April 2, 2013

Ross Anderson: Security Engineering
 - Started reading this today, up to chapter 4.  Reading protocol exchanges in the technical notation hurts my brain.  The author explains it well though, so I just need to SDSU and work through it.

Frank Barnaby: How to build a nuclear bomb
 - Bonus points for having the BEST TITLE EVER.  I suspect a visit from a three letter agency on that basis alone.  This book is a brief introduction to weapons of mass destruction (NBC) history, development, proliferation, and terrorist feasibility.

Most interesting bits from this book.  Officially, at least one country has not tested their nuclear arsenal.  Also it had first person accounts from a chap in Nagasaki and a Kurd that lived through the Iraqi chemical gas attacks.  I feel particularly sorry for the latter, as even the text is going to give me nightmares.  I'm quoting this bit below, though it's not suitable for most readers.

[...] a young woman, perhaps twenty, in a magenta and orange dress, holding a baby in her arms. The mother could have been sleeping, but the baby's eyes were white and dead. Its clothes were continually fluttering in the slight wind.

We wandered around the houses. Most of them still had people inside. I went into one where a rocket had come through the roof. There was a sound of buzzing: flies were at work on the food the family had been eating when the attack began. There were six of them around the table. A child had rolled out of his chair and lay on the floor, face down. A man and a woman were hunched down in their seats: I couldn't see their faces. An older man, the grandfather, lay with the side of his face on the table, his hand to his mouth, his jaw still clamped on a piece of flat bread which he had been in the act of biting when the rocket came through the roof and filled the room with poison gas.

I sniffed the air: mustard gas smells of sewage; nerve gas has a much more pleasant smell, like chocolate according to some people and new-mown hay according to others; cyanide gas supposedly smells like almonds, though if you take a single breath of it you are likely to die. According to the Iranian doctor who accompanied us it was cyanide that killed the old man eating his bread and the mother with the child in her arms. All over in a second or two, he said. The others were really bad. [...]

I won't be sleeping tonight, methinks.