20. In 1930, Sinclair Lewis was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, and he received many other honors. But It Can’t Happen Here was one of Lewis’s less highly acclaimed books. In 2004, Philip Roth published the novel The Plot Against America, a counterfactual history in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 election—a plot even less credible than the earlier and more timely plot used by Sinclair Lewis
21. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Direct Books, 1991).
22. A series of scholarly studies have arrived at divergent conclusions. For instance, Walter Hofer et al., Der Reichstagsbrand: Eine wissenschaftliche Dokumentation (Berlin, 1972) conclude that the Nazis were culpable for organizing the arson. But other historians argued this conclusion was based on forged documents and that only one person, the Communist-affiliated arsonist Van der Lubbe, was responsible (Eckhard Jesse, “Der Reichstagsbrand—55 Jahre danach,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht [1988]: 194–219).
23. Oppenheimer’s interest in Sr-90 is reported by Jonathan Schell, who cites Joseph Rotblatt as his source in The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 55.
On the U.S. nuclear targeting plan for 1962 briefed to President Kennedy, see Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 25.
5. Time to Get Serious
1. A sophisticated and comprehensive report on the projects that are part of the “revolution in military affairs” is Michael G. Vickers and Robert C. Martinage, The Revolution in War (Washington D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, 2004).
Andrew Marshall (Director of Net Assessment in the U.S. Defense Department) played the leading role in developing this revolutionary perspective as an area of study and to guide the relevant Defense Department decisions.
2. Lowell Wood’s unclassified contributions on this issue are largely in the form of briefings. A recent example dealing with the gamma-ray color camera is “Finding Nukes … at High Speeds and Long Ranges,” a briefing given to the Defense Science Board on May 23, 2004. Sadly, Wood’s proposals and those of his colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories did not receive the necessary long-term funding and institutional support for team work to develop and test these important approaches, build prototypes, and find cost-saving improvements.
3. The inadequacy of today’s sensors is no secret. False-alarm rates are so high that an effective line of defense could not be established without an economically intolerable blockage of commercial traffic. Other applications of these inadequate sensors are farcical: In December 2005 the FBI and the Energy Department admitted that thousands of searches for radioactive materials had been conducted since 9/11, to look around the country for radioactive devices (“dirty bombs”) in parking lots and other easily accessible areas. Unless someone had sprinkled plutonium or cesium in the sidewalk, it seems doubtful this operation would have detected a “dirty bomb” that was reasonably hidden. And a shielded HEU-bomb could not have been detected even if it was in a car parked in the street. But this FBI search did stir up strong complaints from American Muslim organizations, since it was reported that many mosques and homes of Muslims were monitored—from the outside (Mathew L. Wald, “Widespread Radioactivity Monitoring Is Confirmed,” New York Times, December 24, 2005, A11).
One domestic source of bomb material is the continued use of research reactors that still operate on HEU (see chapter 4, note 5). The last section of chapter 3 deals with the prospect of a new domestic source—the MOX economy. To prevent theft or illicit sales of nuclear materials “at the source” requires greatly improved security for many disparate sources, and not only for the Soviet nuclear detritus, even though Russia now owns by far the largest collection of fissionable material and weapons that need better protection.
4. John Lehman, “Getting Spy Reform Wrong,” Washington Post, November 16, 2005; Newt Gingrich, “Getting the Lessons of Iraq Exactly Right,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2005.
The case for giving more weight to common sense in the workings of the U.S. government has also been made by Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America (New York: Random House, 1994), Paul C. Light, Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1995), and Jonathan Rauch, Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working (New York: Public Affairs Press, 1999).
5. Stephen Flynn, America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 50–51. Flynn offers rich and highly disturbing detail about the weak defenses to protect U.S. territory from smuggled weapons at ports and the land border. Flynn also recognizes the limits of going to the “source” and hideouts abroad. “It would seem that we are barely capable of hunting down these violent young men even when they are in our midst” (11).
6. The Quadrennial Defense Review Report of February 6, 2006, mentions the requirement “to locate, tag and track fissile materials rapidly … and to deploy specialized teams to render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world” (34). And the report adds “the need” for “capabilities to detect fissile materials such as nuclear devices at stand-off ranges” (35). See www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/QDR20060203.pdf.
7. Norman Ornstein, “How Many Warnings Does Congress Need to Protect Itself?” Roll Call, May 31, 2005.
8. From 2001 to 2003, the Brookings Institution conducted the Presidential Appointee Initiative (with Paul C. Light as the senior advisor), a study that examined the problem in great detail and made actionable recommendations. Apart from a fine study and a couple of legislative draft proposals in Congress, the initiative ended with zero implementation.
9. Paul Schott Stevens, U.S. Armed Forces and Homeland Defense: The Legal Framework (Washington D.C.: CSIS Press, 2001): see section on the Posse Comitatus Act (22–27).
