Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Almighty
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1983
WEBSITE: http://www.mrdanzak.com/
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.mrdanzak.com/about/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1983, in Buffalo, NY.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Freelance reporter, beginning 1998; Washington Post, Washington, DC, general assignment feature writer, 2005–.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Dan Zak is a general assignment reporter who has worked for the Washington Post since 2005. In 2016, he published the book Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age, based on an article he wrote for the Post about a break-in at a nuclear weapons site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
In 2013, an eighty-year-old nun, a house painter, and a Vietnam veteran broke into the Y12 National Security Complex with relative ease, cutting through four fences. They climbed a wooden ridge and entered a storehouse of enriched uranium. They splattered blood everywhere and spray-painted biblical messages. They were discovered by a security guard who was later fired because he treated them with respect. The incident inspired Zak to write about not just the lack of security surrounding America’s nuclear arsenals but also the history of nuclear weapons, including how a bomb is made. He covers the bombing of Hiroshima during World War II, describing to Claire Schaeffer-Duffy in America that the city “was erased by an amount of uranium that weighed no more than a human fetus at 28 weeks.”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor was impressed by Zak’s account, writing: “Zak soberly recounts the Manhattan Project’s origins, charts the growth and development of the Oak Ridge facility, forthrightly assesses the difficulties surrounding arms reduction and security, and demonstrates the sheer persistence of problems relating to all things nuclear. More than anything, though, it’s the moral convictions demonstrated by Zak’s three holy fools that will remain with readers. A scrupulously reported, gracefully told, exquisitely paced debut.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer was also impressed, commenting: “Zak gracefully synthesizes the stories of the politicians and bureaucrats controlling stockpiles of weapons and those of the activists working to disarm them.”
Schaeffer-Duffy in America wrote: “Many of us know about the Japanese vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cancerous fate of the cities’ survivors. But what of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. atomic veterans pilots flying unaware through mushroom clouds, ground soldiers standing in the radiated glow of desert tests? ‘They lost hair and teeth in the short run,’ Zak writes. ‘In the long run: thyroid problems, multiple myeloma, slow and agonizing deaths in their 50’s and 60’s.'” Schaeffer-Duffy continued: “High suicide rates plagued Oak Ridge and the Marshall Islands, where the United States conducted 66 nuclear tests. Cancer invaded the bodies of Americans who lived downwind from nuclear weapons plants. Brain damage and premature death felled their workers.”
In the New York Times, Kai Bird wrote: “Even today, a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, nine nations possess some 16,000 nuclear warheads; the United States and Russia each have more than 7,000 warheads. Four countries—North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel—have developed nuclear arsenals and refuse to sign the Treaty on Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons.” Bird continued: “These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed. The odds are that these weapons will be used again, somewhere and probably in the not-so-distant future. It may happen through human error or an idiotic technical failure. But given enough time, it is certain to happen if we learn to
live with the bomb. (As Zak reports, last year ISIS was said to have captured 40 kilograms of uranium from Mosul University, so perhaps these … inspired fanatics will someday explode a crude “dirty bomb” made from conventional explosives and radioactive materials.)” Bird concluded: “Zak’s narrative is a perfectly measured blend of biography, suspense and
history. He skillfully uses the small, finite story of the Y12 protest to explore our national identity as a people whose culture is now intimately connected with things nuclear.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, December 19, 2016, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, review of Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age, p. 35.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2016, review of Almighty.
New York Times, August 7, 2016, Kai Bird, review of Almighty.
Publishers Weekly, May 9, 2016, review of Almighty, p. 59.
Washington Post, July 15, 2016, review of Almighty.
ONLINE
Dan Zak Home Page, http://www.mrdanzak.com (February 17, 2017).
NPR Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (July 12, 2016), Kelly McEvers, “Almighty Follows Activists in the Fight against Nuclear Weapons,” author interview.
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Web site, https://www.wagingpeace.org/ (August 1, 2016), Madeline Atchison, review of Almighty.
I am a writer. Specifically, a reporter. More specifically, a general assignment feature writer for The Washington Post. I've written from Hollywood, Baghdad, Newtown, the Marshall Islands, the nooks of the Mississippi Delta and the crannies of the Cowboy Poet's mind. I'm also the author of a non-fiction book titled "Almighty," which is based on this story.
I'm from Buffalo, N.Y. I was born in 1983. I started working for newspapers in 1998, and the Post in 2005. I am not an adjunct professor of anything. I am the winner of no awards.
Here is what readers and online commenters say about me and my work:
"Dan Zak is a silly little smart alec ... in over his head, ill-prepared and rude ... You make me sick with your haughty little column. You probably have no friends either. ... Another step in the degradation of American journalism."
