And the part about Central Park. That seems just strange. No terrorist with a nuclear explosive in New York would detonate it in Central Park (9/11 attacks were also not focused on Central Park. Gee, why not?)

They would go to critical places like Wall Street. Also, the terrorists might choose to create an EMP nuke weapon by shooting it a short distance above New York. Which would essentially destroy the entire NY economy.

Also, if terrorists can build a small nuclear weapon, they could build a larger one very easily. The most difficult part would in fact be securing bomb grade fissile material. Which is not that unthinkable in a predominantly nuclear powered world. The rest is relatively easy.

Of course the current White House has been hostile to that very notion. It reminds me of Ron Suskind’s October 17, 2004 NYT magazine article:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The White House believes it can create its own reality. The problem in a nutshell.

Being really smart and interested about topics doesn’t automatically make one the best person to teach them. If you call that a disease, the cure is to write a blog instead. (It’s Joe Romm’s preventative therapy. He’s tested it himself!)

Not that I think they shouldn’t write books. It’s more the unwarranted idea that their works are “teachable” or the product of a scholorly excercise. (For example, Copenhagen consensus “priority” rules are just vain and goofy if you don’t like them, and very interesting and informative if you do like them: and there is no logical way to resolve that kind of difference of opinion since the rules are just as arbitrary as those of a board game.)

Scholorship is as much about process as product. Some really smart guy writing a book is not an ideal process for producing good scholorship.

I’d rather a President, or any politician, even before knowing basic science facts, would appreciates the process of arriving at those facts (the scientific method, and, beyond that, the structure of the scientific programs that allowed them to be achieved), and is able to recognize and construct good processes for making future decisions. This, more than anything, is what Bush, for example, has failed at, repeatedly.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/

http://www.princeton.edu/ ~globsec/ publications/ effects/ effects.shtml

Fairly widely used. This was like a round slide rule dedicated to bomb and defense planning. You can still get them on ebay. I got one at a yard sale.

I am surprised that a physicist would speak to that subject without visiting the primary sources. The US has tested hundreds of nuclear bombs, many above ground – this is important data collection and assembled calculator display. Certainly would be a pity to lose the important data from those experiments. Troubling that Muller uses such wobbly sources. And I really hope future presidents will know enough to consult the primary sources for information.

A bit of criticism should go to the university that hosts his work.

Subtitle it “The Lies You Need to Confuse the Voters”.

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On a more serious note. How is the academic community reacting to this book? Anyone on the inside at the moment?

You’ve made it evident that Future Presidents is an ideological treatise masquerading as a popular science book. thanks.