Kaizer Frans Hoseph Habsburg

There are few left living today who remember World War I, but it leaves an indelebile stain in our history books. It was the first global war and estimates place the body count at over 40 million. The events that brought about the horror of trench warfare and gas attacks are well documented and involve all of the world’s “Great Powers” at the time. Several of them no longer exist at all, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and some still exist but are no longer Great Powers. Regardless of how World War I redrew the world’s political boundaries, the trenches of Europe and the Middle East swallowed an entire generation of young men and led directly to The Great War’s bigger, meaner older brother – the Second World War.

Gavrilo Princip, Serbian Nationalist

The catalyst for the war is generally recognized as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg in Sarajevo. While these names sound strange to us today, Ferdinand was next in line for the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which covered most of Eastern Central Europe at the time. He was murdered by a Serb named Gavrilo Princip who was part of a pan-Slavic movement that preached unification of all Yugoslavs in a nation independent of Austro-Hungary. Following the assassination the Austro-Hungarians delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia that basically put Austro-Hungary in charge of The Kingdom of Serbia for the purposes of eliminating anti-Austro-Hungarian sentiment and rooting out the political opposition that had planned and carried out the attack

While the Sarajevo Outrage, as the assassination was called, supplied the catalyst, conditions were ripe for war. European imperialism was making a resurgence and the traditional powers were growing overly bureaucratic, top heavy, and were becoming increasingly saddled with debt. They had been building their armies for years and the Balkan Peninsula had already been a flashpoint for decades. It is surprising how many conflicts originate on the geographical confines of peninsulas with their limited space and valuable ports. So, when the engine got started in Sarajevo, there was ample fuel and nationalistic pride to keep it running for years.

Kim Jong-un

Jump forward a hundred years and the situations are chillingly similar. North Korea occupies the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and provides a buffer between Communist China and the Capitalist West in the form of the Republic of Korea. China, the dominant power in Asia for 3,000 years has, for the last 100 years, been quiescent as a result of Ming Dynasty abuses that opened the gates first to European, and then to Japanese imperialism. They are only now recovering from World War II in which deaths were as high as 20 million along with the utter destruction of their economy. They are flexing their muscle at the exact time that the West is weakening from its own towering bureaucracy, debt, and bumbling governments. And of course Japan, always a player in the Far East, has been seeking to secure resources and reacquire traditionally Japanese islands lost at the end of World War II.

And then there’s Kim Jong-un sitting in the middle of it all, just like the Kingdom of Serbia, calling for unification of the Korean Peninsula. That’s what they want, after all. Just like the Serbs. Not world hegemony under the Kims. They want Korean Unification as an independent state. Everything they have done since being rid of Japan’s colonization in 1945 has been geared towards Korean unification. The Serbs didn’t want to control Europe, they wanted their homeland the way they wanted it.

North Korean missiles are not the danger. The Unha-3, which carried their Kwangmyongsong-3 into orbit late last year, is basically just 4 Scuds strapped together with another Scud, or an equally inaccurate missile, stuck on top of that. The primitive actuator technology and low-grade IMU ensure that targeting accuracy after an intercontinental flight will be on the order of 40 or 50 miles at best. Whatever target they are aiming for would likely remain unaffected. Even a city would be tough for them to hit. A terror weapon, but one they would use only once, and which would likely be intercepted by America’s missile defense system.

North Korean nukes are not the danger. Their weapons are probably of a Fat Man-implosion or Little Boy-gun design which means they are large, heavy, and low yield. The mass of the Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite they orbited is on the order of a few hundred pounds. Their nukes are probably ten times heavier, at a minimum – if they even have them which my analysis leans against. North Korea cannot shoot a nuclear-tipped missile at the United States, and probably not even Japan, with any reasonable success. And if they did, they know that they would cease to exist. Fanatical yes, stupid, no.

The danger in North Korea is Gavrilo Princip. Our armies are arrayed and ready to fight. The tanks are in place. The aircraft are armed and in the air. The artillery already pointed. The missiles targeted. The ships stationed. A West weakened by corruption and inefficiency. A Russia seeking to reassert itself and reclaim some of its former glory. A China emerging from a century of irrelevance. A Japan hoping to rise above its defeat in World War II. A very fragile ‘peace’ held together by the world’s lone remaining Super Power. A status now nearly as fragile as the peace which it seeks to sustain. You never know when or where Gavrilo will emerge. And unfortunately, we are making all the same mistakes that the Habsburg’s did a hundred years ago, starting with lampooning the North Koreans in our media, for the fate of man is always the same: those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

John Brewer is a physicist, rocket scientist, and expert on nuclear weapons and North Korea. He is author of the North Korean nuclear suspense novel The Silla Project, finalist for the 2013 Eric Hoffer Awards, Montaigne Medal.

Regardless of the reason you go with a small publisher, it means you’re got a tough road ahead of you. As with a large publisher, the author is responsible for the bulk of the marketing. However, without a large publisher you don’t have something that traditionally published authors do – cred. Short for, credibility. This is unfortunate since some of the best books I’ve read in years have been independently published.

At the same time, some of the worst books I’ve ever read are also independently published. Often, seemingly, without even running spell check. And that alone wouldn’t have fixed the massive grammatical and continuity errors in the even the first few pages. Aside from the nonexistent plot and playing-card thin characters.

