Jeremy Bernstein loves Jeffrey Richelson's "fascinating new book." He also nicely pulls together some ongoing threads about intelligence and foreign policy.

The themes of this review have been twofold. In order to have really reliable intelligence about the atomic program of a foreign country a necessary, but not sufficient, condition is to have agents on the ground. In the examples I have given the necessity is clear.

The second theme is that in almost all cases the predictions have erred on the side of conservatism. Countries have acquired nuclear weapons well before they were supposed to. The example of the Russians is the most graphic. As the people at Los Alamos discovered, making an implosion bomb was a very difficult technological feat that required the enormous assembled talents of almost the entire laboratory. Do the Iranians have the people to do this, even if they have the plans? We simply do not know.

About the book, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, saying:

Richelson has written an authoritative and definitive account of US nuclear espionage from the earliest days of atomic research in WWII to the present. ... Richelson concludes chillingly, "Trouble Is Waiting to Happen." More than a comprehensive and often compelling history of nuclear espionage, this is an important contribution to the debate regarding American intelligence that began on 9/11.

The Secrets of the Bomb