Book Review: ‘Nuclear Iran’ by Jeremy Bernstein

WSJ

Googling the phrase “Iranian nuclear program” yields more than three million hits. Those reflect millions of news articles, think-tank reports, op-eds, government assessments, and other bits of professional and amateur punditry. But how many of the people producing this mountain of copy actually understand what nuclear fission is, or how centrifuges work? I mean, really understand.

Jeremy Bernstein doesn’t pose it quite so bluntly, but that’s the question that prompted him to write “Nuclear Iran.” Mr. Bernstein, a theoretical physicist and former New Yorker staff writer, heard an Israeli general say in a 2009 television interview that the Jewish state’s red line would be crossed if the regime in Tehran acquires the “knowledge” to build an atomic bomb. How far away from creating fissile material was Iran, he wondered, but also: “How would one learn about another country’s state of ‘knowledge?’ ” It seemed that the general reader—not to mention policy makers—could use a book that briefly explains the science behind Iranian nukes.

Mr. Bernstein’s verdict: If the Iranians are “left to their own devices, within a fairly short time—a few months, say—they could produce enough fissile material for one or two nuclear weapons.” It’s a frightening, if justified, conclusion.

“Nuclear Iran” is part scientific primer, part history with a dash of policy analysis. Here the reader can come to grips—as best as we nonscientific souls can—with the math behind the concept of critical mass in nuclear fission. There he offers a brief but illuminating portrait of Gernot Zippe, the eccentric Austrian-German engineer, captured by the Soviets during World War II, who pioneered the centrifuge model later sold by the Pakistani proliferator A.Q. Khan to North Korea and Iran. Mr. Bernstein also details the history of the Iranian nuclear program, beginning with its origins under the Shah. Letting the facts speak for themselves, Mr. Bernstein makes it very hard to maintain that the mullahs have peaceful intentions.

Despite the author’s best efforts, the math and physics in “Nuclear Iran” are hard. At other points, I wished I could stop Mr. Bernstein and beg him to slow down or to hold off on that diversion about physicist Niels Bohr’s governess. But then I stopped worrying and loved the book. A reader doesn’t need to master every equation to get the conceptual gist, and anyone who publicly opines about Iran would do well to spend an afternoon learning from Jeremy Bernstein.