THE NUCLEAR TERRORIST

Confidently predicting nuclear annihilation and the worldwide destruction of civilization as we know it, Tor/Forge executive editor Gleason (End of Days, 2011, etc.) accuses American political leaders from both parties of treason.

“Future scholars may well argue,” writes the author, “that the most significant datum in U.S. history was that—for the sake of personal avarice—our politicians…traded with America’s nuclear enemies and helped bankroll the nation’s financial ruin and its nuclear destruction.” The author has become something of a professional enthusiast of the apocalypse, with a show on the History Channel, a novel featuring the destruction of the world, and now a hastily written and poorly edited broadside against the political establishment. While Gleason does bring to light how the United States has promoted the spread of nuclear power in dozens of countries, his unfocused approach makes it difficult to take seriously. The author conflates low-enriched uranium and highly enriched uranium throughout, though the two substances are radically different, a basic confusion which belies his self-proclaimed expert knowledge of proliferation. He refers to nuclear power plants as “nuclear bomb-fuel refineries,” and his estimate of the annual production of nuclear waste is dubious at best. Information boxes and bullet points on nearly every page are often only tangentially related to the subject at hand: Gleason rehashes the Bush dynasty’s well-known connections to companies that benefitted from the Nazi regime and describes the economic crisis as “A Detonating Debt-Bubble of Apocalyptic Proportions.” Gleason’s analysis of nuclear strategy and game theory has the feel of a quickly written undergraduate term paper. He muses, “Why India would want the ability to nuke the United States is a very strange conundrum,” and asserts that “Pakistan is so fearful of India, one could imagine that country nuking China, then trying to blame India.”

A tiresome and tendentious book that destroys its own credibility through hyperbole and careless composition.