Tag: Nonfiction

Review: Seeking the Bomb

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Seeking the Bomb

Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb is another nuclear proliferation study, this one focusing on how the bomb was sought, not why. This is an incredibly frustrating to read (but very fun to review) book because of how it wobbles across both extremes of political scientist writing.

Right off the bat a gargantuan flaw comes into being: Having a central thesis heavily committed to theories and charts that simply don’t really translate well into an incredibly complex set of situations with a very small sample size. This is disturbingly common in works by political scientists, of which the author is one. It’s also adversarial in its nature and cites multiple kinds of “conventional wisdom” as wrong, including both other scholarly studies and pop-history claims. This feels like a college work in that it’s written to defend a thesis argument rather than simply study the subject.

Fortunately, this book has a lot of strengths as well. It is very well researched and has an effective categorization of nuclear seekers as either hedgers (building up the known capacity but holding back for political reasons), sprinters (just openly moving ahead at all costs), and hiders (trying to keep it concealed until too late). Its story of how India moved from hedging to blatant hedging (doing an unweaponized explosion in 1974 with obvious hints) to just open use is well done as a case study.

Yet I still feel it lacks somewhat in terms of applying technical capacity. This is not to say the book never acknowledges it-it recognizes that South Africa’s ability to make a domestic enrichment plant and other technologies contributed to it being the one successful hider, praises the scholarship of Unclear Physics even as it disagrees with its conclusions, and mentions that Libya’s program was doomed. But I think more detail, more appreciation for both technical challenges and opportunities, and a couple fictional “Nth Country” hypotheticals would have done better. Almost any reasonably advanced country could sprint to a bomb in the kilotons, even if cruder and more dangerous than established ones, if they really wanted to, and I don’t think Seeking the Bomb comes across as appreciating that in its text.

Still, if this is an uneven book it’s an interesting and well-done kind of uneven, and I don’t regret reading it.

Review: The Big Book of Serial Killers

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The Big Book of Serial Killers

It’s hard to find a book with a more accurate title than The Big Book of Serial Killers. This is an A-Z compendium of both solved and unsolved serial murders. Being exactly what it claims to be is… beneficial. It does not shy away from how simultaneously disgusting and pathetic nearly all of them are. Even the smarter ones come across as less Tzeentchian chessmasters and more people who just got away with pulling the same basic trick against soft targets-until they couldn’t.

The book even pads it out by including a few cases of people who weren’t the classic kills-for-the-sake-of it murderers. It includes a handful of terrorists and excessively violent robbers who simply Trevor Phillipsed their way past every victim. The comparative effort of those makes the mentally ill creeps stand out even more.

While its subject matter is obviously not for everyone, this book is excellent for what it is.

Review: Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

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Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

Against my better judgement, I got another H. John Poole book. The title made me naively think “oh, this could be a set of practical drills approached from a different perspective.” So like any H. John Poole book, this is about 5% reasonable well-thought out arguments (in this case: Formations should be simpler and grenade skill should be focused and emphasized) mixed with 95% incoherent rambling about how artillery is useless.

The “logic” is a classic all or nothing where if the artillery fails to destroy everything in its path and close combat is still necessary, therefore artillery is useless and only suitable for clunky western armies and not cunning subtle ‘eastern’ ones. He even argues that artillery and aid of artillery has not been useful in the contemporary war in Ukraine, which is… something. But not something good.

By this point Poole has lost most of what teaching value his books had, and I recommend avoiding them.

Review: The Gardner Heist

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The Gardner Heist

Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist is about the largest unsolved robbery by price ever. In 1990, two thieves went into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston and then left an array of paintings worth (albeit by the less than exact standards of painting appraisal) $500,000,000. And as far as concrete undisputed knowledge goes, that’s it. The case has never been solved, zero of the paintings have been found, and not one court-worthy piece of evidence has been made.

I think you can see the problem with someone making a book about this. It’s like DB Cooper. All we know is that a guy jumped out of a plane. From there it’s nothing but speculation and rumor. Boser tries (the sections on how hard it is to track and recover stolen art are excellent), but there’s only so much one can do with basically nothing. A lot of the book is pure padding, which is understandable but not fun to read.

I can’t hold any of Boser’s choices against him. It’s just not a very concrete topic for obvious reasons.

A Thousand Words: The Woodstock Movie

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Woodstock

The Woodstock music festival is probably the most overrated cultural event ever. A ramshackle mess that could have very easily turned into a 1960s Fyre Festival or something much worse, all it gave was a huge mess in an upstate farm, music, and… a documentary film.

A massive reason-perhaps the biggest reason-why the concert is so well remembered is Michael Wadleigh’s masterpiece. Easily the best documentary/concert film I’ve seen, it cuts from the performances (of varying quality in every sense of the word) to interviews with dazed hippies, musicians, and the festival organizers, to things like the rainstorm and Wavy Gravy’s pronouncements, all done with amazing cinematic skill.