'Almighty' Follows Activists In The Fight Against Nuclear Weapons
Listen· 7:42
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July 12, 20164:26 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
NPR's Kelly McEvers talks to Washington Post reporter and author Dan Zak about his latest book, Almighty, about anti-nuclear weapons activism.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In his new book "Almighty," Washington Post reporter Dan Zak introduces us to three modern-day activists - an 80 year old nun, a Vietnam veteran and a house painter. They all oppose the use and development of nuclear weapons. Through these three people's stories, Zak looks at America's complex relationship with the bomb from the Manhattan Project to the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima.
Our co-host Kelly McEvers talked with Zak about the activists and the larger questions their story raises. A warning to listeners that this conversation contains a graphic description of the effects of a nuclear blast.
KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: Dan Zak, welcome to the show.
DAN ZAK: Thank you, Kelly.
MCEVERS: This book is based on an article that you wrote for The Washington Post in 2013? Is that right?
ZAK: That's right.
MCEVERS: And it was called "The Prophets Of Oak Ridge."
ZAK: Yes.
MCEVERS: What was the story that you told in that piece?
ZAK: It was a story of a break-in at a nuclear weapons site in East Tennessee. It was - three peace activists in the middle of the night intruded into this weapon site, cut through four fences, climbed a wooded ridge and got up to the building that stores all of our highly enriched uranium. And they threw blood on it and spray painted biblical messages and essentially waited to be arrested.
MCEVERS: You know, that's a scene that we've heard before - people chaining themselves to sites and, you know, cutting fences and putting up signs. Why was this one a big deal?
ZAK: I think because it was - if you're ranking these actions the most successful and alarming, this was supposed to be one of the most secure sites in the world because it's probably the site that has the most fissile material stored. So you'd think you'd want to protect that from, you know, middle-aged and elderly activists. And because of the reputation of this site, the reaction to it was so strong.
MCEVERS: Right. And so it wasn't just a reminder that there is still this anti-nuclear movement out there but also just that, you know, security is lax at a place where it should not be.
ZAK: Yeah and also a reminder that we continue to maintain a significant arsenal and significant reserves of fissile material that are, you know, perhaps occasionally under-protected.
MCEVERS: Yeah and maybe under-reported. I mean, is that what got you interested in then taking a much deeper dive because this book covers basically a century of nuclear weapons development and the people who oppose that? I mean, that seems like a pretty major undertaking. What made you go so deep?
ZAK: I think it was personal for me because I was - as I reported the initial piece for The Post, I was shocked and felt profoundly guilty that I knew so little about the history. I was born in 1983. I came of age after the Cold War. I don't remember the Berlin Wall coming down. Nuclear weapons had no salience in my life.
So part of it was I felt this remedial self-education just as a citizen to kind of understand what's at stake now, what's at stake in the future. And how does history inform that?
MCEVERS: One of the things you do talk a lot about early in the book, of course, is the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And first I wonder if you could just read a passage about Hiroshima. I mean, this is a really vivid description of what happened when the bomb was dropped on that city.
ZAK: Yeah. This is a description of the explosion over Hiroshima. Its blinding heat energy carbonized anyone within a half mile of ground zero. Thousands of pedestrians crumpled into crisp, black husks. Birds in flight burst like fireworks. Then came the blast wave which steam rolled houses and ripped off human flesh that had already been broiled by the flash, then the fireball itself which set five square miles of rubble ablaze and created a fire storm that chased the maimed into the delta city's tributaries which were soon clogged with floating corpses.
If a Japanese citizen survived all that, he became his own ticking time bomb. His cells stopped dividing because of the intense dose of radiation, which meant organ decay, hemorrhage and death in the hours and days afterward. All told, 160,000 people were dead, dying or injured in the aftermath.
MCEVERS: That is a pretty vivid description of what happens when one of these weapons is deployed.
ZAK: Yeah, and I think that is - what happens when one of these weapons goes off I think is lost on people today because it has been nearly 71 years since it was used in combat and decades since they've even been tested by the major nuclear powers. They've receded in memory - in the public memory because of that.
MCEVERS: And then eventually of course during the Cold War is really when we see the growth of this whole sort of anti-nuke movement, right? And I think a lot of us think of that movement as something from the '70s and '80s, you know?
Again you talk about this as being why you wrote this book, and you found, of course, not just in these three characters who broke into this place in Oak Ridge but others, you know, that there is a movement that is still very much alive. Is that right?
ZAK: Yeah, I mean, I think when you think of anti-nuclear activists, I think most people would think hippies. They would think a certain era. That kind of activism seems dusty anachronistic because the Cold War has been over for 25 years.
