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The Next World War: Computers Are the Weapons and the Front Line Is Everywhere

James Adams
Reviewed by By Eliot A. Cohen
July/August 1998
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James Adams
Simon & Schuster
1998
368 pp.
$25.00

A veteran defense journalist, now chief executive officer of United Press International, Adams has written a book on war in the information age, drawing heavily on the voluminous periodical literature. After disquisitions on the menace posed by cyberterrorists, who can, in theory, paralyze financial systems and cause ghastly industrial accidents with a few keystrokes, meditations on the effects of instantaneous worldwide news, and snippets of technologically informed fiction (very much ˆ la Tom Clancy), the author comes to a grim conclusion: "America today looks uncomfortably like Goliath, arrogant in its power, armed to the teeth, ignorant of its weakness." A sensationalist judgment, perhaps, but not necessarily wrong.

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