He Perfect Weapon

The Perfect Weapon

I hope you enjoyed that fresh water you had this morning, either from the tap or bottled. If our government hadn't been diligent in its duties, you would only have a few months to live because you would have been poisoned. In my book, The Perfect Weapon, a group of terrorists develop a weapon that contaminates 90 percent of America's water supply. Because we as a people, and we as a nation, have become so reliant on bottled and safe water, we are easy marks for these terrorists. There is a parasite that lives in stagnant water that, once ingested, is mostly fatal because it lives in our bloodstream and migrates to our brain, where it wreaks havoc and finally kills the host. These terrorists find this parasite and modify it so it can be dehydrated or frozen, and nothing, including modern antibiotics, can kill it except boiling it. Once a large-enough supply of dehydrated parasites are produced, these terrorists hire a pilot and copilot to fly this deadly cargo over the reservoirs that provide water for the one hundred largest cities in the US. This cargo is then released by the preprogrammed flight of the plane. After a few weeks, the results of the parasite infection begin to raise its ugly head. Thousands of Americans begin to get sick and, as there is no antidote, await a long and painful death because the American scientific community and esteemed government said this couldn't happen. Once one hundred thousand people begin dying per day, and two hundred million people are sick, our government launches a three-pronged attack to wipe out the people responsible and the manufacturing place where the poison is being stored for use against other nations. They are successful because of help from a few overseas operatives that hate the man responsible for so many needless deaths. All this country needs now is an antidote! This is stumbled on accidentally by a rancher in South Central Texas, and millions are saved from the painful parasitic death. The president of the US invites this Good Samaritan to the White House for a Fourth of July celebration the nation and the Samaritan will never forget.

The Perfect Weapon

NOW AN HBO® DOCUMENTARY FROM AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR JOHN MAGGIO • “An important—and deeply sobering—new book about cyberwarfare” (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times), now updated with a new chapter. The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents—Bush and Obama—drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal and, during President Trump’s first year, turned back on the United States and its allies. And if Obama would begin his presidency by helping to launch the new era of cyberwar, he would end it struggling unsuccessfully to defend the 2016 U.S. election from interference by Russia, with Vladimir Putin drawing on the same playbook he used to destabilize Ukraine. Moving from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger reveals a world coming face-to-face with the perils of technological revolution, where everyone is a target. “Timely and bracing . . . With the deep knowledge and bright clarity that have long characterized his work, Sanger recounts the cunning and dangerous development of cyberspace into the global battlefield of the twenty-first century.”—Washington Post

The Perfect Way