But there is still a very enthusiastic, if smaller, faction of people in the U.S. but also abroad in Europe that is very devoted and includes people who were born after the end of the Cold War who nevertheless are animated about the ongoing danger and also the morality of possessing nuclear weapons alone, let alone - you know, let alone using them - just having them as part of a national security strategy. So the work does continue. It's just a little less in the public eye than it was in the '40s, the '60s, the '80s.
MCEVERS: You also spent a lot of time talking about those who oppose nuclear weapons at the highest levels, right? Of course in one of his first major speeches as president, Barack Obama stood up in Prague and talked about America's commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. Then he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
And yet here we are seven years later, and the U.S. is set to spend a trillion dollars - is that right? - on its...
ZAK: That's right.
MCEVERS: ...On its nuclear arsenal. You know...
ZAK: Over the next 30 years.
MCEVERS: Yeah. What happened?
ZAK: You know, the question is that nuclear weapons remain kind of the foundation of our security. And the economies that have been created around them - they have a momentum because of that. And this president since his days in college has had nuclear weapons on his brain. His first major speech, as you mentioned, in Prague was about seeking a world without nuclear weapons.
He did hedge a bit in that speech and continues to hedge - which he says, this may not happen in my lifetime. I think he says that because he knows the U.S. government and military are not ready to get rid of these weapons as long as other people have them. The last time they were really overhauled was in the '80s. So we're kind of past due for doing that.
That responsibility has fallen in the lap of the commander in chief who I think is very at odds with even possessing them but knows in his position of authority that if we can't get rid of them right now, we have to modernize and overhaul them.
MCEVERS: Well, Dan Zak, thank you very much.
ZAK: Thank you, Kelly.
MCEVERS: Dan Zak is the author of the book "Almighty." It is out now.
"was erased by an amount of uranium that
weighed no more than a human fetus at 28 weeks."
Many of us know about the Japanese vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cancerous
fate of the cities' survivors. But what of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. atomic veteranspilots flying unaware
through mushroom clouds, ground soldiers standing in the radiated glow of desert tests?
"They lost hair and teeth in the short run," Zak writes. "In the long run: thyroid problems, multiple myeloma, slow and
agonizing deaths in their 50's and 60's." High suicide rates plagued Oak Ridge and the Marshall Islands, where the
United States conducted 66 nuclear tests. Cancer invaded the bodies of Americans who lived downwind from nuclear
weapons plants. Brain damage and premature death felled their workers.
Our nuclear complex
Claire SchaefferDuffy
America.
215.20 (Dec. 19, 2016): p35.
COPYRIGHT 2016 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
ALMIGHTY
Courage, Resistance, And Existential Peril In the Nuclear Age
By Dan Zak
Blue Rider Press. 416p $27
It has been four years since three activists entered a nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Under the cover of
early morning darkness, an octogenarian Catholic nun, along with a house painter and a Vietnam veteran, crested a low
pine ridge and walked onto the Y12 National Security Complex, supposedly one of the most secure sites in the world.
Using bolt cutters purchased at Target for $25, they snipped through three fences, hung peace banners and spraypainted
the walls of the Highly Enriched Uranium Material Facility, a massive, castlelike structure that housed enough
uranium to power thousands of nuclear bombs. Architects had designed its walls to withstand a crashing jet but
probably never considered an assault of biblical graffiti.
"Woe to an empire of blood," wrote one activist.
"The fruit of justice is peace," wrote another.
The three then prayed and waited to be arrested.
Upon learning the news, Dan Zak, a journalist at The Washington Post, paid close attention as U.S. lawmakers railed,
first reporting on the breach at Oak Ridge in a beautifully crafted piece for the newspaper's style magazine. That article
evolved into Almighty, one of the most captivating and penetrating books about the United States' lovehate
relationship with the bomb I have ever read.
Zak is a terrific writer. His chronicle of our nuclear complexfrom the bomb's creation to the presentday
modernization of our nuclear arsenalunfurls like a film, with drama, suspense and an eye for horrifying absurdities.
Describing the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, he notes the Japanese city "was erased by an amount of uranium that
weighed no more than a human fetus at 28 weeks."
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comes to mind. Except here, the monster is not craving connection. It does not get killed.
It shapeshifts, appearing as the preserver of global security when its function is planetary annihilation.
