I had a conversation yesterday with a U.S. official who shared with me the gossip that shpilkis roiled the lower intestines of other officials who were awaiting Sy Hersh’s newest New Yorker piece. Huh, I said, what’s it about? My interlocutor hadn’t seen it yet, but rumors traveled: it seemed to concern possible U.S. plans to secure Pakistani nuclear weapons.

My source sighed in frustration. Why was Hersh writing this stuff, if he was in fact writing it? We probably have plans to invade, I don’t know, Canada, my interlocutor continued, since we plan for fucking everything on the planet, and soreporters of Hersh’s stature ought to be able to distinguish between what’s purely hypothetical and what’s real. And now what do we do? We have to say WE HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE IN THE PAKISTANIS TO SAFEGUARD THEIR NUKES when no sane human being has *total confidence*. But if they don’t hear that, all this ill will built up from the Kerry-Lugar-Berman missteps and the Waziristan operation and the drones and all the rest will boil over, and we’ll be digging ourselves out of this for weeks…

As it turns out, Hersh’s piece is basically writing around the disputed nugget that the U.S. is trying to convince the Pakistanis to accept help over their nuclear arsenal, and it expands from there into an excellent, reported thinkpiece about the substantive complexities of the program and Pakistani distrust of their American frenemy. Nothing to be afraid of — though, if I were a government official, I’d probably reach for the antacid when I heard Hersh has a new story coming down the pike — and something, certainly, to check out.

*Also, why not check out this 2008 post of mine about how to read a Sy Hersh piece?