- Hutchinson, Robert. Weapons of Mass
Destruction. London: Cassell, 2003. ISBN 0-304-36653-6.
- This book provides a history and survey of present-day
deployment of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The author,
a former journalist with Jane's, writes from a British perspective and
discusses the evolution of British nuclear forces in some detail.
The focus is very much on nuclear weapons—of the 260 pages of
text, a total of 196 are devoted to nuclear weapons and delivery
systems. Two chapters at the end cover chemical and biological
weapons adequately but less thoroughly. Several glaring technical
errors make one worry about the reliability of the information
on deployments and policy. The discussion of how fission and
fusion weapons function is complete gibberish; if that's what
interests you, the Nuclear Weapons Frequently-Asked Questions
available on the Nuclear Weapons Archive is
the place to go. There is one anecdote I don't recall encountering
before. The British had so much difficulty getting their staged
implosion thermonuclear weapon to work (this was during the years
when the McMahon Act denied the British access to U.S. weapon design
information) that they actually deployed a 500 kT pure fission
weapon, similar to Ted Taylor's “Super Oralloy Bomb” tested in the
Ivy King shot in 1952. The British bomb contained 70 kg of highly
enriched uranium, far more than the 52 kg unreflected critical mass
of U-235. To keep this contraption from going off accidentally in an
aircraft accident, the uranium masses were separated by 450 kg of steel
balls (I'll bet, alloyed with boron, but Hutchinson is silent on this
detail) which were jettisoned right before the bomb was to be dropped.
Unfortunately, once armed, the weapon could not be disarmed, so you
had to be awfully certain you intended to drop the bomb before letting
the ball bearings out.
- Walsh, Jill Paton and Dorothy L. Sayers. Thrones, Dominations. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1998. ISBN 0-312-96830-2.
- This is the first of the
Sayers/Walsh posthumous collaborations extending the Lord Peter
Wimsey / Harriet Vane mysteries beyond Busman's
Honeymoon. (The second is A Presumption of Death, April 2004.) A Wimsey insider informs me the
splice between Sayers and Walsh occurs at the end of chapter 6.
It was undetectable to this Wimsey fan, who found this whodunit
delightful.
- Jenkins, Dennis R., Mike Moore, and Don Pyeatt. B-36 Photo Scrapbook. North
Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2003. ISBN 1-58007-075-2.
- After completing his
definitive history of the B-36, Magnesium Overcast (August 2003), Dennis Jenkins wound up with
more than 300 historical photographs which didn't fit in the book.
This companion volume includes them all, with captions putting each
into context. Many of these photos won't make much sense unless
you've read Magnesium Overcast, but if you have and
still hanker for more humongous bomber shots, here's your book.
On page 48 there's a photo of a New York Central train car to which
the twin J47 jet pod from a retired B-36 was attached “to see what
would happen”. Well, on a 38.5 km section of straight track, it
went 295 km/hour. Amazing, the things they did in the U.S. before
the safety fascists took over!
- Haigh, Gideon. Bad Company: The Strange Cult of the
CEO. London: Aurum Press, 2004. ISBN 1-85410-969-3.
- In this small and quirky book, Haigh puts his finger
precisely on the problem with today's celebrity CEOs. It isn't just
that they're paid obscenely out of proportion to their contribution
to the company, it's that for the most part they don't know all that
much about the company's products, customers, and industry. Instead,
skilled only in management, they attempt to analyse and operate the
company by examining and manipulating financial aggregates. While this
may be an effective way to cut costs and improve short-term operating
results through consolidation, outsourcing and offshoring, cutting
research and development, and reducing the level of customer service,
all these things tend to injure the prospects of the company over the
long haul. But CEOs are mostly compensated based on current
financial results and share price. With length of tenure at the
top becoming ever shorter as executives increasingly job hop among
companies, the decisions a CEO makes today may have consequences
which manifest themselves only after the stock options are cashed
in and his successor is left to sort out the mess. Certainly there
are exceptions, usually entrepreneurs who remain at the helm of the
companies they've founded, but the nature of the CEO rôle in today's
publicly traded company tends to drive such people out of the job,
a phenomenon with which I have had some experience. I call the book
“quirky” because the author draws examples not just from well known
corporate calamities, but also films and works of fiction. He is fond
of literary allusions and foreign phrases, which readers are expected
to figure out on their own. Still, the message gets across, at least
to readers with attention spans longer than the 10 to 30 minute time
slices which characterise most CEOs. The ISBN on the copyright page
is wrong; I've given the correct one here.