Zak tells this history of apocalyptic possibilities through the lens of personal stories. His central characters are four
ordinary Americans: the three activists Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Greg BoertjeObed, and the Y12
security guard, Kirk Garland, who first discovered the peace protestors outside the Oak Ridge nuclear facility and was
later fired for treating them humanely instead of drawing his gun. Among the supporting cast are scientists who
conceive the bomb, presidents publicly urging nuclear disarmament, yet sanctioning the expansion of our arsenals,
bombmakers, true believers, dissenters and victims.
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Dear God, the victims! Many of us know about the Japanese vaporized at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cancerous
fate of the cities' survivors. But what of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. atomic veteranspilots flying unaware
through mushroom clouds, ground soldiers standing in the radiated glow of desert tests?
"They lost hair and teeth in the short run," Zak writes. "In the long run: thyroid problems, multiple myeloma, slow and
agonizing deaths in their 50's and 60's." High suicide rates plagued Oak Ridge and the Marshall Islands, where the
United States conducted 66 nuclear tests. Cancer invaded the bodies of Americans who lived downwind from nuclear
weapons plants. Brain damage and premature death felled their workers.
Catholics on both sides of the nuclear divide are featured prominently here. Richard McSorley, S.J., a pacifist of
vigorous intellect, declares nuclear weapons to be "the taproot of all violence." Leroy Matthiesen, a pastoral Catholic
bishop in Texas, urges his parishioners working at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant to quit their jobs. No such
sermons are heard at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Oak Ridge, where the faithful receive holy Communion on Sunday
and make weapons on Monday.
This is not a history we Americans like to ponder. To do so requires reckoning with the devil among us. As Zak so
clearly reveals, the bomb we believe saved our boys and ended a world war also brought dark regret and ominous
faith.
"It is an awful responsibility which has come to us," President Harry Truman said after the nuclear leveling of
Nagasaki. "We thank God that it has come to us instead of our enemies, and we pray that He may guide us to use it in
His ways and for His purposes."
Over the decades, that faith spawned a vast nuclear network "insulated from logic and reason," Zak notes, and the
United States became entrenched in a deadly paradox: We would keep the peace by threatening global destruction.
This book is essential reading for any American. The U.S. budget for nuclear weapons is now higher than at any point
in history, despite a shrunken arsenal. Yet who is asking us to consider the consequences of this investment? Zak is,
and he does so in a way that cuts through the psychic numbing and gives hope.
Almighty reminds us the United States, birthplace of the bomb, is also a land of prophets and visionaries, a country of
unexpected converts (Henry Kissinger is now antinuke!), and committed believers in the value of life. In emphasizing
the human dimension of our nuclear complex, the book reiterates what the peace protesters symbolically suggested
when they penetrated the inner sanctum of Oak Ridge with their household tools and abundant conviction.
The devil among us is not the weapons but our faith in them. Having made them, we can unmake them, if we but, to
quote Sister Megan, "change the mission."
CLAIRE SCHAEFFERDUFFY, a writer, lives with her husband at the Saint Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in
Worcester, Mass.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
SchaefferDuffy, Claire. "Our nuclear complex." America, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 35+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476572473&it=r&asid=cbc460731c0ec2a3acb611c2ac57315d.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476572473
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Zak, Dan: ALMIGHTY
Zak soberly recounts the Manhattan Project's origins, charts the
growth and development of the Oak Ridge facility, forthrightly assesses the difficulties surrounding arms reduction and
security, and demonstrates the sheer persistence of problems relating to all things nuclear. More than anything, though,
it's the moral convictions demonstrated by Zak's three holy fools that will remain with readers. A scrupulously
reported, gracefully told, exquisitely paced debut.