But being independently published, even if your work is good, the feedback comes slow. Getting reviews is hard. Getting reviews from established and respected reviewers is even harder. Getting the word out to buyers seems even more impossible at times. So each one of those positive reviews can be like gold to the indie-pubbed writer. But even those can get old when sales are lagging. You can get to doubting yourself and wondering if your work is any good.

With that in mind, and knowing that feeling only too well, I was delighted to get an email today from the Eric Hoffer Award for Books. They’ve been around for a dozen years now and have grown to be one of the largest and most respected indie book awards out there. Each year they get thousands of submissions and pick just a few for a variety of categories. The grand prize even has a $2,000 cash award. So hearing that my novel, The Silla Project is a finalist for the Montaigne Medal was quite a rush!

In addition to the normal categories, the Eric Hoffer Award for Books gives out several medals for special categories. The Da Vinci Eye goes to the best cover art. The First Horizon Award goes to exceptional work by debut authors. And the Montaigne Award is given to a few books that best exemplify the ideals of the great, French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, as works that illuminate, progress, or redirect thought. I can’t be more proud and thrilled that The Silla Project is a finalist for this respected award. But then, I’ve known for some time that no one who reads The Silla Project comes away unchanged.

The Silla Project is not a normal book. Like all books it began as a dream. A way out of having to rely on engineering to pay my bills. I was going to write thrillers and be the next Tom Clancy! It was a twist of fate that led to my choosing to set the story in North Korea. It was the plight of the North Korean people that redirected my thoughts to telling their story.

After four years of intensive – some would say obsessive – study of North Korea and nuclear weapons, I had lost all interest in writing a mass market thriller. It became my mission to do what I could to bring the horror of that evil regime to light in a way people could relate to. To help the people trapped in that real-life Zombie apocalypse. So it is with tremendous hope that the honor of being a finalist for the Montaigne Medal might help The Silla Project achieve a wider audience and help others to come to understand North Korea for what it is. As my friend, fan, and inventor of high-temperature conductivity, Dr. Jim Ashburn said, “It may be the largest hostage crisis of all time.”

Until next time,

John

[Note 2/12/13: Many news sources are reporting this as a major step on the road to having a functional nuclear weapon. I disagree. Consistent with North Korea's brinksmanship policy and given it's timing right before the State of the Union address, I still interpret this primarily as posturing. The test was obviously scheduled, along with the Kwangmyongsong-3 launch, to coincide with Iran's statement about nuclear fuel and the U.S. State of the Union address.]

In my novel The Silla Project, an American nuclear scientist is abducted by North Koreans and is forced to help them perfect the nuclear weapon they seek. The novel is fictional, the reality isn’t. At least, all most.

Today, sensitive instruments around the world detected seismic activity from magnitude 3.9 to 4.5 around the location of previous nuclear tests conducted by the reclusive regime. Like the other tests, this one was small, on the order of a few kilotons.

North Korea has been covertly developing nuclear weapons for many years, starting under Kim Il-sung, ongoing through the reign of his son, Kim Jong-il, and continuing at a renewed pace under Kim Jong-un. Having studied their program, technological base, assets, and tests it is my opinion that they do not yet have a fully functional device. Given the small size of the yields produced they seem to me to be more like “fizzles.”

A fizzle is a term coined by American nuclear scientists that refers to a bomb that doesn’t achieve full yield. Given the complexities of a nuclear weapon, unless constructed to micrometers in machining and nanoseconds in timing, the bomb will blow itself apart before the conditions are reached that would allow it to reach full yield. This is what I believe happened a kilometer under the rugged mountains of the insular peninsula.

The problem for the North is in fact the sanctions. The technology needed to construct a nuclear weapon is formidable. Machines are needed that can mill chemical explosives to micrometer accuracy. Timing dozens of separate explosions to all go off within nanoseconds of one another is almost impossible without switches that are extremely difficult to manufacture. Achieving the necessary purity of chemicals in a nuclear explosive is beyond the ability of all but a few labs around the world. Machines capable of performing such operations are strictly controlled by the few nations that can actually build them. Building them from scratch is extremely difficult. It is my opinion that the North doesn’t quite have the technology. Not quite.

Anyone interested in either North Korea or nuclear weapons would get a lot out of The Silla Project, as it remains the only North Korean nuclear thriller that has ever been published. Extensively researched over many years using original Los Alamos technical reports from the Manhattan project and hundreds of pages of declassified nuclear literature, The Silla Project details the approach a technologically deficient nation like North Korea would have to follow if they wanted to build a nuclear weapon.

So Kim Jong-un’s Juche-inspired scientists and engineers haven’t pulled it off yet, huh? Of course, they have been known to abduct foreigners from time to time…

Predator launching a Hellfire missile.

The first known attack by a United States drone occurred on June 18, 2004. A Hellfire missile launched from a modified Predator drone over Pakistan killed Nek Muhammad Wazir and two children. Nek was suspected of harboring Al Qaeda fugitives and was deemed a target worthy of elimination. While I have little information on the actual Nek, or the kids who died in the blast, I do know that on June 18, 2004 technology once again surpassed ethical evolution.