- Sarich, Vincent and Frank Miele. Race: The Reality of Human
Differences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2004. ISBN 0-8133-4086-1.
- This book tackles the puzzle posed by the apparent
contradiction between the remarkable genetic homogeneity of humans
compared to other species, while physical differences between
human races (non-controversial measures such as cranial morphology,
height, and body build) actually exceed those between other primate
species and subspecies. Vincent Sarich, emeritus Professor of
Anthropology at UC Berkeley, pioneer in the development of the
“molecular clock”, recounts this scientific adventure and the
resulting revolution in the human evolutionary tree and timescale.
Miele (editor of Skeptic magazine)
and Sarich then argue that the present-day dogma among physical
anthropologists and social scientists that “race does not exist”,
if taken to its logical conclusion, amounts to rejecting Darwinian
evolution, which occurs through variation and selection. Consequently
variation among groups is an inevitable consequence,
recognised as a matter of course in other species. Throughout, the
authors stress that variation of characteristics among individual
humans greatly exceeds mean racial variation, which makes racial
prejudice and discrimination not only morally abhorrent but stupid
from the scientific standpoint. At the same time, small differences
in the mean of a set of standard distributions causes large changes
in their representation in the aggregate tail representing extremes of
performance. This is why one should be neither surprised nor dismayed
to find a “disproportionate” number of Kenyans among cross-country
running champions, Polynesians in American professional football,
or east Asians in mathematical research. A person who comprehends
this basic statistical fact should be able to treat individuals on
their own merit without denying the reality of differences among
sub-populations of the human species. Due to the broad overlap
among groups, members of every group, if given the opportunity,
will be represented at the highest levels of performance in each
field, and no individual should feel deterred nor be excluded
from aspiring to such achievement due to group membership. For the
argument against the biological reality of race, see the Web site for
the United States Public Broadcasting Service documentary, Race:
The Power of an Illusion. This book attempts to rebut
each of the assertions in that documentary.
- Meyssan, Thierry ed. Le Pentagate. Chatou, France:
Editions Carnot, 2002. ISBN 2-912362-77-6.
- This book is available online in both Web and
PDF editions from the book's Web site. An English translation is available,
but only in a print edition, not online.
- Hofschröer, Peter. Wellington's Smallest
Victory. London: Faber and Faber,
2004. ISBN 0-571-21768-0.
- Wellington's victory over Napoléon
at Waterloo in 1815 not only inspired Beethoven's worst musical composition, but a
veritable industry of histories, exhibitions, and re-enactments
in Britain. The most spectacular of these was the model of the
battlefield which William Siborne, career officer and author of
two books on military surveying, was commissioned to build in 1830.
Siborne was an assiduous researcher; after surveying the battlefield
in person, he wrote to most of the surviving officers in the battle:
British, Prussian, and French, to determine the precise position of
their troops at the “crisis of the battle” he had chosen to depict:
19:00 on June 18th, 1815. The responses he received indicated that
Wellington's Waterloo Despatch, the after-action report
penned the day after the battle was, shall we say, at substantial
variance with the facts, particularly as regards the extent to which
Prussian troops contributed to the victory and the time at which
Wellington was notified of Napoléon's attack. Siborne stuck with the
facts, and his model, first exhibited in London in 1838, showed the
Prussian troops fully engaged with the French at the moment the tide
of battle turned. Wellington was not amused and, being not only a
national hero but former Prime Minister, was a poor choice as enemy.
For the rest of Siborne's life, Wellington waged a war of attrition
against Siborne's (accurate) version of the events at Waterloo, with
such success that most contemporary histories take Wellington's side,
even if it requires believing in spyglasses capable of seeing on the
other side of hills. But truth will out. Siborne's companion History of the Waterloo Campaign
remains in print 150 years after its publication, and his model of the
battlefield (albeit with 40,000 figures of Prussian soldiers removed)
may be seen at the National Army Museum in
London.
- Smith, Edward E. Triplanetary. Baltimore: Old
Earth Books, [1948] 1997. ISBN 1-882968-09-3.
- Summer's here (though you'd never guess from the
thermometer), and the time is right for some light reading,
so I've begun my fourth lifetime traverse of Doc Smith's
Lensman series, which now, by
Klono's gadolinium guts, has been re-issued by Old Earth Books in
trade paperback facsimiles of the original Fantasy Press editions,
complete with all illustrations. The snarky foreword, where John
Clute, co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
shows off his pretentious post-modern vocabulary and scorn for the
sensibilities of an author born in 1890, is best skipped.