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Zak, Dan ALMIGHTY Blue Rider Press (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 7, 12 ISBN: 9780399173752
Centering on a single episode, a powerful declaration of conscience, a Washington Post reporter tells an intensely
unsettling story about living with our nuclear arsenal.In July 2012, cutting through fences topped with razor wire and
avoiding guards, guns, sensors, armored cars, and alarms, an 80yearold nun, a Vietnam veteran, and a housepainter,
all deeply religious, all affiliated with the pacifist Plowshares movement, broke into the Y12 National Security
Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the "Fort Knox of Uranium." Carrying hammers, cans of spray paint, a loaf of
bread, seeds, bottles of blood, banners, and a written "message" explaining their action, the protestors spent hours
inside the facility before their arrests. Was this security breach "a miracle," as supporters claimed, or a "catastrophe,"
as the government labeled it? Or was it both? Zak demonstrates that this strange and awful duality has been at the heart
of the nuclear weapons debate from the beginning. Was the atom bomb's first detonation, as President Harry Truman
said, "the greatest thing in history," or was it, as one of the scientists who first imagined it remarked, one of history's
"greatest blunders?" Using this trespass against Y12, the activists' biographies, arrests, prosecutions, and
imprisonments, Zak skillfully intersperses a wider story, with nuances about the minds behind the bomb, so many of
them populating the physics department at Columbia University, which taught the young Megan Rice, who'd grow up
to become the protesting nun. New York was also ground zero for Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, spiritual
ancestor to the Berrigan brothers and today's Plowshares antinuclear activists. While the author's sympathies clearly
lie with his protagonists, the narrative plays fair. Zak soberly recounts the Manhattan Project's origins, charts the
growth and development of the Oak Ridge facility, forthrightly assesses the difficulties surrounding arms reduction and
security, and demonstrates the sheer persistence of problems relating to all things nuclear. More than anything, though,
it's the moral convictions demonstrated by Zak's three holy fools that will remain with readers. A scrupulously
reported, gracefully told, exquisitely paced debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Zak, Dan: ALMIGHTY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454177020&it=r&asid=cf19c66e5fd524cba27242dca0af95fe.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454177020
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Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential
Peril in the Nuclear Age
Zak gracefully
synthesizes the stories of the politicians and bureaucrats controlling stockpiles of weapons and those of the activists
working to disarm them.
Publishers Weekly.
263.19 (May 9, 2016): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age
Dan Zak. Penguin/Blue Rider, $27 (416p) ISBN 9780399173752
This wellresearched history from Washington Post reporter Zak tells the riveting story of three nuclear weapons
protestors and how, in 2012, they infiltrated the ultrasecure uraniumenrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Sister
Megan Rice, Greg BoertjeObed, and Michael Walli took different paths to becoming activists opposed to nuclear
weapons, but they united on a breathtaking mission to protest America's ongoing nuclear program. Zak also dives into
the history of how the United States devoted enormous resources to the initial development of the nuclear bomb. At
one point, nuclear weapons accounted for 10% of the country's gross national product, and the Oak Ridge facility
alone consumed around 14% of the U.S.'s electricity. Zak shows how the country continues to grapple with the tension
between ensuring peace and maintaining weapons with the power to cause our own extinction. Despite President
Obama's early experience of antinuclear activism, his administration has continued to prolong the life of the U.S.
nuclear weapons program. Much of the antinuclear movement is intertwined with Christian ethics and the Catholic
Church, and it still uses as its central metaphor the Biblical idea of turning swords into plowshares. Zak gracefully
synthesizes the stories of the politicians and bureaucrats controlling stockpiles of weapons and those of the activists
working to disarm them. Agent: Lauren Clark, Kuhn Projects. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age." Publishers Weekly, 9 May 2016, p. 59.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883362&it=r&asid=ab89e48a37629b1f17158ac61134a5ca.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883362
Even today, a quartercentury after the end of the Cold War, nine nations
possess some 16,000 nuclear warheads; the United States and Russia each have
more than 7,000 warheads. Four countries — North Korea, Pakistan, India and
Israel — have developed nuclear arsenals and refuse to sign the Treaty on NonProliferation
of Nuclear Weapons.
These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity
is screwed. The odds are that these weapons will be used again, somewhere and
probably in the notsodistant future. It may happen through human error or an
idiotic technical failure. But given enough time, it is certain to happen if we learn to
live with the bomb. (As Zak reports, last year ISIS was said to have captured 40
kilograms of uranium from Mosul University, so perhaps these Wahhabiinspired
fanatics will someday explode a crude “dirty bomb” made from conventional
explosives and radioactive materials.)
Zak’s narrative is a perfectly measured blend of biography, suspense and
history. He skillfully uses the small, finite story of the Y12 protest to explore our
national identity as a people whose culture is now intimately connected with things
nuclear.
How to Keep an Atomic Bomb
From Being Smuggled Into
New York City? Open Every
Suitcase With a Screwdriver.
By KAI BIRD AUG. 5, 2016
ALMIGHTY
Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age
By Dan Zak
Illustrated. 402 pp. Blue Rider Press. $27.
This is a strangely captivating book — dark and utterly frightening, despite or
perhaps because of the author’s dispassionate tone. Dan Zak, a versatile reporter for
The Washington Post, has written an engaging story about three dogged peace
activists — a house painter, a radicalized Vietnam War veteran and an 82yearold
Catholic nun — who in July 2012 blithely penetrated layers of security surrounding
Y12, an immense factory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., devoted to manufacturing highly
enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. After splashing human blood on the secret
facility, Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Greg BoertjeObed were arrested,
charged with a “federal crime of terrorism” and eventually sentenced to prison terms
ranging from two years and 11 months to just over five years. But by penetrating the
“Fort Knox of uranium” they demonstrated how a handful of actual “dacoits” might
someday carry off an apocalyptic act of nuclear terrorism.
