Nuclear Ransom

A chiller about blackmail

Dec. 13. A package containing specifications for the construction of a hydrogen bomb has just been delivered to the White House, together with a cassette-recorded message from Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. With rising horror, the mansion's current resident, a decent but untested Southerner, listens to the ultimatum on the tape: If the U.S. does not make Israel withdraw from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem within 36 hours, a nuclear device concealed in New York City will be detonated by satellite command.

The scene, of course, is fiction. No portable nuclear bomb awaited triggering; President Gaddafi, for all his Israelophobia, had taped no such doomsday threat. Yet for thousands of French readers the scenario seems icily plausible. The Fifth Horseman is France's hottest bestseller this winter only four weeks after publication. (The book will be published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster in July.) Co-Authors Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Is Paris Burning?, O Jerusalem) have so convincingly interwoven fact and fiction that the details of civilization's vulnerability to nuclear blackmail appear totally realistic.

Collins, 50, an American and a former Newsweek bureau chief in Paris, and Frenchman Lapierre, 48, a former editor at Paris-Match, spent four years interviewing and researching for the book on five continents, producing what they call "research-fiction." In the process, they talked with U.S. nuclear scientists at Los Alamos, civil defense experts in New York, Arab students in Europe and North Africa, and Israeli generals, not to mention a brace of agents from the CIA, Israel's Mossad and the S.D.E.C.E., the French secret service.

They even hired a former police officer to introduce them to the gamy underworld of New York pickpockets and ID-card fixers. Gaddafi was selected as the fictional blackmailer, explains Lapierre, "because he was not susceptible to [U.S.] reprisals, having such a small population and all that sand."

Its wealth of factual information gives the book the air more of crackling investigative journalism than of fast-moving fiction. Virtually all the international figures in The Fifth Horseman--the important exception being the U.S. President--are identified and living people. Israeli Premier Menachem Begin's daughter Hassia plays the piano in the family's Jerusalem apartment; France's President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has a secret meeting with his top aides to discuss energy matters.

But the most hair-raising detail is the revelation that there have actually been more than 50 attempts at nuclear blackmail in the U.S.; that figure is confirmed by Washington officials, although they note that all were hoaxes or extortion attempts and that no nuclear device was ever involved. The authors claim that one of the blackmail ploys, supposedly hatched by Palestinians, forced President Gerald Ford in the spring of 1974 to consider the evacuation of Boston. Officials in Boston and Washington admit that Ford did know of such a threat, but that they never could identify who was behind it. No evacuation was ever considered.

Just as well. The Collins and Lapierre research indicates that civil defense contingency plans for evacuating 11 million people from the New York metropolitan area are laughable. During an inventory of the city's 1950s-era nuclear fallout shelters, it was discovered that millions of tins of biscuits, part of emergency food supplies, had been shipped to Nicaragua in 1972 after a severe earthquake there. Dope addicts had rifled painkilling narcotics from first-aid kits.

The authors hope their description of how easily a nuclear blackmail attempt can be brought off will, as Lapierre says, "alert some heads of state to the dangers of nuclear proliferation." Among the intended targets of the warning is Lapierre's own France, which canceled a nuclear reactor sale to Pakistan only under heavy and persistent U.S. pressure. Said Lapierre last week: "The attitude of the French government influenced us to some degree to write the book."

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