Far ahead of its time. Fascinating and perhaps prophetic

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	• The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994 - 236 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Absorbing, Fascinating and Still Pertinent

Despite being written 30 years ago this is still an amazing and pertinent book about all things nuclear.

First off it is another McPhee homerun. His style of just following tangents, paying attention to all the interesting details that paint the full picture and which most authors would ignore, until the tangents all coalesce into a bigger story works incredibly well. So well that I'm surprised he seems to be one of the only authors to use it, but he does it masterfully.

This book is about the life of Theodore Taylor, a brilliant nuclear engineer and weapons designer. And about mining nuclear material, and processing it into fuel (not only how, but WHERE, what the plants look like, how big they are, how many people work there, what comes in one end and what comes out the other end and where does the stuff go after that), and transporting nuclear materials, and the Manhattan project, and nuclear weapon testing, and nuclear reactor design, and nuclear safety, and the Orion spaceship design, and building coast to coast underground tunnels with specially designed nuclear bombs, and a thousand other incredibly interesting topics.

The writing style is immensely absorbing, and perhaps the biggest theme is safeguarding commercial nuclear material so that terrorists cannot get a hold of it and build a bomb that could topple the World Trade Center. Considering this book was written in the early seventies its foresight is unbelievable, and in a post 9-11 world where nuclear power is again receiving attention as an oil alternative the information in this book is still relevant.

Highly recommended!

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Prophetic, scary and still important

John McPhee is a writer for the New Yorker with a particular focus on science and nature. His heroes tend not to be the pure scientists but the engineers, the doers. His 1987 profile of the Old River Control Structure, the enormously complex and epic-scale engineering works that prevent the main body of the waters of the Mississippi from spilling down the Atchafalaya as they really want to, was widely linked at the time of the New Orleans floods last year and deservedly so -- search for "McPhee Old River Control" to read it, it's well worth it. He has a love for the concrete that doesn't prevent him having a good understanding of the underlying science that his engineers use and writes clearly and with energy.

The Curve of Binding Energy is about Ted Taylor, a physicist from Los Alamos, his efforts to develop the lightest fission bomb that he possibly could, and how his research pushed him in the direction of proper oversight of post-fission materials. The writing is excellent, pacey and readable, though at times tending too much to the New Yorker structure of "At facility Y I was ushered in to meet Expert X. He had shrewd eyes and an expansive, welcoming half-smile at the corners of his mouth. He said Z." The basic message is: (1) plutonium is easy to get access to; (2) with current (1974) practices and volumes the amount necessary to produce a bomb (15 kg) would be lost in the statistical noise; (3) this will only get worse as volumes produced go up, and they're projected to go up massively.

This is all from the perspective of 1974, of course. Since then, prompted in part by the concerns this book raised (and in part by independent factors such as a fall in the price of oil), the US cut back hugely on reactor starts. Nevertheless, nuclear power in the US grew from 114.0 billion MwH (out of a total of of 1867.1 billion MwH) in 1974 to 763 out of 3721 in 2004, in other words from 6% to 21%. Global annual plutonium production has gone up by a factor of 4, which granted is a lot but isn't the exponential increase predicted by the book. This is in part because the US contributes much less plutonium than you'd expect, in part because it hasn't adopted fast breeder reactors.

So the good news is that the US seems to have taken the issue relatively seriously. The bad news is that the UK and France between them hold 50% of the civilian plutonium in the world. I'm shocked by the lack of serious public awareness and serious official response in those two countries -- the protests seem to have died down a lot since the 80s but the problems have just got worse. The other bad news is that nuclear material keeps going missing in Russia, though under a 1994 agreement the US is continuing to pay some of the costs of shutting the relevant reactors down and moving to fossil fuels.

Ultimately, given that deterrence works against states, the question is how to prevent terrorists from getting the bomb? One part of the answer is simply increased vigilance, which has the advantage of protecting against all attacks: the terrorists don't necessarily need the bomb, after all. Another part is increased spending on counter-proliferation measures like the Russia program. Another part, perhaps, is engaging with countries that want to develop nuclear power to make sure that their plants are efficient and safe. And another part, unfortunately, is probably to accept that in the future there will be the occasional bomb in a major city and people will die but life will go on. All of these conclusions are reached in the book: they haven't dated, and in an important sense neither has the book itself.

