The perfect weapon War, sabotage, and fear in the cyber age

THE GREAT BELIEVERS, by Rebecca Makkai. (Viking, $27.) A novel that ricochets between Chicago in the mid-1980s, an era when AIDS was a death sentence, and present-day Paris, where the shadow of its contagion still looms over a mother in search of her errant daughter. THE PERFECT WEAPON: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, by David E. Sanger. (Crown, $28.) This encyclopedic account by a Times correspondent traces the rapid rise of cyberwarfare capabilities and warns that ideas about how to control them are only beginning to emerge. SLAVE OLD MAN, by Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated by Linda Coverdale. (New Press, $19.99.) Set in plantation-era Martinique, this novel is a kind of action pastoral, tracing a slave's desperate escape from a savage master and his monstrous mastiff. His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy. AMERICAN EDEN: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson. (Liveright, $29.95.) The doctor to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel also created a legendary botanical garden for early America, now buried far beneath Rockefeller Center. Johnson tells his story. DAMNATION ISLAND: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York, by Stacy Horn. (Algonquin, $27.95.) A detailed consideration of the appalling history of the East River penitentiaries and asylums where the city once held its undesirables in forcible exile. ELASTIC: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $28.95.) "Elastic thinking" is the ability to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs. Mlodinow tries to understand how this happens in the brain, what it takes to arrive at human creativity, innovation and independent thought. SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE, by Alan Lightman. (Pantheon, $24.95.) In tightly composed essays, a noted astrophysicist and novelist argues that science need not be in conflict with spirituality. An elegant and moving paean to our quest for meaning in an age of reason. THIS LITTLE ART, by Kate Briggs. (Fitzcarraldo, paper, $20.) Briggs, a translator of Roland Barthes, here offers a philosophical meditation on the perils and pleasures of her vocation, one she compares to Robinson Crusoe's efforts to fashion a table - an act of "laboriously remaking an existing thing." FOX & CHICK: The Party and Other Stories, by Sergio Ruzzier. (Chronicle, $14.99; ages 5 to 8.) Friendship can be challenging as well as comforting. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Computer and cyber warfare is a burgeoning mode of conflict that poses serious threats to the United States, Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent Sanger (Confront and Conceal) argues in this perhaps overly worried investigation. Sanger rehashes the notorious Russian hacks during the 2016 American election along with lesser-known digital assaults on the United States, including the installation of Russian malware on systems that control-and could shut down-U. S. power and communications grids; Russian hacks of White House, Pentagon, and NSA networks, the last putting secret American hacking tools in the hands of miscreants; and Iranian and Chinese hacks of banks, corporations, and government databases. America, he notes, is hardly innocent, having engineered the Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear centrifuges and a possible sabotage of North Korean missiles. He further warns that federal responses to these attacks have been feckless and shrouded in a secrecy that makes prevention harder. Sanger gives a lucid account of national programs for digital espionage and warfare, but it's not always clear that the various technologies described hold much danger; for example, he doesn't make a strong case that Russian spoofing of social media accounts really undermines American democracy. Readers could use a more thorough exploration of the limitations of supposedly perfect digital weapons. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Mary Louise Kelly (NPR): Is there a Stuxnet for North Korea? John Brennan (CIA director under President Obama): [Laughter] Next question. --December 2016   In the spring of 2016, North Korea's missiles started falling out of the sky--if they even made it that high. In test after test, Kim Jong-un's Musudan missile--the pride of his fleet--was exploding on the launch pad, crashing seconds after launch, or traveling a hundred miles or so before plunging prematurely into the Sea of Japan. For a missile that Kim imagined would enable him to threaten the American air base on Guam and form the technological basis for a larger missile that could reach Hawaii or Los Angeles, the failures were a disaster. All told, Kim Jong-un ordered eight Musudan tests between mid-April and mid-October 2016. Seven failed, some spectacularly, before he ordered a full suspension of the effort. An 88 percent failure rate was unheard-of, especially for a proven design. The Musudan was based on a compact but long-range missile the Soviets had built in the 1960s for launching from submarines. Its small size but high power made it perfect for Kim's new strategy: shipping missiles around the country on mobile launchers and storing them in mountain tunnels, where Ameri­can satellites would have trouble finding them. As part of his effort to boost the range and lethality of the North's missile fleet, Kim had invested heavily in modifying the Soviet engines. The Musudan was far more complex than the Scud, the short-range missiles the North had made billions selling to Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, among other nations. Developing the Musudan technology was critical for Kim: He hoped it would pave the way for a whole new generation of single-stage and multistage missiles. With those in his arsenal, he could make good on his threat that no Ameri­can base in the Pacific--and ultimately no American city--would be beyond his reach. The North had been in the missile-launching business for a long time and had gained a reputation for mastering the art. So the serial run of Musudan failures in 2016--three in April, two in May and June, then two more in October, after the North had taken a pause to figure out what was happening to them--was confounding. The his­tory of missile testing suggested that everyone suffered a lot of failures in the beginning, then figured it out and made things work. That's what happened during the race between the United States and the So­viet Union to build intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s and '60s, an era marked by many spectacular crashes before the engineers and missileers figured out the technology. The Musudan experience reversed the usual trend. After years of successful tests of other missiles, it was as if North Korea's engineers forgot everything they'd learned. Kim and his scientists were highly aware of what the United States and Israel had done to the Iranian nuclear program, and they had tried to insulate themselves from the same kind of attack. But the high failure rate of the missiles forced the North Korean leader to reas­sess the possibility that someone--maybe the Americans, maybe the South Koreans--was sabotaging his system. By October 2016, reports emerged that Kim Jong-un had ordered an investigation into whether the United States had somehow incapacitated the electronic guts of the missiles, perhaps getting inside their electronics or their command-and-control systems. And there was always the possibility that an in­sider was involved, or even several. After each North Korean failure, the Pentagon would announce that it had detected a test, and frequently would even celebrate the mis­sile's failure. "It was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch that was unsuccessful," a Pentagon spokesman told reporters in April 2016, after the first full test of the Musudan, timed to celebrate the birthday of the country's founder, Kim Il-sung. When subsequent attempts failed, the official news release from the Pentagon included dryly worded boilerplate that "The North American Aerospace Defense Command de­termined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America." The statements never speculated about what went wrong. But there was a lot of speculation inside the Pentagon, the NSA, and the White House, among the select group who knew about the classified US program to escalate cyber and electronic attacks against North Korea, with a particular focus on its missile tests. Each explo­sion, each case of a missile going off course and falling into the sea, prompted the same urgent question: "Was this because of us?" Excerpted from The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.