A thoughtful series of proposals for reducing the excessive inventories of nuclear weapons still held by the US and Russia nearly a decade after the Cold War's end. Drawing on his own experiences as a senior military commander and director of the CIA during the Carter administration, Admiral Turner (Terror and Democracy, 1991) first examines the Strangelovian assumptions employed to justify the sizable stockpiles of warheads still held by the major powers: Moscow controls over 20,000, while Washington has more than 15,000 at its disposal. Although this latter total represents a substantial decline from peak of approximately 32,500 reached in 1967, the author documents the appalling extent to which these costly and dangerous arsenals are still heavily redundant in terms of deterrence. Overkill apart, he notes, bloated reserves increase the risk of proliferation and aggravate the problems posed by the ongoing deterioration of a cash-strapped Russia's military plant. Having estimated just how few nuclear weapons are needed to ensure national security (and conceding that disarmament is an unrealistic possibility any time soon), Turner makes some arresting suggestions. His centerpiece initiative encompasses three principal elements: a strategic escrow program (which, inter alia, would put all warheads in internationally supervised storage at some distance from their launchers); a no-first-strike pledge (confirmed by treaty); and incremental improvements in defense against atomic attack as well as inspection technology. He goes on to urge that elected civilian officials reassert their control over the military on nuclear matters; the author also recommends establishment of a Presidential Council for Nuclear Security and an organized effort to enlist the public's support for sizable cutbacks in America's stores of doomsday ordnance. An informed and informative contribution to a debate of vital importance to all mankind.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8133-3328-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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