W. Langewiesche, The atomic bazaar: the rise of atomic poor

W. Langewiesche, The atomic bazaar: the rise of atomic poor, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, ISBN 0-374-10678-2

Throughout the 90s, “The New York Times” and WSJ entertained their readers by stories that in Russia one can buy nuclear bombs on the flea markets and that generally, the Russians are the source of all evil on this planet. By the new millennium the readers of respectable newspapers got bored and the torch was passed to others, such as this “Vanity Fair” columnist. His interviews with unnamed “experts” contain such technical absurdities and his description of Russian nuclear facility is so generic a picture of a provincial Russian town in the Western press that I have little doubt that his main (if not the only) interlocutors were drug-addled members of the Moscow press core and their prostitute friends. Or he could have lifted the descriptions from tabloid web sites sitting pretty in his upscale NYC or LA condo.

To be completely fair I must remind the reader that the only WMD arsenal which leaked was the US biological weapons research complex. This resulted in the “anthrax scare” and the death of one tabloid journalist.