Reviews for The Intelligence War

The average rating for The Intelligence War based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-03 00:00:00 Christian Guyard Good but not great. What a frustrating book. First the good news, it is a marvelous history and worth the read. Richelson is the master in collecting data. He did it before on his books on the CIA and NSA and he does it again here. However, much like his previous books, Richelson lacks the ability to pull the pieces into a coherent whole. (I'd like to generously attribute that to the author having too much classified knowledge.) And without the context (that is surely somewhere in his notes) the general reader is unable to do it for him. In the 544 pages of the book there wasn't a single coherent description of the components of a weapons complex. It would have been helpful to start with the U.S. Manhattan Project and describe and diagram what were the key facilities necessary for a Plutonium weapon. How were these facilities different for a U-235 weapon? Why do we and other countries choose both? Why use electromagnetic separation versus thermal, etc. Then a description of how each of the other countries chose their paths would have been easy to understand. This didn't have to be a huge section of the book, 10 pages would have sufficed, but it would have turned the mind-numbing laundry list of facts into a coherent story. In the same vein, what detection methods were developed in WWII (he mentions a few) and how had these methods grown more sophisticated over the years. No one single section summarizes the suite of these tools. You literally have to go through the book and make your own notes to realize that some means of verification literally are mentioned once, and then disappear. Did we really stop using them or are they now codeword classified? Again, worth reading but could have been great rather than good.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-13 00:00:00 Matthew Green Very good book on intelligence efforts around nuclear development. It can be easy to get lost in the details.