Since that first attack it has become commonplace to deal with enemy operatives using armed drones. On the one hand it makes sense. There are some really bad people out there who are extremely difficult to get to. If it would have been possible to deal with Osama bin Laden with a drone strike in 2000 we might have prevented two massive wars. And since then, a lot of scumbags have been taken out by our droids, drones, UCAVs – Unpiloted Combat Aerial Vehicle. (Stick an acronym on it and everything’s legit.) This is militarily justifiable in my book.

That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

On the other hand, the longterm ramifications of using robots to terminate people we don’t like is chilling to say the least. More than a few science fiction stories deal with exactly that. And while they were science fiction when written, we’re living in the future now and it isn’t fiction any more. While it may not be a six foot tall Terminator with a cybernetic brain and a hyperalloy battle chassis, what it is, is even worse – death from above. At least you can run from a Terminator. How do you fight a droid loitering at 20,000 feet? People hit by long range Hellfire strikes don’t hear or see anything. In fact, there are weapons in development such as the Advanced Hypersonic Strike Weapon that are designed to be launched from the CONUS* and hit anywhere in the world in minutes. So, an agent spots a wanted fugitive at a cafe in Say’un, Yemen and calls it in. Twenty minutes later, less time that it would take a drone to make the flight, the cafe flashes and ceases to exist. I have a friend, who worked on this project with me, who calls this a smite weapon. Even assuming the baddie who just got ‘smited’ actually deserved his smiting, the ethical ramifications quickly become as complex as a Mandelbrot set.

President Bush raised the first ethical hurdle when got the ball rolling on using drones to target enemy ‘combatants’. It is illegal for the President to order an assassination, and targeting an individual for termination is assassination. His administration got around this by reclassifying the targets as terrorists which basically means you can do anything you want. Sort of like pirates of yesteryear. If you caught someone you thought might be a pirate you could hang them without debate. Now I’m not saying that pirates don’t deserve hanging or terrorists don’t deserve smiting, what I’m saying is that reclassifying in order to circumvent law is a dangerous practice when you have the ability to smite. Smiting used to be something only God could do and as far as I know, he’s the only one who is omniscient.

Obama is greatly expanding the drone war. Not only that, we are vastly expanding our droid arsenal. New UCAVs are in development that can fly faster, farther, longer, with larger payloads and better tracking systems. His administration likes using droids, er drones – sorry – because no one need know about it other than the guy at the controls who thinks it is an XBox game. And the potential for prisoners of war is zero, unless you consider the CPU of a shot down drone to be sentient. But his zest for tech has raised a new ethical hurdle. Some of the people dying in these strikes are U.S. citizens which means the President is now ordering the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad.

“Hang him!”

Now don’t get me wrong, I would never imply that the life of an American is worth more than the life of an orc, but there are laws that leap up when an American President is dealing with an American citizen whether at home or abroad. Foremost is the Constitutional guarantee of due process. A missile launched from 20,000 feet based on a tip furnished by a character of shady reputation at best, is hardly due process. Then there is the 14th Amendment that guarantees every American citizen equal protection under the law.(I searched for it but could find no amendment or clause that says these rights are suspended when traveling in a foreign country.) Like his predecessor, Mr. Obama’s administration just invokes the pirate doctrine, best exemplified by Governor Swan in the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean-Curse of the Black Pearl, when Jack Sparrow’s wrist brand identifies him as a pirate. “Hang him!”

But classifying an American as a terrorist to justify an assassination raises some very troubling thoughts. Especially if you are the citizen of a nation that possesses smite weapons. First and foremost, what does it take to classify a person as a terrorist? I have a friend who generalizes Christians as terrorists because a few (like a dozen) highly-radical and deeply disturbed Christians have bombed abortion clinics. And are there any geographic limits? Since these strikes are not isolated incidents but are policy, obviously the Constitution doesn’t apply across international borders anymore. So, at what point does assassinating an American citizen in Missouri become legal if you just reclassify them as a terrorist? And if smiting them with a drone is legal, why not just send some uniformed thugs (complete with a legitimizing acronym) to shoot them on their doorstep?

UCAVs first resembled airplanes. This won’t be true for much longer and will be that much more terrifying.

We live in a time of profound technological change. For most of human history change has been slow. Mixing of people and ideas has been limited to physical contact. New inventions had only minor impact on society. This is no longer true and has not been true for some time. The ability to keep people alive beyond their normal lifespan has raised enormous ethical questions. The ability to prevent childbirth through either aborting fetuses or preventing conception has quickly outstripped ethics which evolved under far different conditions. Now we have the ability to smite from distance. It is easy. Convenient. Relatively cheap. And up to now, based on our standards, the people being ‘smited’ seem to deserve it. But the question lingers uncomfortably in the air: Where is all this going?

And therein lies the power of fiction. I read a lot of fiction as a boy and then as a young adult. Mostly science fiction, and it just so happens that these ethical questions were being asked in the pages of the books I read. Even before these things happened I was being forced to consider the possibility and the ramifications. But then I stopped reading fiction. Most people do, in fact. They go off to college, start a business, or begin a career. Who has time to read for pleasure when you’re reading ten hours a day for survival? The value of fiction plummets as it is considered to be ‘make believe.’ Well if fiction is make believe, then mathematics is make believe.

