The startling story of America’s role, over three decades and five administrations, in aiding and abetting a new age of nuclear terror.

In a masterful investigation, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark reveal the disastrous ideological shortsightedness that has informed American policy toward Pakistan over the last thirty years, and how decades of parochial and sometimes criminal policy enabled a nuclear scandal to evolve. Although seen as a crucial ally, Pakistan instead betrayed the West, building a vast nuclear arsenal in large part with U.S. aid money and selling the technology to countries hostile to the West, while more recently giving shelter to the resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda. Deception puts our current standoffs with Iran and North Korea, and the quagmire in Iraq, in a startling new perspective, revealing how by giving the Pakistan military succor, the United States has helped usher in a new age of nuclear terror. Based on hundreds of interviews over the past decade in the United States, Pakistan, India, Israel and the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia, it is a masterwork of reportage and dramatic storytelling by two of the world’s most resourceful investigative journalists.