The Ghost War by Alex Berenson

States and Israel, the eternal enemies of Muslims everywhere. The words spilled from Ahmadinejad’s mouth so quickly that Li’s translator could hardly keep up. Though the Iranians kept the presidential palace frigid, sweat rolled down Ahmadinejad’s face as his voice rose.
    For half an hour, Li had sat across from Ahmadinejad, hands folded patiently in his lap, waiting for the man to exhaust himself. He was used to sitting through boring speeches, though usually they came in his own language. The Iranian poured out words, a river of nonsense. He seemed to be preaching at an audience of thousands, an audience that only he could see. Finally Li broke in.
    “Mr. President,” he’d said, first in Chinese, then in English. “Mr. President.
    “The Chinese people appreciate your grievances with the global hegemon, the United States. We agree that every state has the right to rule itself.”
    “Yes, yes. But the problem is deeper. The Zionists—”
    Li had no intention of sitting through another rant. “And I thank you for your hospitality. But I must return to Beijing tomorrow, and we have much to discuss.”
    Ahmadinejad seemed to have forgotten that Li was an emissary from a country more powerful than his own, not a rival to be bullied. “General, before we can continue, you must understand—” But Li never found out what he had to understand. Before Ahmadinejad could go on, the clean-shaven man beside him whispered into his ear.
    The man was Said Mousavi, the head of Iran’s secret police, and whatever he had said, his words were effective. Ahmadinejad ran his hand through his coarse black beard and whispered back to the security minister. From then on, his conversations with Li had been mostly businesslike, though Ahmadinejad still blustered occasionally about Zionist conspiracies. Yet by the end of their second meeting, Li realized that the Iranian was more subtle than he appeared. As much as anything, his windy speeches were intended to distract, to hide Iran’s real ambitions.
    If outsiders had known of these meetings, they would have assumed China had the upper hand. Yet it was Li who flew to Tehran, not Ahmadinejad to Beijing. The men who ran Iran took such eagerness as a sign of China’s weakness. Li didn’t try to change their minds. He had his own reason for wanting these meetings in Tehran instead of Beijing. This way, only he and his closest aides knew exactly what he was telling Ahmadinejad. Of course, he reported back to his fellow ministers on the Standing Committee after each meeting. But he didn’t report everything.
    As they tried to build a bomb, the Iranians needed engineering help, lots of it. Even for a sovereign country with a multibillion-dollar budget, building a nuclear weapon was harder than it looked.
    Nuclear weapons are both complicated and very simple. Conventional explosives get energy from breaking chemical bonds between atoms. Nuclear bombs release the energy bound up inside individual atoms, a far bigger source of power. The difference in power is staggering. Fat Man, the bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, used fourteen pounds of plutonium to produce a blast with the energy produced by 42 million pounds of conventional explosive. The bomb killed 70,000 people immediately and tens of thousands more over the next generation. Yet by modern standards, the Fat Man bomb is puny.
    Fortunately for humanity’s survival, most types of atoms can’t be used in nuclear weapons. The exceptions are plutonium and a certain kind of uranium, called U-235, so-called fissile materials. The United States and other major nuclear powers prefer plutonium for their bombs, because plutonium is even more potent than uranium. But plutonium is also harder to handle, and it doesn’t exist naturally. Making it requires nuclear reactors, big buildings that are prime targets for guided missiles or bombs. So uranium is the nuclear material of choice for countries like Iran, which need