It is a nightmare possibility, but one that we have lived with since 1945. Zak
reminds us in “Almighty” that not long after the obliteration of Hiroshima, Robert
2/5/2017 How to Keep an Atomic Bomb From Being Smuggled Into New York City? Open Every Suitcase With a Screwdriver. The New York Times
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Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” was asked in a closeddoor Senate
hearing “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into
New York and blow up the whole city.” Oppenheimer nonchalantly replied, “Of
course it could be done.” Asked if there was any means to detect such a suitcase
bomb, Oppenheimer remarked dryly, “A screwdriver” (to open each and every crate
or suitcase).
Some years later, our government commissioned a classified study of nuclear
terrorism. Naturally, the report is still classified, but it is known in the business as
the “screwdriver report.”
Even today, a quartercentury after the end of the Cold War, nine nations
possess some 16,000 nuclear warheads; the United States and Russia each have
more than 7,000 warheads. Four countries — North Korea, Pakistan, India and
Israel — have developed nuclear arsenals and refuse to sign the Treaty on NonProliferation
of Nuclear Weapons.
These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity
is screwed. The odds are that these weapons will be used again, somewhere and
probably in the notsodistant future. It may happen through human error or an
idiotic technical failure. But given enough time, it is certain to happen if we learn to
live with the bomb. (As Zak reports, last year ISIS was said to have captured 40
kilograms of uranium from Mosul University, so perhaps these Wahhabiinspired
fanatics will someday explode a crude “dirty bomb” made from conventional
explosives and radioactive materials.)
The problem is that humans adapted decades ago to living with what
Oppenheimer called the “gadget.” The Dr. Strangeloves among us have learned to
love the bomb and even believe that it has kept the peace — or at least ended the
possibility of total warfare on the scale of World War II. But most of us just try to
live our lives, hoping vaguely that the worst will not happen in our lifetimes.
Zak’s “Almighty” is about the few stubborn souls who resist such complacency.
Sister Megan Rice is one of them. She comes from that peculiar band of prophets,
the whistleblowers and dissenters who demand our attention by their bold acts of
civil disobedience. Sister Megan and many others like her — Daniel Berrigan,
2/5/2017 How to Keep an Atomic Bomb From Being Smuggled Into New York City? Open Every Suitcase With a Screwdriver. The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/books/review/almightydanzak.html 3/3
Dorothy Day, Daniel Ellsberg — are products of what the novelist E.L. Doctorow
called “our bomb culture.” They are the annoying, selfrighteous voices from the
wilderness who insist that they can spot impending disaster right around the corner.
Zak makes it clear that it is hard to like these eccentric souls — and hard not to
admire them.
Zak’s narrative is a perfectly measured blend of biography, suspense and
history. He skillfully uses the small, finite story of the Y12 protest to explore our
national identity as a people whose culture is now intimately connected with things
nuclear. Our bomb culture has not come cheap; the environmental costs have been
devastating for many communities. And even though scores of governments — but
not our own — are on record supporting a treaty that would ban nuclear weapons,
Zak shows this is still an outlier dream. He quotes a United States admiral intoning:
“I don’t see us being nuclearfree in my lifetime. Or in yours.”
We are stuck with Armageddon in our dreams. And in the meantime the Sister
Megans of our bomb culture will no doubt try again and again to cry out against our
complacency. But truly, it seems hopeless. As Billy Pilgrim laments repeatedly in
Kurt Vonnegut’s “SlaughterhouseFive,” “So it goes.”
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian and a coauthor, with Martin J. Sherwin,
of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” His
most recent book is “The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames.”
A version of this review appears in print on August 7, 2016, on Page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Bound to Happen.
Nuclear weapons mess: we’re all in it together but don’t know how to get out alive
By Richard Rhodes July 15, 2016
Richard Rhodes is the author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and three other volumes of nuclear history.
Shortly after 4 a.m. on July 28, 2012, an 82-year-old Catholic nun, a Vietnam veteran and a housepainter cut holes in several security fences surrounding a government facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where thousands of nuclear bomb cores are stored, walked up to the massive white concrete-and-steel building and splashed its walls with blood. They spray-painted slogans. They hammered concrete chips off the base of a manned guard tower. No one shot them. Six minutes passed before a security van even arrived to investigate.
The story of this shocking peaceful invasion of Oak Ridge, and what followed, anchors Washington Post journalist Dan Zak’s “Almighty,” but the book examines at eloquent length the current state of nuclear security and diplomacy, as well. As Zak finds, these appear to be at least as complacent and contradictory as did Oak Ridge security when the nun and her two fellow protesters challenged it in 2012.