I worked for many years as a rocket scientist and part of my job was to mathematically describe the behavior of rockets and missiles, program these equations and conditions into a computer, and observe the ‘behavior’ of the vehicle. Billion dollar programs live and die based on the outcome of these simulations. And though a simulation can never express how an actual missile is going to behave when fired, a good simulation can get you 95% of the behavior. The same thing is true of well-written fiction. It serves as a simulation not of things described by physics, but of people described by emotions. In fact, it is the only such laboratory available to us.

As we grapple with complex questions of ethics, we aren’t groping about in the dark thanks to the efforts of creative, forward thinking authors over the last hundred years, who weren’t writing fiction as much as they were running simulations. It was Jules Verne who first investigated the modern ramifications of unlimited power in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As machine intelligence burgeons, it isn’t really new because Phillip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and others had us thinking about it four decades ago with works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and I Robot. Drones that kill? Terminator, anyone? Bioengineering, euthanasia, utopias, and just about every other ethical dilemma we might face has been investigated, sometimes well, sometimes not so well, in the annals of fiction.
Sadly, Americans seem to be losing their way with fiction. I don’t know why this is happening, perhaps it is video games, perhaps it is just a general lack of discipline, perhaps it is the way stories are selected and published, perhaps it is all these things, but the stories on the shelves of the bookstore offer little in the way of ethical deliberation. Yes, they are simulations, but just as a computer simulation can be used to design a moon rocket or as the kernel of a violent videogame, literary simulations can be used to teach or to titillate. A cursory examination of recent fiction suggests the latter. A more thorough examination reveals that the word titillate is far too weak. But it is a problem that Aristotle understood. Even 2,500 years ago in Greece, Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers of the western world, understood that fiction was a simulation of human interaction. An ethics laboratory where things that can’t happen, do happen, and people must face them and decide. It is for this reason that Aristotle wrote, “When story telling goes bad, decadence is the result.”

If you think quality fiction isn’t important, you are wrong. It has a stronger influence on the public ethos than any amount of CNN or Fox. If you aren’t reading quality fiction, you’re making a mistake. Reading crap will ruin your brain. Reading nothing leaves you defenseless. What are you going to do when things that used to be impossible aren’t impossible anymore and you are in the dark? When a computer becomes sentient. When a genetically engineered food goes amok. When quasi-humans are cultivated for their stem cells and organs. When a drone kills a bad guy on the other side of the world. When thugs show up at your door.

Is fiction important? You bet your life it is.

- John C. Brewer

*Contiguous United States

Serenity, the star of Firefly.

I tend to stay away from television. I’ve got probably, 300 channels. You probably to do. Or more. And let’s face it, there’s usually very little worth watching. Though the bandwidth is packed to the gills How It’s Made is usually the best thing on. I watch some soccer on TV, but have no regular programs. And when I do, they’ve already been either cancelled or run their course and I buy the DVDs and watch them at my own pace. Firefly is a good example of that and proof that great writing doesn’t have to be in a book. I didn’t discover Firefly until five years after it had aired. Magnificent writing that my entire family enjoyed. Too bad there were only 14 episodes. It should have run for five years, like the show I discovered a few weeks ago. Of course, the final episode of that aired earlier this month so once again, I’ll be buying the DVDs or watching on Apple TV.

The television show I’m talking about is Fringe that wrapped up it’s five-year story arc two weeks ago. I had seen a part of the pilot at some point but wasn’t in a situation where I could sit down and get sucked in. Maybe that was a mistake because they’ve been running them on the Science Channel in order. At any rate, I caught my first full episode about a month ago and was literally blown away by the writing. It was an episode from Season 2* that brilliantly used one of my favorite literary devices: having somebody make horrible decisions for all the right reasons and then having those decisions proceed to destroy everyone and everything around them. Except in this case, the entire universe is at stake. Other episodes I’ve seen since then have also been strong with well-developed characters, outstanding dialog, tight plots, and ample lines of tension running throughout.

John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop.

As a writer myself I’m always looking for great writing wherever I find it. And since I tend to write thrillers that lean towards science fiction I felt it worthwhile to catch up on the series. So I sat down with my wife and a friend last night to begin our Fringe journey by watching the pilot. Were my history of never watching a TV series when it airs so solid, I’d say it’s surprising that I didn’t discover this sooner. Like all the other episodes I’ve seen it was very strong, well acted, well written, and well produced. And the acting is sublime, led by John Noble who most of us will recognize as Denethor from Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. It was amusing seeing Denethor say with a big smile, “Let’s make some LSD!” in a way that makes sense, isn’t about getting high, and doesn’t offend a conservative like me. That’s the kind of writing I’m talking about! Surprising, creative, clever. The stuff we all try to get into our own writing. Too bad Fox did such a lousy job with advertising, then again, there’s some history there too.

Crude and stupid. A bestseller in Nazi Germany.

I’m looking forward to seeing all 100 episodes in order, though it is going to take me a while. Even though I like the show, I’m still not a big TV watcher. And, of course, I have my own writing to do, books to read, and life’s other activities. I looked over the list of episodes on Wikipedia and am encouraged. The number of viewers goes down steadily as the show progresses, starting at a high of over 13 million in 2008 and ending in January of 2013 with less than three-and-a-half million. This is good news for me because it means the writing either stays strong, or improves. So why do falling numbers mean better writing? I think Hitler said it best: “To reach the broadest masses you must tell people the crudest and most stupid things.” Fringe is neither stupid, nor crude, and demands that you pay attention. Good writing is where you find it, and it is always a joy to discover. Now if we could just get Joss Whedon and the crew of Serenity back together for four more seasons…

*Season 2, Episode 16: Peter

The scale of the production was stupendous. And while French dreadnoughts were not as large as modern aircraft carriers, the spectacle of men pulling the enormous, listing ship into dry dock set the perfect tone for the rest of the film. Some viewers and critics panned the singing dialog but, as a huge fan of musicals, I found it splendid and highly relatable. In fact, it felt to me much like inner monologue, which film often lacks, but deepened the emotional connection to the characters – almost like reading a novel.

