A.Q. Khan's Atomic Vision

Khan couldn't operate alone. He was a master at using people and companies in Europe and at promoting his agenda within Pakistan. The West, India and Israel had or would have the bomb, he argued, and only Muslims would be left unprotected in the nuclear world. Pakistani leaders -- from Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf, who is now ruling by decree -- agreed.

Of these three books, Deception is the most complete and authoritative. Levy and Scott-Clark take the reader deep inside Khan's operations, including his extensive and previously unreported contacts with China, which gave him technical help beginning in the early 1980s. Their book also provides the fullest picture of Khan's turbulent family life, his constant tension with his wife, his extramarital affairs and even his visits to a psychiatrist, who noted that he seemed "eaten up . . . as if he was unable to sate his ambition."

It was this insatiable ambition that appears to have led Khan to move beyond just developing Pakistan's nuclear capability and into the world of black market proliferation in the '80s. As his ego and expensive tastes grew, so did the recklessness with which he sold off nuclear plans and materiel. In the late 1990s, he went so far as to draw up a menu of nuclear goods and services he could provide. Pakistani officials occasionally sought to limit his business trips abroad, indicating they had inklings of his proliferation activities. All three books suggest that this mediocre physicist could not have carried out his plans without the backing of at least some senior military and government officials.

Deception also gives the harshest indictment of Pakistan's duplicity. By Levy and Scott-Clark's account, Musharraf has often told the West what it wanted to hear while following what the ISI -- Pakistan's entrenched intelligence service, which has strong ties to Islamic militants -- wanted to do. His recent declaration of a state of emergency has left Pakistan adrift and control over its nuclear arsenal arguably more tenuous than ever, as the army's command and control structure has frayed. Yet Musharraf seems confident that the United States, Britain and other patron states will not dare cut Pakistan off militarily or economically, precisely because of that arsenal.

The Nuclear Jihadist covers much of the same ground from a narrower, U.S.-centered perspective. Of particular interest is a behind-the-scenes account of the negotiations that led Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to give up his nuclear program, one of the few bright spots in this saga. In clear, gripping prose, the husband-and-wife team of Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins recount the race to intercept a shipment of equipment that would have helped make Libya's nuclear ambitions a reality. They also add new details of the key role that Gaddafi's son, Seif Islam Gaddafi, played in the negotiations.

America and the Islamic Bomb is a ground-level look at the operational failures of U.S., British and other intelligence services in assessing the Khan network. Relying on government documents and interviews, David Armstrong and Joseph Trento reveal multiple scuttled investigations and chronicle the infighting within several U.S. administrations, beginning under Reagan in the 1980s, over what to do about Khan and, more broadly, Pakistan, whose cooperation was deemed vital in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Rivetingly, Armstrong and Trento also recount the deals that Khan made through a Dubai-based company, Gulf Technical Industries, to supply uranium centrifuges to several countries. And they tell the story of Operation Aquarium, a successful British effort to uproot the tentacles of Khan's illicit purchasing network from Malaysia to Spain and France. It shows what Western intelligence services can do when they have clear direction and international cooperation.

But, on the whole, these books give little grounds for optimism that the West will be able to prevent Islamic extremists from getting their hands on nuclear weapons. "There are plenty of ideologues, thinkers and Islamic strategists who are working towards precisely that goal," Levy and Scott-Clark write, "and here is a regime in Islamabad that has no hard and fast rules, no unambiguous goals or laws, and no line that cannot be bent or reshaped." *

Douglas Farah's most recent book is "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible."