These are frightening times for us all: Sarin nerve gas being sprayed on innocent civilians in Syria, threats that biological warfare agents might be spread about on the New York Subway and the most terrifying of all, three dirty bomb attacks thwarted in Russia. The reality of all these developments is that the environment in which we live today is being seriously threatened by the calculated use of weapons of mass destruction, and from a variety of dissident sources.
Several rogue nations have attempted to build the bomb, an enormously complex task. So far only Pakistan and North Korea have succeeded, with Iran right now on the cusp of making that breakthrough. South Africa built six atom bombs in the 1970/1980s but these were dismantled under British and American supervision together with help from the International Atomic Energy Agency before Nelson Mandela's African National Congress came into power.
In Nuclear Terror, Venter assesses the developments over recent decades of different countries in their attempts to build nuclear programmes. Not inflammatory or scaremongering, Venter takes an objective stance in chronicling these disturbing developments overseas and in the process adds another valuable contribution to this conversation.
Al J. Venter is a specialist military writer who has had over fifty books published. He started his career with International Defence Review, covering military developments in the Middle East and Africa. He has been writing on insurgencies across the globe for half a century and remains involved with Britain's Janes Information Group. Late 2019 he covered the conflict in the Central African Republic, a United Nations "Peacekeeping" effort for Jane's Defence Weekly. Sadly, he found a country striven with violence.
In his day the author was a stringer for the BBC, NBC News, as well as Londons Daily Express and Sunday Express. He branched into television work in the early 1980s, producing more than a hundred documentary films including Africas Killing Fields (on the Ugandan civil war) as well as AIDS: The African Connection, nominated for a Pink Magnolia Award in Shanghai, China. He also produced an hour-long television programme on Russia's war in Afghanistan in 1985.
One of his most recent major books, Portugals Guerrilla Wars in Africa, was nominated for New Yorks Arthur Goodzeit military history book award. Venter writes extensively for several Pen & Sword military history series including Cold War 19451991 and A History of Terror.