What really pulled me in to this Les Mis, however, and what did not come across in the high school version, was the spiritual element woven deeply throughout Victor Hugo’s story. And it wasn’t just spiritual, it was based firmly on God. There was no attempt to remove, replace, or weaken the themes of faith, forgiveness, and redemption as often happens with modern retellings of traditional stories that substitute the Christian God with some kind of vague, universal spirituality, thereby stripping out any grounding for the characters’ motivations. While some critics didn’t appreciate the spiritual thread, without it there really is no story worth telling, much less singing.

Faith, manifest in various ways, used to be prominent in fiction because it is a key element in the human condition. Many of the greatest writers included strong spiritual themes in their work; as opposed to religious themes. Nearly all large, manmade organizations become corrupt and politically driven, and religious institutions generally follow this path as well. Spirituality is much different, beginning with it’s strongly personal nature. Among other things, it is an awareness of one’s failings in relationship to one’s faith, that drives the decisions we make, or just as often, the repentance we seek.

Sadly, spirituality seems to have dropped out of mainstream fiction for the most part. There is Christian fiction in which spiritual themes are the story- not really my cup of tea- and there is fiction that at best has substituted God with universalism and at worst, portrays anyone of faith as conniving and perverted. Gone it seems, are the days when stories spoke of the failures of people and how their faith leads them back to the light. Stories that speak to what it means to have faith and hope, where the true reward is making a difficult but correct decision, is something the world is sorely lacking these days.

The popularity of Les Mis gives me hope, however. The film is doing extremely well. Box-office revenues have nearly tripled the budget already. And while it is a musical, I don’t think the film’s success is based solely on the singing. I know my own recommendations are based more on the themes of faith and redemption than on the spirited performances of the cast. Les Mis’ popularity also gives me hope because this is the way that I write. Not in sing-song, but my work includes spiritual themes. In fact, it’s so much a part of me that I can’t not write that way. When I leave faith out the actions and emotions of my characters make no sense. If Les Mis is any indication, despite the reluctance to publish such stories, there remains a strong market for such work. Not Christian fiction. Rather, stories that incorporate the spiritual nature of people, fiction with Christian characters. And what is a Christian? It is a person who tries to hold his life to a higher standard… and fails. The primary themes of The Silla Project, despite the subject of nuclear proliferation, are the same as those of Les Mis: redemption and forgiveness.

Will this production of Les Miserables kindle a resurgence of spiritual themes in popular fiction? That would be nice, but regardless of whether the industry listens or not, it does tell me one thing – we are a nation hungry for stories with spiritual themes. Now I just have to figure out how to reach this market!

John C. Brewer

We like to look at our own time and say, “Things have never been worse.” And in fact, they are pretty bad right now. Each side has its solutions, and each side believes the other’s solution is the road to ruin. Think about it: what one side feels will fix the nation, the other side believes will destroy it. Each side must work against the other to save the nation. I even had a friend in this last election cycle tell me he didn’t really want to speak to me anymore. I’m sure this isn’t an isolated incident. And while this may not be the most our nation has ever been divided, it is the most it has been divided in my lifetime. And since it is my lifetime it is the most important to me.

When I set out to write The Silla Project, I didn’t know where I was going to set it. It’s a story about an American nuclear scientist abducted by a nation with nuclear aspirations so I could have easily put it in the Middle East. It would have been easier to write. It would have been easier to sell. But I’m glad that I didn’t because I have learned some tremendous lessons from researching and writing that book, and therein lies the power of fiction.

North Korea is a nation defined by a monolithic ideology. For those of you unfamiliar with the word ideology, as I was when I began studying the Workers Paradise, ideology is your world view and political beliefs put into practice. Ideology is law in North Korea. Law with a capital ‘L’. The Law in a Biblical sense. Written Law with penalties. In fact, one of the key principles of North Korean education is to place the main stress on ideology. Indoctrination of the youth. They spend as much time studying Kim Il-sung’s hundreds of essays and religion of Juche as our kids spend studying math and english. More, in fact. But unlike our laws, North Korean law doesn’t just carry penalties, it also carries rewards. Rewards for right behavior, like say, reporting a friend who made negative statements about the regime.

I had heard of places like that but until I researched this book I didn’t understand what that meant or what it can do to a people. Like my friend (I still consider him a friend) I once made and broke friendships based on ideology. But studying a place where ideological connections determine everything from your job, to your housing, to your kid’s schooling, and can even get you sent to a prison camp, shocked me into the realization that most people are deeper than their politics. And while I am passionate about my ideology, and vocal, I will not determine who is my friend, and who is not, by their ideology. It is a dangerous trend and one that is, quite-frankly, un-American, especially with this creeping reward system. More and more industries, with the media at the center, hire and fire based on ideology. In North Korea you can’t get a job unless your ideology is Red. Are we as Americans going to embrace this, too? Do we understand what that will do to us as a people?

