma maritima de terrorismo mundial son algunos de los temas del libro.