Jeffrey T. Richelson's history of American nuclear intelligence, Spying on the Bomb, is timely, writes CISAC's David Holloway, given the faulty intelligence about nuclear weapons that was used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In fact the book could have gone further toward analyzing the relationship between the intelligence community and policy makers, Holloway suggests in this New York Times book review.

Before attacking Iraq in March 2003, the United States told the world that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program in defiance of the United Nations. That claim, used to justify the war, was based on assessments provided by the United States intelligence community. But as everyone now knows, those assessments were wrong. So Jeffrey T. Richelson's history of American nuclear intelligence, including our attempts to learn about Iraq's nuclear program, could hardly be more timely.

In "Spying on the Bomb," Richelson, the author of several books on American intelligence, has brought together a huge amount of information about Washington's efforts to track the nuclear weapons projects of other countries. He examines the nuclear projects of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, France, Israel, India, South Africa, Taiwan, Libya, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea, as well as Iraq. Through interviews and declassified documents as well as secondary works, he sets out briefly what we currently know about those projects and compares that with assessments of the time.

This may sound like heavy going, but Richelson writes with admirable clarity. And along the way he has fascinating stories to tell: about plans to assassinate the German physicist Werner Heisenberg during World War II; about discussions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on the possibility of attacking Chinese nuclear installations; about Indian measures to evade the gaze of American reconnaissance satellites; and about the bureaucratic infighting over the estimates on Iraq.

The United States has put an enormous effort into gathering information about the nuclear projects of other countries. After World War II it equipped aircraft with special filters to pick up radioactive debris from nuclear tests for isotopic analysis. It created a network of stations around the world to register the seismic effects of nuclear explosions. Most important, in 1960 it began to launch reconnaissance satellites that could take detailed photographs of nuclear sites in the Soviet Union and China. Richelson occasionally speculates about the role of communications intercepts and of spies, but these appear from his account to have been much less important than the other methods of collecting information.

Through these means the United States has gathered a vast quantity of data, sometimes to surprising effect. Intelligence played a crucial role in the cold war, for instance, by reducing uncertainty about Soviet nuclear forces. Alongside such successes, however, there have been failures. One notable example concerned the first Soviet test, which took place in August 1949, much sooner than the C.I.A. had predicted. Another was the failure to detect Indian preparations for tests in May 1998, even though at an earlier time the United States, with the help of satellite intelligence, had managed to learn about preparations the Indians were making and to head off their tests.

But the most serious failure of all was in Iraq in 2003, because in no other case did the intelligence assessments serve as justification for the use of military force. The information needed for avoiding political surprise is one thing. That needed for preventive war is quite another, if only because of the consequences of making a mistake.

Beyond making the uncontroversial recommendation that "aggressive and inventive intelligence collection and analysis" should continue, Richelson draws no general conclusions. That is a pity, because his rich material points to issues that cry out for further analysis. He suggests in one or two cases that failures sprang from the mind-set of the intelligence community, but he does not elaborate on this point. He has little to say about relations between policy makers and the intelligence community, even though the quality of intelligence and the use made of it depend heavily on that relationship.

His focus is no less narrow in his discussion of foreign nuclear projects. He concentrates on the programs themselves, paying very little attention to their political context. Does that reflect a technological bias in nuclear intelligence? Would, for example, the prewar assessment of Iraqi nuclear capabilities have been more accurate if it had paid more attention to the broader political and economic circumstances of Hussein's regime?

The task of intelligence has become more complex than it was during the cold war. A single dominant nuclear opponent has now been replaced by a number of nuclear states, along with states and stateless terrorists that are aiming to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the technology needed for producing nuclear weapons has become easier to acquire.

Many critics believe the recent performance of the intelligence community shows it has not responded adequately to this new situation. Richelson does not have much to say on this question; nor does he discuss the likely impact of the current reforms, initiated in response to the Iraq war, on the quality of intelligence. His reticence may imply that he does not think reform is necessary. Still, it is disappointing that he does not draw on his historical survey to discuss whether new approaches are needed for dealing with nuclear threats, and, if so, what those new approaches might be.

George Habash, a militant and former secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, once characterized terrorism as a "thinking man's game." Fighting terrorism is a thinking game, too, as illustrated by CISAC scholars Lawrence M. Wein and Jonathan Farley who use operations research and mathematics to devise rational methods for homeland security policy making.

George Habash, a militant and former secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, once characterized terrorism as a "thinking man's game." Using mathematics, researchers at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) have made fighting terrorism a thinking man's game as well.

CISAC affiliate Lawrence M. Wein of the Graduate School of Business and CISAC Science Fellow Jonathan Farley are both applying mathematical models to homeland security problems, such as preventing a nuclear detonation in a major U.S. city and determining whether terrorist cells have likely been disrupted.

Wein, who teaches operations classes about different business processes used to deliver goods and services, has focused his research on bioterrorism and border issues. He has performed, he says, the first mathematical analyses of hypothetical botulism poisoning, anthrax outbreaks and smallpox infections.