I heard an interesting comment related to the recent North Korean missile launch. Actually, I read it. It was on Facebook I think. A friend noted that if the North Koreans were to launch a missile at the United States it would probably hit a Blue city: a city that voted Democrat in the last election. He’s right. All of our major cities voted Blue, even in states that otherwise voted Red. But you know, I’m not really worried about that. I’m not worried about Kim Jong-un launching a missile at us and, being a rocket scientist by profession, I’m in a pretty good position to make that assessment. I’m not worried because if he does launch a nuclear missile at one of our Blue cities, it will be shot down by an interceptor designed and built in a Red city. When our early warning satellite detects that missile launch there isn’t going to be an ideological comparison like Kim Jong-il would do. Our BMC3I will track the threat, compute a firing solution, and salvo the interceptors.

Our military discriminates between friend and foe with the colors red and blue. Video games pit the Red team against the Blue. Manchester United is red, Chelsea is blue. Alabama is red, Auburn is blue. And our political maps draw stark comparisons using red and blue. Sure, political beliefs are important and it’s good to be vocal about them, it is our right as Americans, but if we are going to continue to be a nation we better stop thinking in terms of Red and Blue for the things that matter. Because if we don’t, some third color is going to come in and take over and we’re going to be left wondering why we were at one another’s throats.

Yesterday the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), what we usually call North Korea, had a successful test launch of their Unha-3 rocket, placing a Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite into low Earth orbit. For the next few weeks it will travel around the Earth transmitting “The Song of General Kim Il-sung.” While this is billed as a scientific test, and I’m sure it has merit in that department, what it really means is that the North Koreans now have a ballistic missile that can hit any city in North America from their homeland. That Unha-3 is just a refined Taepodong-2 they’ve been working on for years. It also means that the cash strapped North Korean government can sell this missile to their allies in the Middle East.

But what do most of us really know about North Korea? We see images of goose stepping automatons on television. Military hardware rolling through Kim Il-sung Square in their capitol city of P’yongyang. Pictures of Kim Jong-il with his wild hair and coke bottle glasses. His porky son, Kim Jong-un. In point, they are caricatured. As a result we view them as ridiculous. Crazy. Not as a threat. This is unfortunate and dangerous.

When I set out to write my nuclear thriller The Silla Project, the first question I had to answer was where to set it. The plot began as a concept that could have been placed in any one of a number of countries with nuclear ambitions. We all know what those are because they are constantly in the news. But when I looked at North Korea I discovered it was the strangest place on Earth. Indeed, it is an alien planet. I had to set it there because I quickly learned that all my stereotypes about the Workers Paradise were egregiously wrong. I had heard of it, but I knew absolutely nothing about the place.

For starters, their entire culture is centered around the personality cult of the late, Great Leader, Comrade Generalissomo, Kim Il-sung, peerlessly brilliant leader and iron willed commander. But North Koreans are not crazy. Some of them are fanatical, but most of them are just hungry. They are held captive, all of them, in the world’s largest prison. It is surrounded by bars, filled with guns, and the population is held in check through starvation, privation, and a secret police network that makes the Gestapo look like crossing guards. They worship Kim Il-sung as a deity – though not as a god as westerners would think of a god – under a religious system called Juche sasang. P’yongyang is one giant shrine to him with thousands of statues and monuments of his likeness. This religion teaches them, among other Marxist ideals, that the United States – the imperialist agressor – is the cause of all their woes. They believe that the American forces stationed in South Korea are massing for imminent attack. If you visited there, you would think the Korean War, what they call The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War, ended sometime yesterday and that they manged to win despite countrywide chemical and biological attacks by the United States along with widespread atrocities in which millions, yes millions, of civilians (mostly women and babies) were murdered by being thrown off bridges into icy rivers, burned alive, experimented on, tortured to death, etc. (Do a search on “North Korean Propaganda Paintings”) Even the staunchest opponents of the military in our own nation would find their claims laughable. It is an example of what you get when you have no critical review process. Indeed, critical review of anything will result in ten years in a concentration camp, where up to 10% of their population is spending this Christmas.

It took me years of study to understand North Korea. My novel, The Silla Project, was a decade in the making. Americans can’t travel to North Korea so I did the next best thing. I learned to speak and read Korean. Studied Taewkwondo to access the culture. Poured over maps and historical records. Learned their songs. Compared satellite photography to thousands of photographs to achieve spatial orientation. Ate their food. Interviewed retired nuclear scientists and government officials. Read dozens of books on everything from their geography to their military. Studied their history. I even located and read old Los Alamos technical reports from the Manhattan Project – after which The Silla Project is named. The research that went into this novel is unprecedented in today’s quick-buck literary market. It is more like the kind of research that James Michener and James Clavell used to put into their work.

To know more about North Korea and better understand why they appear to be so bizarre I urge you to read The Silla Project. For whatever reason it is the only thriller novel set in North Korea, and as everyone who has read it has told me, it will forever change how you think about one of the most dangerous and misunderstood places on Earth. It will also give you an excellent understanding of nuclear weapons, how they work, and why they are so darned hard to build. It is chock full of formerly classified information that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death for passing to the Russians. While much of this Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information or CNWDI has been declassified it is still very hard to find, even harder to understand, and it took me years of diligent research to put it all together and present it in a way that is easily accessible to anyone.

Ironically however, I am not a nuclear scientist. I am a rocket scientist, which is exactly why I can’t say anything overly technical about yesterday’s rocket launch / missile test. Only that if the DPRK does have a nuclear weapon and if it is small enough to put on the tip of a missile it can now hit anywhere in the United States with only about thirty minutes warning.

That’s what people usually say a few moments after I tell them that I’m an engineer. Or a rocket scientist. Or whatever the conversation warranted. I guess they are thinking about the nerds they knew in college. But it is a true statement. I’m not much like an engineer. The primary reason for that is that I’m not an engineer. I’m a physicist. I just work as an engineer. As a rocket scientist to be exact.

For the same reason, many people are surprised to learn that I am a writer. They usually say, “Engineers can’t write.” And I say, “Exactly, because I’m not an engineer, I’m a physicist.” Then we have to go into that discussion: physicists figure things out because they are curious. Engineers figure out how to turn their discoveries into a death ray, or a nucleonic bomb, or a force field, and then sell it to the government for a bajillion dollars. Once a physicist always a physicist, but I really am not an engineer, I just played one for twenty years until I retired to pursue writing.

It took me a while to realize it, but writing a novel and engineering actually have some interesting overlaps. I didn’t discover this right away because I was so focused on the words. An engineer would say “x = x_0 + v+0 t + a t^2 / 2.” A writer would say, “Objects in free-fall travel in parabolas.” But once I got past that and began developing novels in a way that made sense, I quickly discovered that I had already been trained in the process.

Yes! It is a Matlab window.

Much of my engineering work involved writing computer code. If we needed a control system, I was the guy who would turn the control law into code so it could be burned onto a processor and then used on the missile. Computer code has tons of variables that hold data when it is being executed. To write the code the engineer/physicist/monkey must hold all the variables in his head, knowing what they are, what their expected values are, what their units are, where they are used, and how they change. The code below is some stuff I wrote to calculate the intersection of a cone with an oblate spheroid. Not as easy as it sounds. It was used in a program to draw what a satellite could ‘see’ if it was looking down on the Earth, so you’d get a nice outline of what is called the satellite’s footprint.

if (strcmp(method,’SPHERE’) || strcmp(method,’sphere’))
h = r_sinM – R_e;
%Account for large initial cone angles
if r_sinM > R_e
r_c = r_sinU*(R_e + r_sinM)/2;
%Move half way to surface
else
%Move above surface – only happens once
r_c = r_sinU*(2*R_e – r_sinM);
h = 1e6;
end
elseif (strcmp(method,’GEOID’) || strcmp(method,’geoid’))
[lat lon h] = ecef2lla(r_sin(1),r_sin(2),r_sin(3));
r_g = geoid_height(lat*180/pi,lon*180/pi);
%Account for large initial cone angles
if r_sinM > r_g
%Move half way to surface
r_c = r_sinU*(r_g + r_sinM)/2;
else
%Move above surface – only happens once
r_c = r_sinU*(2*r_g – r_sinM);
h = 1e6;
end
end

Some of the variables in this snippet are r_c, r_sinU, h, and R_e. I still remember what they mean and I’ve not looked at this code in about a year. There are also functions up there like strcmp() and ecef2lla() as well as keywords like if and elseif. Even the uninitiated can tell the code is highly structured. This is just a small piece of a much longer function with dozens of variables and functions, loops, counters, and decision making structures. In short, it is just like a novel.

Novels are full of characters. They do things. They have attributes. They go places. They interact and they change. You also have setting which determines what characters can do and where they can go, and plot that applies structure to the story. Character, setting, and plot must work together in a coherent way or the novel makes no sense. And just like in code, if an author makes a change, she must carry the ramifications of the change throughout the entire manuscript. To successfully develop and revise a novel the author must hold all of this in her head and see it all at once or the situation is hopeless. I’ve seen code like this. (I’m pretty sure Windows was developed that way.) We’ve all read books like this. One wonders how they get published!

Besides rocket science and writing novels I also work with wood. In fact, I run a small cabinet business. Kitchen cabinets, built in bookcases, vanities, islands. It’s work I enjoy. I’m using my hands, it is artistic as much as it is functional, the projects have a definite beginning and ending – unlike government programs and some novels. I’m very proud of a job when I’ve completed it. But it should come as no surprise that I enjoy it because, once again, it is like hacking code or writing a novel!

In code you have logical structure. In a novel you have a plot. In a cabinet the structure is an actual structure. The characters are all the separate pieces and the setting is how they fit together. Small cabinets are easy. You can do them in your head. And estimating them is not too bad. Draw them out on the back of an envelop, work our your cuts and your lumber, and build. Sort of like a short story, or a Matlab function. A bigger job is like a larger piece of code, or a more complex novel. I’m doing a kitchen right now with six different assemblies that must all fit together when I’m done.

There are a lot of components that go into a cabinet. Plywood panels for the sides, back, and base. Hardwoods for the facing. Doors. Hinges. Drawers. Countertops. And you don’t want to waste a $50 sheet of plywood or a $40 piece of cherry. You have to lay out your pieces to get the minimal amount of waste. To be successful, the craftsman must hold all these pieces in his head, in the right orientation, of the proper size and material, and understand how they will fit together with either fasteners, glue, or both. Drawing it out helps, but without the grand scheme in your head the drawings become meaningless. Just like a novel. Just like computer code.