You can make a nuclear explosion yielding at least the equivalent of hundreds of tons of TNT simply by dropping one subcritical piece of a bomb core onto another by hand. For that reason, bomb-core storage facilities depend on perimeter defense — on keeping the bad guys out of the building. Sister Megan Rice and her two accomplices had no intention of trying to breach the storage building’s formidable defenses — it is, so its guardians claim, one of the most secure buildings in the world — but the fact that they were able to stand next to it and fling baby bottles full of blood onto its walls indicates that its very physical security had made its guards complacent. They simply couldn’t imagine anyone getting past perimeter security; they actually reset their alarms after the three protesters set them off, assuming that an animal had tripped them.
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If a flying squad of suicide commandos had blown its way into that building, Oak Ridge today would be a large hole in the ground and eastern Tennessee a radioactive wasteland. Sister Megan made her point, as Rep. Joe Barton told her when she testified later in Washington. In return, from a reluctant judge, she got 2 1/2 years in prison.
"Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age" by Dan Zak (Blue Rider)
Oak Ridge is one node of an extensive and expensive national complex of nuclear weapons deployment, storage, refurbishment and dismantling. Zak quotes a U.S. official calling it “a zoo of extremely wild animals.” The U.S. nuclear arsenal, Zak notes, has been reduced by 85 percent since its numerical high point in 1967, yet our “21st-century budget for nuclear weapons is higher than the budget at any point in history.” (This seeming contradiction reminds me of the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1955 observation that, because work expands to fill the time allowed, the number of British admiralty officials had increased by more than 78 percent during a time period — 1914 to 1928 — when the British navy had decreased by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. President Obama’s recent call to spend nearly $1 trillion to refurbish and upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal across the next decade continues the trend.)
Zak reports not only on the lives of the three Oak Ridge protesters but also on the impact of nuclear weapons testing over the years on the people of the Marshall Islands, where the largest U.S. bombs were tested, and the downwinders of the American Southwest below the continental test site at Yucca Flats, Nev., who believe that their cancers and other serious illnesses resulted from exposure to nuclear fallout. He looks into the lives of the people who live in the city of Oak Ridge and work at the bomb facility in their midst.
He follows the trial of the three protesters from the point of view of the uncomfortable government lawyers who led the prosecution. He profiles Rose Gottemoeller, Obama’s leading U.S. nuclear diplomat, as she tries to untie the nuclear knot incrementally while more than 100 other nations sign an Austrian-initiated humanitarian pledge that commits them to work “to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences and associated risks.”
Zak doesn’t spare what he calls the “nuclear priesthood,” the weapons-makers and suppliers, finding them meeting in Washington during the same 2015 summer when Sister Megan was released from prison. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman sponsored their annual nuclear-triad conference. On that occasion, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama referred to Obama’s speech in Prague in 2009 on eliminating nuclear weapons, claiming happily, “I think we can safely say the president’s Prague vision is dead,” and a guest speaker warned of a “relatively new threat to our deterrent” — the same humanitarian movement that is promoting Austria’s pledge.
To Zak’s credit, he reports as well the opinion of that guest speaker, a former Navy officer named Frank Miller, that nuclear weapons have prevented large-scale war since 1945, that the “humanitarians . . . have no role in assuring global stability or halting aggression,” that “their crusade could create conditions for war, and for massive bloodshed.”
Nor is Zak prepared to choose sides, though his heart is clearly with the nun and the humanitarians. In the end, Sister Megan returns to Oak Ridge, where a new security company has replaced the old one, to hang a paper crane from the somewhat better-guarded fences. The guards would collect it and throw it away in half an hour, he tells us, “but right then . . . it was all she could do.” Having surrendered our authority as citizens to what the scholar Elaine Scarry rightly calls a “nuclear monarchy,” with the president, like a king, solely in charge of initiating world-destroying nuclear war, it’s all any of us can do.
I wish Zak had checked his physics more carefully; his descriptions of how nuclear weapons work are badly garbled. He seems as well to credit the revisionist view that the Japanese leadership in the final days of World War II was ready to surrender, no atomic bombs required — a view that both Japanese and American scholars have convincingly discredited.
These minor errors hardly weaken the authority of Zak’s report on where we are and how we got here. The most important single idea in “Almighty” emerges in the assertion of an exasperated South African ambassador to the United Nations, Abdul Samad Minty: “If for security reasons the [five original nuclear powers] feel that they must be armed with nuclear weapons, what about other countries in similar situations? Do we think that the global situation is such that no other country would ever aspire to nuclear weapons . . . when the five tell us that it is absolutely correct to possess nuclear weapons for their security?”
