This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

A technothriller, in the Clancy tradition. "Starts off with Nuclear war—then the action reallystarts," it says here on the cover.

Has the Clancy-like intelligence technocrat who rises to great heights, too; in this case a national security advisor.

He seems to be ignorant about the tech he's so fond of, though. The bit that really bugged me was a section where jet fuel acted like aviation gasoline (it's really essentially equivalent to diesel fuel or kerosene—not volatile, not explosive).

There were some good bits where one side refused to believe the other because their simulations showed what the other side said they'd done was stupid. But they had, of course, still actually done it.

Incidentally, most of the June and July booknotes were lost in the server meltdown. A lot of it was O'Brian, I was reading through them in order.