Photo Credit: FP
Add to Nathan Myhrvold’s already eclectic résumé — which includes ex-chief technology officer of Microsoft, co-founder of one of the world’s largest patent-holding firms, and author of a $625 cookbook — a new credit: terrorism expert.
Myhrvold, a famous autodidact, recently published a 33-page paper that he rousingly calls, “Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action.” The core of his argument is easy enough to understand, and probably true: The United States is more focused on stopping a guy who blows up an airplane and kills 300 people than on a guy who intentionally spreads smallpox and kills 300,000.
“In my estimation, the U.S. government, although well-meaning, is unable to protect us from the greatest threats we face,” Myhrvold writes. “[M]odern technology can provide small groups of people with much greater lethality than ever before. We now have to worry that private parties might gain access to weapons that are as destructive as — or possibly even more destructive than — those held by any nation-state.”
Myhrvold to Washington: National security … you’re doin’ it wrong.
The paper is accessible to a layman, which is what Myhrvold was when he started thinking about the strategic aspects of terrorism not long after the 9/11 attacks. He wrote the piece in his spare time — apparently he does have some — and it was mostly finished in 2006. Myhrvold had no intention of publishing it until recently, when he met Benjamin Wittes, the editor of the influential national security and legal site Lawfare. Wittes thought that parts of the paper accurately described the threat posed by small actors with big weapons, and he decided that Myhrvold’s analysis deserved a wider audience. Lawfare published the paper in July.
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