I could point out that despite being intended to be sympathetic, the interview subjects and even the whole festival doesn’t exactly look the best. But that’s the beauty of it, with the film being detailed and close (again in multiple senses) enough to give the viewer enough evidence to a make a judgement call. Its main goal was to chronicle, and chronicle it did.

Review: Shopping for Bombs

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Shopping For Bombs

Gordon Corera’s Shopping for Bombs is a look at the then-recently busted AQ Khan nuclear network. It is very much an immediate-reaction book written in the close aftermath of an event aiming to capitalize on the media attention. Not surprisingly it has the strengths and weaknesses of such a thing. The strength is that it’s clear and understandable to a reader who isn’t a nuclear procurement nerd.

The weakness is that it feels a little shallow. Some of this isn’t Corera’s fault (how would he know at the time about the intricacies of Libya’s program). But it could have stood to have gone just a little deeper. And while being dated isn’t anything the writer can do anything about, it’s still an issue. Even for popular history about nuclear proliferation, there’s other stuff I would recommend more nearly twenty years on.

The SL-1 Disaster

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One of the most overlooked but the single most fatal (in terms of direct casualties) nuclear incident on American soil is the SL-1 disaster. Occuring at the height of the Atoms For Peace phase in 1961 in a remote part of Idaho, it’s understandable that it wasn’t as publicized. But it is an ‘incredible’ story, one that seems to combine the worst parts of Chernobyl and the Byford Dolphin.

The US army was experimenting with small reactors. One such reactor was the SL-1. On January 3, 1961, three men were performing maintenance on the ‘shut down’ reactor. John Byrnes moved a control rod too far, causing the reactor to go prompt critical and immediately explode in a blast of radioactive steam. Byrnes and fellow technicians Richard Legg and Richard McKinley were killed.

That Byrnes’ moving the control rod caused the disaster was well established. But since all with possible knowledge of why he did that died in the explosion, that part remains mysterious. The most likely explanation is simply that the ill-built reactor had a rod get stuck, and while Byrnes pulled he moved it too far. Other theories range from a distraught Byrnes over a failing marriage not paying attention, Legg pulling a prank that caused Byrnes to get startled and yank on the rod, and most infamously the theory that a love triangle involving Byrnes, Legg, and their spouses led him to intentionally cause a murder-suicide.

We will never know the why.

Review: Defence of Villages and Small Towns

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Defence of Villages and Small Towns

It was 1940 and Britain stood alone. Colonel G. A. Wade published the pamphlet/book Defence of Villages and Small Towns to give the massively mobilizing Home Guard a rapid lesson. It’s worth the cost and as more than a historical curiosity. In fact, a lot of its lessons would applicable in contemporary Ukraine or similar (like defending a theoretical desert village in the NTC from the Donovian hordes).

Basically it’s intended to be a casual plain-text tome with as little field-manualese as possible about area defense. It’s about using terrain and available resources, the importance of time, and other crucial things like coordinating unit boundaries to avoid friendly fire. Useful in both historical and understanding terms.

Review: Unclear Physics

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Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons

In Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer takes a look at the ultimately unsuccessful nuclear weapons programs of Saddam’s Iraq and Libya. Instead of a technical perspective, she looks at them from a political/organizational one, showing how poor state structures (in the case of Iraq) and nonexistent ones (in the case of Libya) hampered them. From the outside, there aren’t any shocking revelations: Iraq could have had a bomb by the mid-late 1990s without the Gulf War or a similar catastrophe, while Libya’s was going nowhere by 2003.

But from the inside, it’s a detailed look at human failure,in terms of dealing with low technology, dictator paranoia, dictators not understanding, and disorganized factionalism. Some of it comes across as legitimately fun to read.

Unclear Physics has two big apparent weaknesses. The first is its academese tone. The second and worse one along the similar nature is that she writes in a kind of inside baseball tone as if this an argument among nonproliferation academics, saying “the conventional wisdom says ______” when she means the previous conventional wisdom among people in that very small niche. It’s arguments that I’ve never even heard, for better or worse, as someone who’s for an amateur read up a lot about nuclear proliferation.

But this is still a great book at showing the soft human side of an otherwise hard technical issue.

Review: The Athlete

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The Athlete

With football/handegg season now upon us, I figure a sports book is in order. As good as any other is Jon Finkel’s The Athlete, a biography of Charlie Ward, a quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy and then went on to a long and successful pro career…. as a basketball player. Especially since, by basketball standards anyway, Ward wasn’t even very tall.

To get the negative out of the way, this is a rose-tinted view of him that excuses one of his most infamous incidents (which thankfully just amounted to him saying something dumb and not doing anything). It also praises him as if he was Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson, which is just a little too much in my eyes. But it’s still an interesting look at a man who succeeded in two places where almost everyone can’t succeed in one.

A final interesting piece is that Finkel doesn’t really try to answer the counterfactual everyone is going to ask: Could Ward have been a viable NFL quarterback? Could have been Russell Wilson two decades earlier, or an undersized runt who’d get crushed by pro defenders? The correct answer is “We don’t know”, but it’s a little disappointing to not even consider it.

While not the best book, this is a good look at someone I knew growing up from his time on the Knicks.