"One overriding theme of my work is that all these homeland security problems are operations problems," said Wein, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science. "Just as McDonald's needs to get hamburgers out in a rapid and defect-free manner, so too does the government have to get vaccines and antibiotics out and test the borders for nuclear weapons or terrorists in a rapid and defect-free manner."

In collaboration with Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan research center, Wein recently has conducted research to improve security at U.S. borders and ports. Port security has received significant attention recently owing to the furor over Dubai Ports World's bid to manage six terminals at major U.S. harbors. The aim of Wein and Flynn's work is to prevent terrorists from bringing into the country a nuclear weaponbe it an atomic bomb or a so-called "dirty bomb," or conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste.

"Of all the problems I've studied, this is the most important because the worst-case terrorist scenario is a nuclear weapon going off in a major U.S. city and also it is the one the government has dropped the ball on the most," Wein said. "They have done a very poor job."

Instead of using the existing approach, where U.S. Customs actively inspects a minority of containers based on information from a specialized tracking system designed to identify suspicious containers, Wein and Flynn have recommended the government use a multi-layer, passive screening system for every container entering the country. Under their system, Customs would photograph a shipping container's exterior, screen for radioactive material and collect gamma-ray images of the container's contents. If terrorists shielded a bomb with a heavy metal such as lead to hide it from radiation detectors, gamma-ray imaging would allow inspectors to see the shielding and flag the container for inspection. Wein and Flynn believe this whole process would cost about $7 per container.

"Right now about maybe 6 percent of the containers are deemed suspicious and they will go through some testing and the other 94 percent of the containers just waltz right into the country without an inspector laying an eye on them," Wein said. "What we're proposing to do is 100 percent passive testing."

Wein's earlier work addressed a different threat: bioterrorism. In 2005, Wein revealed the nation's milk supply was vulnerable--a terrorist could potentially poison 100,000 gallons of milk by sneaking a few grams of botulinum into a milk tanker. Although the government and dairy industry have collaborated to intensify the heat pasteurization formula for milk, Wein is still pushing for additional botulinum testing, which he says would cost less than 1 percent of the cost of milk.

Wein also has used math to study smallpox outbreaks, the U.S. fingerprint identification system and U.S.-Mexico border security issues. Wein's congressional testimony on the fingerprint identification system in 2004 led to a switch from a two-finger system to a 10-finger system. His 2003 research on anthrax attacks resulted in a Washington, D.C., pilot program to use the U.S. Postal Service to distribute antibiotics throughout the capital after an outbreak. Seattle is now testing a similar program.

"In Washington, D.C., now, if there is a large-scale anthrax attack, postal workers will be the first to get their Cipro and, on a voluntary basis, they will go door-to-door distributing antibiotics," Wein said.

He said the common thread throughout his research is queuing theory, or the mathematical study of waiting lines, but he also draws upon mathematical epidemiology for his smallpox studies; air dispersion models for the anthrax model; supply chain management for the milk study; probability theory for the fingerprint identification system; and models for nuclear transport and detection for his work with containers.

From tainted lactose to lattice structures

While Wein is working on improving the government's counterterrorism systems, Jonathan Farley is working to figure out when terrorist organizations have been effectively disrupted. His mathematical model is designed to help law enforcement decide how to act once they have captured or killed a terrorist or a number of terrorists in a cell.

A professor at the University of the West Indies who will chair the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science there next year, Farley is on a one-year science fellowship at CISAC. In 2003, he co-founded Phoenix Mathematical Systems Modeling Inc., a company that develops mathematical solutions to homeland security problems.

He is using lattice theory--a branch of mathematics that deals with ordered sets--to determine the probability a terrorist cell has been disrupted once some of its members have been captured or killed.

"Law enforcement has to make decisions about what resources they should allocate to target different cells," Farley said. "The model should provide them with a more rational basis for allocating their scarce resources. ... It will inform you when you're making decisions about how much time and effort and how much money you're going to spend going after a particular cell."

While at Stanford, Farley hopes to unearth the perfect structure, mathematically speaking, for a terrorist cell--or in other words, a cell structure that is most resistant to the loss of members.

"If it's possible to determine the structure of an ideal terrorist cell, you can focus on a much smaller number of possibilities, because it makes more sense to assume the adversary is going to be smart rather than stupid," Farley said.

Farley has suggested it is possible Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations already may have figured out the perfect structure for a terror cell by trial and error.

"I don't expect Osama bin Laden to be reading lattice theory in his caves in Afghanistan," said Farley. "But if it follows from the mathematics, perhaps heuristically, the terrorists will have come to the same conclusion--that this is the best way to structure a terrorist cell."

Although Farley acknowledges his model is not a panacea for terrorism, he hopes it will help reduce guesswork that might be involved in pursuing terrorists.

"It's not that I think mathematics can solve all of these problems," Farley said. "Because it can't. But it's better to use rational means to make decisions rather than guesswork."

John B. Stafford is a science-writing intern at Stanford News Service.