HPPUB BOOK REVIEW of The Next War by Weinberger/Schweizer

Author (or Editor): Weinberger, Caspar amd Schweizer, Peter (introduction by Margaret Thatcher)

Title: The Next War

Fiction? Anthology? (five hypothetical war scenarios)

Publisher: Regnery

Date: 1996

ISBN: ISBN 0-89526-447-1

Series Name:

Physical description: hardbound , 470 pgs

Relevance to HPPUB: National security

Regnery is well known as a publisher of conservative books, with ties to The Washington Times and Rupert Murdoch.

Former Secretary of Defense (from the Reagan administration) Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer have written a chilling account of five hypothetical war scenarios, involving (1) North Korea and China, (2) Iran, (3) Mexico, (4) Russia, and (5) Japan. These were all reasonable scenarios in the mid 1990s. Of course, at that time the Taliban had not yet seized Afghanistan and no one quite anticipated the tremendous scale of asymmetric warfare possible as with Osama bin Laden.

The scenario most like the current one may be the Mexico one, where there are terrorist attacks on San Diego and Houston, and connections of illegal immigration with the drug cartels. The Iran scenario builds upon our oil vulnerability (and the Strait of Hormuz), and the Russia scenario involves a return to nationalist totalitarianism in Russia, with invasion of Europe and eventual use of tactical nuclear weapons, with a raising of the questions about a national missile defense.

But history would prove even more fantastic.

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