Norman Dombey is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at Sussex. He has written many pieces about nuclear weapons for the LRB, arguing late in 2002, for example, that Iraq did not have the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Fifteen months ago in these pages I reviewed a book by Khidhir Hamza, who called himself ‘Saddam’s bombmaker’. At the same time I assessed the now notorious government dossier of September 2002 on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, together with the more restrained document published by the International Institute of Strategic Studies. I said that Hamza’s...
“In the absence of clear evidence that it has been able to rebuild those facilities [removed by the inspectors] despite stringent UN sanctions, one can only conclude that as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Iraq is much less of a threat now than it was in 1991.”
‘Britain Carries Out Second H-Test, Explosion even bigger than the first one,’ the Manchester Guardian reported on Saturday, 1 June 1957. It was the lead news item. The story that followed was datelined ‘Aboard HMS Alert’, Alert being the frigate which housed the representatives of the British press corps invited to see for themselves that Britain, as befitted the third great power in the world, had attained thermonuclear status. According to Reuters, ‘a great multi-coloured fireball above the central Pacific heralded Britain’s second hydrogen bomb test’ off the Malden Islands.
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