This book demonstrates the irrational choices that politicians make in the face of their refusal to confront the mass hysteria of the public whipped up by a tabloid media increasingly driven by excess and exaggeration. It also reflects badly on the woeful levels of scientific illiteracy acceptable among the political class. We are kept afraid by a flock of sheep in wolves’ clothing over issues that blight our lives and cost us dear.
Physics for Future Presidents exposes some of the myths. All that elaborate, yet partial and incoherent, security at airports is to prevent an occurrence of an event that would never happen again. When 9/11 occured there was no real necessity for the terrorists to call up weapons, at the time the trained response for cabin crew was to believe hijackers and do what they demanded, which was normally an uneventful diversion to Havana.
Post Twin Towers, no group of passengers will allow themselves to be used as part of a gigantic petrol bomb; rather they’ll charge the hijackers and tear them apart or die in the attempt. The learning curve was steep. But it only took an hour. After the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon the passengers on the fourth plane did exactly that.
Anyway, why guard airports but not train and bus stations?
We have been shown the destruction of Hiroshima and imagine it happening in our cities. Yet terrorists and rogue states don’t have access to that level of weaponry. North Korea has tested two nuclear weapons, and neither has properly detonated, although it is in the interest of a malign partnership between Pyongyang’s military and US neocons to collude in pretending the contrary. Were Pyongyang to suicidally sell such a device to a terrorist group its yield of one kiloton would have a blast radius of 150m and its power would be less than that released during the attack on the Twin Towers (1.8 kilotons).
How many would die would depend on the location. Hit Wembley on cup final day and it’s 100,000. Stick it on top of an unreliable missile with a dodgy guidance system and the probable number of deaths directly caused by the explosion would be double figures or less. Which is why US intelligence would be better off monitoring DHL than North Korea’s missile programme.
Richard Muller continues in the same vein to punture the myths around the anthrax attack in the US. It was not a sucessful attempt to kill five people but a failure to kill hundreds of thousands. Regarding the claim that we are running out of fossil fuels, we are running out of oil but we have coal for hundreds of years. Chernobyl killed 4,000 and Bhopal 20,000. While electric cars, recycling and solar power may be comfort blankets for the green middle-classes they do not solve the problems of greenhouse gases.
Physics for Future Presidents is iconoclastic in its treatment of global warning. It’s not arguing that we shouldn’t take the threat seriously, but makes the point that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is partial science transforming (albeit high levels of) probability into certainties. Yet whether global warming is man made or not is largely irrelevant. The solution to the adverse consequences is to lower the production of greenhouse gases to stop the atmosphere becoming a better blanket to keep heat in.
This book should be compulsory reading for Labour candidates. It might have helped Tony Blair with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Was he convinced by the dodgy science or was it just a prop for his faith?
As Muller writes, Mark Twain is often quoted as saying: “The trouble with most folks isn’t their ignorance. It’s knowin’ so many things that ain’t so.” Ironically, this quote isn’t even from Twain – as if to illustrate the aphorism itself. The quote is correctly attributed to Josh Billings, a 19th century humourist. And how he would have laughed at the state we’re in.
