Indonesia: The Bamboo Bomb

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What's more, exclaimed one euphoric brigadier, "we plan to explode an atom bomb next year." Though Indonesia does have a functioning nuclear reactor (supplied by the U.S. Atoms for Peace program), it cannot produce materials for weapons. Even the foreign ministry shamefacedly admitted as much. The brigadier's boast was so patently hollow that the Malaysians—who obviously were the target of its propaganda potential—scornfully talked of Sukarno's "bamboo bomb."

And even if the Bung's wobbly country could support the debilitating cost of developing a bomb, Sukarno could not count on being around to profit from it. He has aged visibly since his treatment for a kidney ailment last month, and his hands are as paper-thin and shaky as his economy. Sukarno, 63, has lately begun suffering from intimations of mortality, told a confident that he would like to be buried on Bali, the Indonesian island of lovely women where his mother was born.