Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.
Georgetown senior fellow, @newyorker contributor, @FSGBooks alum, author of THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN and REINVENTING BACH
Doings in DC today recall John McPhee's scenario in THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY: "A one-kiloton bomb exploded just outside the exclusion area during the State of the Union message would kill everyone inside the Capitol. `It's hard for me to think of a higher-leverage target...'"
"A book holding, with pretty good authority, that tens of thousands of people know enough about the bomb and are close enough to what they don't know to produce a bomb at home . . . The report's art at its difficult best." --Alvin Beam, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer
"Though dwellers in the nuclear age should ponder this book, as much for its intellectual excitement as for its warning." --Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal