One Point Safe

Rating:
Summary: The book is sensationalist; the problem is real.
Review: The Cockburns have found an attractive heroine in Jessica Stern and an important issue for national and international debate, but their exaggerations, misstatements of fact, and their treatment of the problem in terms of personalities and the interplay of good and evil in the U.S. government make it very hard to take their writing seriously. There are much better treatments of nuclear terrorism in both fiction and non-fiction. Buy and read them instead.

Rating:
Summary: Scary, exciting, thought-provoking
Review: Very interesting introduction to the topic of nuclear smuggling, and the dangerous deterioration of the military in the former Soviet Union. We in the military often spoke of the USSR as "a Third-World nation, but with nukes". That assessment is more true than ever, according to the authors. Grinding poverty, crime - both petty and organized - and an undisciplined, unreliable military. Bad as Russia now is, we really, really want it to stay the only nuclear Third-World nation (OK, except India). The authors' depiction of internal US politics and agency wrangling over nuclear terrorism is depressing. Read this book after seeing Cockburn's movie "The Peacemaker", and you can put an actor's face to many of the real characters.

Rating:
Summary: Scary, exciting, thought-provoking
Review: Very interesting introduction to the topic of nuclear smuggling, and the dangerous deterioration of the military in the former Soviet Union. We in the military often spoke of the USSR as "a Third-World nation, but with nukes". That assessment is more true than ever, according to the authors. Grinding poverty, crime - both petty and organized - and an undisciplined, unreliable military. Bad as Russia now is, we really, really want it to stay the only nuclear Third-World nation (OK, except India). The authors' depiction of internal US politics and agency wrangling over nuclear terrorism is depressing. Read this book after seeing Cockburn's movie "The Peacemaker", and you can put an actor's face to many of the real characters.