Weapons of mass destruction threats, from nerve gas to dirty bombs, show how rogue efforts endanger everyday life.

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.