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One of the most influential books of the last 30 years

"The Curve of Binding Energy" is the landmark work that changed the American government's collective mind about the possibility of nuclear terrorism. It is fair to say that until nuclear weapon designer Ted Taylor sat down with John McPhee, and until McPhee's articles and book were published, the U.S. government believed that building a nuclear weapon required a regiment of top scientists and an effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project, something which could only be done by major industrialized powers (despite China).

After "Curve" was published, the government accepted the idea that terrorists could build nuclear devices, given only that they had access to fissile material and shifted gears almost immediately, an occurrence as rare as its effects were crucial. Taylor demonstrated that a few competent people mining the scientific literature could do the job. Many millions of dollars, pounds, francs, euros and rubles have been spent by many governments since publication of "Curve" to ensure that no terrorist ever gets his hands on plutonium or enriched uranium, and we are all safer as a result.

The book is, of course, incredibly readable and compelling. One would not expect less from the foremost prose stylist in the United States.

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Nuclear Bombs for Dummies

Theodore B. Taylor, the physicist who was the subject of this book died in 2004, but not before he had completed his spiritual journey from nuclear bomb maker to nuclear protester. Even though the text of this book originally appeared in "The New Yorker" in 1973, Taylor was still driven to publish his own works on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. McPhee has a very understated style ("just the facts, ma'am"), but this book is still the most frightening I've ever read. I can't decide whether I would want him to write a sequel, because the threat of a nuclear bomb explosion is even greater today than it was in 1973. Just ask yourself the following questions:

Is there more plutonium available to terrorists in 2006 than there was in 1973? Yes.

Do more nations have nuclear capability? Yes.

Can a nuclear bomb be built that is even smaller and more efficient than its 1973 counterpart? Yes.

Are the instructions for building a nuclear device more readily available than they were in 1973? Yes.

Do some people hate America even more than they did in 1973? Decide this one for yourself.

John McPhee, staff writer for the "New Yorker" and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of twenty-seven books on subjects as various as oranges and the merchant marine, has written a nuclear explosion of a book in "The Curve of Binding Energy." It's one of those books that is even more relevant now than when it was written. Essentially, it's a blueprint of how to build a nuclear device using materials at hand, along with a chunk of rather easily stolen U-235 or plutonium. Theodore B. Taylor, himself the creator of smaller, more efficient nuclear bombs, tells us where to steal the plutonium, how to assemble a bomb, even gives hints on where to plant it--one of the eeriest parts of this book has Taylor and McPhee exploring the now-vanished towers of the World Trade Center, trying to pick the spot where a nuclear device could do the most damage.

"The Curve of Binding Energy" is a must read for every man, jack, and paper-pusher in the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention both houses of Congress. I imagine the first reaction of many Congresspersons would be to ban this book, but it's way too late for that, my friend.

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Far ahead of its time. Fascinating and perhaps prophetic

I read this book in 1975 and have subsequently reread it several times. The possibilities imagined in this book haven't yet come to pass, mainly, I think, because Ted Taylor is a genius and the terrorists are actually pretty stupid. Dr. Taylor, or someone like him, could build a home-made bomb that would make the events of 9/11 look like a tea party. However, the people motivated to actually carry out events like 9/11 are fortunately not so technically inclined.

The book spells out in chilling detail how it is actually pretty simple to put together an atomic bomb that could rival a Hiroshima-class explosion, IF, and it is a big IF, you have enriched uranium or plutonium.

The book does into enough detail to prove the point that bomb construction is fairly simple, but it contains several deliberate mistakes (one in chemistry and one in physics, that I could find) that keep this book from being a "blueprint" for bomb construction.

Like "The Hot Zone" about ebolla, this book may keep you awake nights if you read it carefully and really think about the implications.

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