Books of Note

Raid on the Sun
By Rodger Claire, Random House, April 2004, 259 pp.

Rodger Claire tells the story of how Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osarik nuclear power plant. Written with full cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, Israeli Air Force commander General David Ivry (ret.), and the eight mission pilots, Claire offers the first authorized inside account of the attack. He gives a pilot’s-eye view of the June 7, 1981, strike—the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history. The reactor, sold to Iraq by France in 1975, was the heart of a large nuclear plant 12 miles from Baghdad. Worried that Saddam Hussein planned to use the reactor to destroy Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin enlisted Ivry to concoct a secret plan to get rid of it.

Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to Present
By Lawrence S. Wittner, Stanford University Press, August 2003, 688 pp.

This book marks the third volume in Wittner’s acclaimed “The Struggle Against the Bomb” series. An historian at the State University of New York in Albany, Wittner provides a wide-ranging account of the origins, evolution, and impact of global nuclear disarmament movement, especially in the United States and Europe. Based on numerous interviews with key governmental and nongovernmental officials as well as original source documents, the study argues that the anti-nuclear movement influenced the direction of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons and arms control policy during the last three decades to a much greater extent than is generally acknowledged.

Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War
By John Prados, The New Press, May 2004, 256 pp.

John Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archives, has compiled and annotated key documents and speeches that the Bush administration used to argue that an invasion of Iraq was justified to remove nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Of particular interest are an October 2002 national intelligence estimate; a December 2002 State Department fact sheet outlining why Iraq’s weapons declarations were inadequate; Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council; and a May 2003 CIA paper on the use of mobile trailers to produce biological weapons.

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