A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

Few areas are as complex and difficult to explore as the subject of this week's cover story, nuclear proliferation. Nations jealously guard their nuclear secrets. Moreover, the issues arising from the global spread of nuclear technology demand knowledge in many disciplines. Says Associate Editor George Russell, who wrote the main narrative: "It's an expertise that is a very strange combination of physics, engineering, politics, psychology and diplomacy."

Russell became absorbed in the proliferation problem while writing TIME's 1981 cover story on the Israeli attack against Iraq's Tammuz nuclear reactor. At that time, remembers Russell, "I called down 30 or 40 books on the subject, some of them absolutely opaque." Since then, Russell has added to his knowledge by plowing through several cubic feet of nuclear literature, including an impressive stack of documents assembled by Reporter-Researcher Edward Desmond for this week's story. "The more you know about this problem," says Russell, "the less obvious the solutions."

New Delhi Bureau Chief Dean Brelis, reporting from India and Pakistan, began studying the black market in nuclear technology in 1978, when he ran TIME's Cairo bureau. Says he: "That's when I first heard that Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's strongman, was trying to get a nuclear weapon." After his reassignment to South Asia three years ago, Brelis started to amass notes about developments on the Indian subcontinent. He found that some of the most reliable sources on the Pakistani nuclear program were Indian officials and scientists. (Fittingly, the Pakistanis were prime founts of information about Indian nuclear progress.) Says Brelis: "In the end I thought that the often | bewildering and contradictory zigzags of truth and fiction made this one of the most satisfying assignments of my career."

Washington Correspondent Jay Branegan began reporting on nuclear energy for TIME in 1982, and contributed his expertise to the 1984 cover story on the predicament of the nation's nuclear power plants. "For this week's story, overcoming the great secrecy surrounding proliferation proved more difficult than understanding the technical issues," says Branegan, who majored in philosophy and physics at Cornell. "Not since college had I thought so much about the force of scientific ideas: history shows that any technology, once developed, eventually escapes the control of its developers. If the nonproliferation effort succeeds, it may be the first instance in history of putting the genie back in the bottle."