For whatever reason we like to put things in boxes. Engineering is a bunch of equations. Writing is all about putting words together. Wood working is cutting and joining wood. But when you get down to it, all of these characterizations are wrong. In fact, these pursuits have more in common than they have different because engineers, writers, and craftsmen all create things, and their minds go through a similar set of steps along the way. Sure, the tools are different. Engineers use equations, probes, and sensors. Writers use typewriters and word processors. And wood workers use hammers, saws, screwdrivers, and all sorts of fun power tools. But what they use to get the job done doesn’t define them, and it doesn’t define the final product either.

Whether it is an airplane, a computer program, a novel, or a set of cabinets, you can be sure that the people putting them together were thinking the same thoughts along the way. How does one piece relate to another? What do I have to do to get things to fit? If I make a change here, how does that affect everything else? Am I still following the plan? And perhaps most importantly: Is it going to work when I’m done? Whether you’re an engineer, a wordsmith, or a craftsmen, it’s about keeping track of things and making sure you are consistent. It is about creating something that is both functional and beautiful. And most of all, it is about meeting the requirements. Because if the thing you are building doesn’t meet the requirements, then why bother finishing it. Nobody would want an airplane that won’t fly. What use would a cabinet be if everything fell out on the floor? And would there be any point writing a book that didn’t make any sense?

Just like in a great novel, just like in an efficient machine, just like in a beautiful piece of furniture, it is all about connections.  Understanding the connections well enough so that the artisan can conceal the practical in beauty. Because when you sit down in a great car you’re not thinking about the equations that describe the static forces in the tubular steel frame. When you walk into a gorgeous kitchen you don’t dwell on what kind of blade the maker used to rip the wood. And when you are captivated by a great novel you see nothing else. Function. Beauty. Design. Connections. Order is where you look for it. It is all around us.

For Christmas one year, it must have been Christmas of 1981, I receive an Atari 400 as a gift from my parents. The computer revolution was just beginning. I mean,Wright Brothers, 100 foot-flight type of beginning. My school had purchased a few TRS-80′s and us nerds were learning to program them. I can still remember ‘peeking’ and ‘poking’ the memory registers to coax more performance out of the limited BASIC language. I managed to blend my appetite for mathematics and my interest in computers with that Atari 400 when I programmed it to graph functions. I spent Christmas break of that year glued to the TV set watching sine waves, exponentials, and parabolas materialize on the pixelated screen. Lord was that machine slow and I remember wishing that I didn’t have to edit the program to try a new function.

Things have come a long way since then and I have been in the middle of it, all along, working in the defense industry as a physicist. In college I learned to program on a good old VAX 11/785. My first high-end computer, which I bought in 1989, was a Mac SE/30 on which I did the research for and wrote my masters thesis. I remember the workstation craze of the ’90s with Sun and SGI. Then when they were replaced with inexpensive x86 PC’s. The debut of Windoze. And how the Internet emerged from the Bitnet. It’s been an enormous privilege and a humbling experience to have lived through the evolution of the information age and, indeed, been a part of it.

It all came full circle this morning when I typed “graph e^(x^2) from -2 to 2″ into the Google search bar. Almost instantly that wonderful, symmetric plot of the function with no closed-form integral appeared. I didn’t even know if Google would do that and was following a hunch from a totally unrelated conversation with a fellow writer and colleague, Terri-Lynne Smiles. But there it was, just as it had appeared on my parents TV set all those years ago. And while the curve hasn’t changed a bit, the technology has transformed the planet.

On my Atari, I had to edit the code to change functions. Google interpreted my query and did what I wanted. That’s Artificial Intelligence, my friends. My Atari did the calculations only a bit faster than I could have done them by hand. I have no idea where Google did the calculations but it was already displaying the plot by the time I got to the limits. My Atari was connected to my parent’s TV with an antenna cable. It wasn’t even a coax. I’m communicating with Google over an 802.11g wireless datalink to my router, which sends it back and forth through cyberspace and manages to get it right almost every time. My parent’s TV had the resolution of a Crayon, was three feet thick, and weighed about a hundred pounds. The screen on my MacBook Pro is less than a quarter of an inch and the entire computer weighs less than the brick-like remote that controlled that old Sears console. We used to heat the den with the power consumed by old-style televisions. The battery life on my Mac is hours, and hours, and hours.

I’m still a nerd. I still love science and mathematics. And I still love fiction. I even write fiction nowadays. And the fiction I write asks the same question James Burke and Carl Sagan used to ask. The questions that Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury used to ponder. Where are we going? We all knew that eventually a TV would fit on something the size of a watch – and now we’re all walking around with them in our pockets. But who saw texting coming? Twitter was an outgrowth of texting. Both are changing the way we view the world, and not always for the better. Consider the effect of Twitter on the recent political election in the U.S.A. The pace of innovation has left the rate of ethical evolution far behind. We’re in unknown waters. Here there be monsters. It’s an exciting time to be alive. It’s an exciting time to be an author. Because the big question isn’t “What’s next?” The big question is “What is it going to do to us?”