Event horizon.

• Author: Leiken, Robert S.
• Position: Critical essay

Fred Charles Ikle, Annihilation from Within (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 142 pp., $24.50.

FRED CHARLES Ikle has been called one of America's two or three remaining "strategic long-range thinkers." Undersecretary of defense for Political Affairs and chief of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Ronald Reagan, the distinguished scholar from CSIS now has written a suggestive and disturbing book. Based on his practical experience and the futuristic thinking for which he has become known, his book calls attention to developing threats that receive little official attention or discussion in the media.

Though he is a "hardliner", Ikle's lifelong preoccupation has been preventing the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, whether by the superpowers, rogue states or--what now draws more of his attention--homegrown terrorists. Ikle takes a measure of personal pride, quite rightly, for helping to prevent nuclear usage during the Cold War when temptations were high (nuclear-armed superpower antagonists squaring-off in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Europe), but states capable of delivering nuclear weapons were relatively few and easily identifiable. But ours is a brave new world where "the ineluctable dissemination of technological and scientific discoveries" may soon make nuclear and biological weapons available to insurgents, terrorists, anarchists and doomsday cults. More and more countries will import plutonium fuel adaptable for building weapons. The Internet offers the bomb-maker unprecedented access to data. And the contemporary nation-state often lacks the will or the means to prevent spectacular mass terrorism.

Ikle traces the source of these dangers to a "split in human culture" between two modes. The mode that values faith and tradition provides the "obedience, power, and pride that makes government function." But in the scientific-technical mode truth is sought "via empirical verification rather than tradition and faith." As Karl Marx put it memorably in his Manifesto, this newly independent mode "created more massive, more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."

The turning point for Ikle was the mid-18th century, when "science began to pull apart from other domains of human activity" in the West. Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice--a ballad about the liberation of a robot whose relentless energy spreads havoc--and his Faust were both inspired by what Ikle sees as the rift in a...