U.S. Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: From World War II to Iraq [electronic resource].

Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest LLC, 2007-

Access is available to the Yale community.

This collection includes primary sources used by Jeffrey Richelson, one of the world's leading experts on intelligence, as the basis for the widely acclaimed book, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (W.W. Norton, 2006). The book garnered an appearance on the cover of the prestigious New York Review of Books, and was described by Los Alamos physicist Jeremy Bernstein as "fascinating." Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Gabriel Schoenfeld of Commentary magazine called it "an engrossing book" and "an exhaustively researched account."In addition to the once largely inaccessible primary source material Richelson used to write his ground-breaking account, the set also includes many of the U.S. Intelligence Community's products on the world's nuclear, biological, chemical, ballistic missile, and military space programs from World War II to the present. Consisting of over 600 documents and 8,300 pages, this collection is the product of an extensive series of Freedom of Information Act requests and in-depth archival research. The subject of this publication could hardly be more topical in the current extraordinary international environment. Worries about weapons of mass destruction were at the center of U.S. justifications for going to war with Iraq in 2003, and appear to be having a similar effect now with regard to U.S. policy on Iran. But WMD issues extend back many years and across the globe. Fittingly, the scope of this collection covers a broad range of nations with WMD and military space programs in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa, in addition to the Middle East. The specific topics that these reports shed light on include: Cold War intelligence issues such as the missile gap and Soviet deployment of ballistic missiles in the 1960s and beyond; the nature of the Vela incident (the apparent detonation of a nuclear device in the South Atlantic in 1979); U.S. monitoring of nuclear testing; U.S. evaluations of the WMD programs of Israel, Iraq, Libya, and other Middle East nations; the Intelligence Community's assessment of French nuclear programs from the 1950s through the 1960s; analyses of the nuclear programs of China, India, and Pakistan; and U.S. estimates in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s of the prospects of WMD proliferation.

English

December 10, 2008

National Security Archive (U.S.)