BHUGA WOOGA!

A very readable and well-researched book about nuclear proliferation. Level-headed and concerned at the same time.

The first half of the book is a reassuring tale of what one might have to go through to try and steal enough enriched uranium to try and make a bomb. It's a pretty daunting task. Starting from one's best bet, in Siberia, one would have to evade a sizable multinational obstacle course, cross several borders, bribe or deal with multiple officials and unofficial local leaders. Once in a place where one might get away with something, such as Istanbul or Mumbai, one needs to assemble a set of risk-hungry machinists, physicists, and electricians to assemble a bomb, which, under optimistic conditions, would be about as strong as the Hiroshima bomb.

The list of problems really is incredible, and this bit is very well researched, on the ground. Nobody with access to uranium is a particularly obvious bribe target, nobody is particularly able to do a lot for you on their own, none of the countries involved between Siberia and any sort of port you could get away with anonymously are particularly keen on free movement without inspections. I really would have thought this was easier, but Langewiesche makes a good case that we've thankfully got some time left before random fools get their hands on suitcase nukes.

The second half of the book should be required reading for anyone who thinks that the Department of Homeland Security has done a damn thing but waste money. It's the story of how Pakistan's own A.Q. Khan volunteers himself to the service of Pakistan and basically single-handedly delivers the bomb to the rest of the world. He steals industrial centrifuge designs from Holland (he had a security clearance), builds a multi-national network of suppliers (I was surprised to see how large a role Germany played in this), and builds an industrial enrichment process in Pakistan. Freaking Pakistan. And it was one guy.

To be fair, it was one guy with the backing of Pakistan and unlimited funds. But he later goes on to give this technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, which was so technologically backwards that it hadn't even opened all of the boxes by they time they 'gave up' their program to the UN.

It's an interesting intersection of superempowerment and top-down decision making. Basically, making a bomb is a small enough project that one guy can make it happen, and cheap enough that there's plenty of Saudis who could afford it. But it's too big a process to do unnoticed almost anywhere: the parts require too much precision, the components must consist of just-so alloys and the entire process, naturally, takes tons of uranium and electricity. While a government can't just declare a bomb--the collection of skillsets is simply too rare to count on--neither can a talented group of individuals get away with making a bomb in private. And *any* state would see the construction of a bomb on its territory as a threat.

So, thankfully, there are a few tech fields left where superempowerment is not going to doom us all anytime soon. However, Langewiesche is appropriately concerned, and there's no Pollyana hope for the future here. The genie is out of the bottle, and it would be the first time in history that humans did not use a weapon they had. The only upside is that having a bomb doesn't mean being able to destroy the world, and that a limited-scale nuclear exchange (to anyone not in the given area, of course) is feasible. Not something I look forward to, but I suppose I should expect to see a nuke go off in my lifetime.

I've started to write short little reviews of the books I read. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is simply to keep better track of what I've read in the longer term, of course, but the main one is that I think one simply reads more carefully when one intends to write something on it, even if almost nobody intends to read it. Turning over the ideas in your head, and thinking of how you'd express them, forces you to read deeper.

Because I really do want to keep this habit up, I'm keeping the barrier of entry quite low for myself. That means no links, no revision or proofreading, and little to no proper internet research before I stand up and cover spectators with spittle with whether or not I've liked a book. No muss, no fuss. Just my thoughts after reading. If it's work to write it up, I won't do it for every book.

At any rate, feel free to read them. You can find them at on the site. There's a feed at http://bhuga.net/books-feed that one could add to a feed reader, were one were so inclined.

Fantastic!

Robb elegantly puts together a summary of the concepts of 4th-generation warfare and how to deal with it. It's easy to read, not longer than it needs to be, and has lots of nifty anecdotes to follow the numbers. The style is good.

The gist of the book is that the nation-state is on the way out. Centralized governments and services are simply too complicated for terrorists not to find a weak spot to attack. He's got example after example after example of this in Iraq, as insurgents cause a half-billion dollars worth of damage for about two large and other such shenanigans.

The last third of the book are actual suggestions on what we need to do--something the other disaster-hawkers have precious little of. He talks about turning our infrastructure components into platforms, decentralizing security and disaster response, and doing away with large swaths of government.

This book was unnecessarily cheerful for me--for all the drab future it portends, the light on the other end of the tunnel--governments less involved in our lives--is an important one to me. Maybe the thousands of unaffiliated terrorist groups, together, will force us into a more productive societal mode after a few states collapse under the weight of their knee-jerk police states. We'll have to see.

I also had one very grim thought reading this. A big part of 4GW and the treatise of this book is superempowerment: individuals have much, much, much more power than they ever did before. Robb, who evidently has a good deal of experience as a military analyst, remarks on this trend, and notes that it is true for both sides. That's not a traditional military viewpoint, not by a long shot. The question, and the thought I had: is individual or employment-based conscription something we'll see on the nation-state's way out? China recently told airplane pilots that they'd be liable for a year in jail if they quit their jobs to get better deals elsewhere. The US military already kind-of practices this with 'stop loss'--the most valuable profession they could draft right now are people with military experience. On the other hand, the increased use of private military forces and contractors says that the need/acceptability for actual conscription should remain low.

Robb talks a lot about how public relations is a serious part of winning wars--particularly on the home front. He's taken a step back from the whole thing and spends a lot of time talking about how we are at much greater risk of financial apocalypse from over-spending in an attempt to contain terrorism than from terrorism. One of the things involved with that is public opinion, and its strange--although 100% correct--to see someone write about it so plainly thus.

Highly recommended.

This is a sort of well-referenced diary of a journalist traveling to most of Africa's oil-producing countries. He interviews everyone involved, from oil execs to the maimed soldiers of wars fought over it, and keeps a very balanced view, while making sure to put out all of the numbers as he goes. Much more interesting than the numbers themselves, but not discounting the overarching statistics for the sake of a few friendly faces he meets, the whole thing comes off as an exceedingly well done overview of oil in Africa.

It seems almost impossible for a journalist or writer these days to write about anyone that's poor without blaming the rest of the world, and Ghazvinian avoids all of that. When he's done, you can certainly sympathize with Nigerian oil thieves, and you see that such a line of work, even counting the risk of criminal prosecution, is the most rational way not just to get ahead, but survive at all. But they are not freedom fighters fighting against the man, and the man is not there specifically to exploit them. He doesn't go off on a single anti-globalization bender, and even takes the time to note that such an argument is not really relevant to the question of what to do with oil money. If only there were more people writing like this; I could be interested in politics again.

I learned an awful lot from this: how no country but Norway has really turned oil wealth into a boon, why that happens, and why it seems unpreventable. Just how little influence China really has in Africa, but why that might explode. How much Africa really has (about as much as Saudi Arabia), and why its so much more expensive (corrupt governments, wars, nationalizations).

Of note is that this book mentioned some of the programs I work for. They were not presented in a particularly glowing halo. I didn't realize all of the countries we're suddenly concerned about suppressing terrorism in are now small-scale oil producers.

On the whole, it made me want to visit some places in Africa. There's a lot of freedom left there, from a certain point of view. Little chocolate plantations on little ex-Portuguese colonies, where their owners live out their lives doing more or less what they want, as long as they don't piss anyone off by hurting someone. Not a bad gig...maybe I should consider working a year in Ghana or São Tomé.