Yesterday I was up in New York recording an episode of The Issue for Evolve TV which should be up in a couple of weeks. I had the opportunity to interview Graham Allison, which of course motivated me to read his recent book to prepare. Allison's book is about what we can do to prevent nuclear terrorism. It's a good book, alarming without being alarmist. That is, it's designed to scare us enough that we care enough to do something about it but not so much that we just crawl under the covers waiting for armageddon to come. In very simple and easy to read language it outlines the potential threat and has some sensible suggestions about what we should be doing. A lot of it is what should be common sense, but if it was common sense he wouldn't have had to write the book as the Bush administration would already be doing it.
Scariest stuff: we all have heard the phrase "tactical nukes" but man, we had some crazy ideas about what they could be used for...
One thing we presumably shouldn't be doing is putting nuclear plant security under the control of the vast crony capitalist industrial complex.
