AN EXCITING BOOK

However, a good start on this and related issues is available through a superb book recently published in English, The Atomic Complex¾A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy by Bertrand Goldschmidt.

As its title implies, it is non-technical¾which makes the book more, not less, difficult: it is, for example, more or less assumed that the reader knows why bomb-grade material is comparatively easily made by centrifuge (U 235) or in a research reactor (plutonium), but is beyond reasonable consideration in a power reactor. But that is just about its only drawback. We had no trouble with the places where Goldschmidt takes the French side in its quarrels with the US, for we believe the nonproliferation policy of the US has always been mistaken, and during the Carter era it became indecent. (On the other hand, France took the moral stand only as long as it was being kicked off the ladder; now that it has a foothold, it is just as good at kicking.)

Apart from the main thread, there are many interesting little sidelights: how one Washington bureaucracy insists on all the safeguards in selling fuel to Britain to prevent its diversion to weapons¾which the British buy from another Washington bureaucracy; or how Khrushchev sent instructions to the chief Soviet delegate at the IAEA never to be absent from its meetings, so as to rub in fully the humiliation of Molotov, once Stalins deputy, but now demoted to the deputy's chair behind the Soviet delegate at a little known international agency.

A brilliant book, which we highly recommend in spite of its price¾ $24 for a paperback without a proper subject index. (ANS, 555 N. Kensington Ave, La Grange Park, IL 60525.)