Like it or not, this question of fundamental equity among nations is the paradox and the core of the nuclear dilemma. The report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons stated it even more succinctly in 1996, calling it the Axiom of Nuclear Proliferation: “As long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will seek to acquire them.” And Obama in Prague added a surely true but terrifying corollary: “If we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”
With nuns splashing blood, countries making pledges, diplomats working to reduce the size of world-destroying arsenals, suppliers cheering a new Cold War, Zak demonstrates that we’re all in it together. And he’s honest enough to report as well the hard truth that none of us yet knows how to get out of it alive.
ALMIGHTY
Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age
By Dan Zak
Blue Rider.
402 pp. $27
Book Review: Almighty
Published by Madeline Atchison at August 1, 2016
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“Nukes, in other words, would be America’s third-highest national priority, ever. Along the way, the weapons would evolve from a strategy into a policy into a faith.” –Dan Zak, Almighty, p. 23
almightyAlmighty, by Dan Zak, is a compelling new book that exposes the intimate truths behind the 2012 Y-12 break-in through the lens of the peace-activist perpetrators. Fluidly weaving between the past and the present, this intriguing true-story resembles more of a thriller novel than that of a mundane biography. As the unique background of all three activists, Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli, and Greg Boertje-obed, unfolds the egregious history of nuclear weapons elucidates the United States’ futile attempt at non-proliferation.
A house painter, a Vietnam War veteran, and an 82 year old Catholic sister, broke into the “Fort Knox of Uranium” (Y-12) in an act of civil disobedience for the sake of mankind. Considered to be one of the most secure facilities in the world, Y-12 was easily penetrated with wire cutters and a courageous death wish. The three peace activists hoped to stop the production of nuclear weapons or, simply, bring awareness to their cause. However, inadvertently, the success of their mission spawned significant national security concerns and shed light on the inherent fault in nuclear facilities: human error.
The novel is broken down into three sections: action, reaction, and relativity/uncertainty. In Part I, Action, Zak describes the history and intricacies of the Manhattan Project as well as provides an in-depth description of the Y-12 break-in. Created by the intellectual elite of Columbia University, the Manhattan Project outlined a clear and destructive path to combat the fear and rise of the Third Reich. The atom became a destructive force displayed in the acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, “ All the while, a counterforce pushed back. Men and women of science, and of faith, believed that humanity was too fragile to tangle with the almighty. The mere possession of nuclear weapons, to them, was a wish for death” (p. 24). In the time of scientific innovation, Manhattan became the soil in which Megan Rice sprouted her anti-nuclear activism.
One of the most intriguing sections in Almighty is Part II, Reaction. In this section, an entire chapter is dedicated to the background and history of Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge, an eerie Cold-War era community dedicated to the production of Uranium at Y-12, prides itself on ‘protecting America’s future’. City festivals and moments of silence commemorate the city’s important role in producing nuclear weapons as well as act as a tool of societal enforcement with regards to the acceptance of nuclear weapons. Historically, Y-12 was a community secret and often employees were unknowingly contributing to the production of uranium. One Oak Ridge citizen recalls, “Her grandmother, who worked at Y-12, was told she was helping to make ice cream” (p.185).
Almighty continues into the aftermath of the Y-12 break-in where the three peace activists were tried for criminal trespassing and destruction of federal property. The court trials touch on the American nuclear weapons paradox regarding morality and the façade of national security. As the judge deliberates between motive, morality, and actions, the reader is taken through the labyrinth that is the jaded American nuclear debate. To illustrate the complexities of the American nuclear relationship, Zak references the youthful Barack Obama in 1983 at Columbia University. In Obama’s student newspaper article Breaking the War Mentality, “His last sentence envisioned a peace ‘that is genuine, lasting, and non-nuclear (p.148).” Yet, the Obama administration has provided little support towards this approach. Clearly the discourse regarding both the struggle to justify nuclear weapons or encourage non-proliferation is inadequate. The activists answered this challenge with radical action.
Almighty covers substantial nuclear weapon modern history, and the morality behind these destructive human designs. Topics further discussed include the court proceedings, life and background of the activists, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Marshall Islands, and the Iran-Nuclear Deal.
Armed with a few hammers and a heavy conscience, these religiously motivated peace-activists hung banners, graffitied biblical verses, and streaked human blood across the exterior of Y-12. Their motivations and respective moral compasses are eloquently revealed in the pages of such chaos. Binding American power, the case for nuclear weapons transforms into 2016 relevance through Almighty.