Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

RICHARD A. CLARKE AND R.P. EDDY

After nearly every catastrophe, we discover an expert warned us but had been ignored

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RICHARD CLARKE’S
WARNINGS FOR 2018

2018 WARNINGS

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From President Bill Clinton's recommended reading list

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Reviews from the Experts

Dangerous. Complex. Immediate. A fair description of today's world. So now, more than ever, you should read this book and learn from two of the very best. Accurate and timely warning are key to success, even to survival. That makes this not only a gripping read, but also a brilliant view of an uncertain future. Clarke and Eddy deliver veteran insights all leaders need to hear.

General Michael Hayden, retired four-star general, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency

Clarke and Eddy’s veteran insight will be required reading for those who want to win in a future dominated by technologies and national security threats most haven’t even begun to ponder.

Senator George Mitchell, former Senate Majority Leader, former chairman of The Walt Disney Company

Impossible to put down, and a "must read." No book is more urgently needed for those of us who want to keep America, and the world, safe. In an increasingly risky world, finding people who see around corners is key—but once you’ve found them, it’s just as important to listen. We need to listen to Richard Clarke and R.P. Eddy, their leadership and vision has been second to none for decades, and they are right again.

Bill Bratton, former New York City Police Commissioner, author of Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic

For those of us who have had the responsibility to warn Presidents of potential threats to the nation, this book is critical to the need to listen to those few Cassandras who can alert corporations, governments and the global community to catastrophe. Dick Clarke and R.P. Eddy know what they are talking about – this is not a book about miracles, it is a book about how to recognize warnings in a very dangerous world.

Leon Panetta, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former Secretary of Defense, author of Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

As someone whose dire predictions about Russia and Vladimir Putin were largely ignored until it was too late, I feel great sympathy for the other "Cassandras" portrayed in this remarkable book. In Warnings, Clarke and Eddy turn mythology into sociology and anecdote into analysis in a way that is both enlightening and important for averting catastrophes.

Garry Kasparov, chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, author of How Life Imitates Chess

This fascinating book asks us to open our ears to the voices we don’t want to hear. With every disaster, there have been a few lonely Cassandras warning of the dangers ahead. Richard Clarke and R. P. Eddy construct a science that separates the true prophets from the fantasists. It’s a fascinating account, and oh, if we’d only paid attention…!

Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and named one of Time’s Top 100 Books of all time.

About the Book

Millions of lives lost to catastrophes – natural and man-made – could have been saved by the advance warnings of experts. Can we find those prescient people before the next catastrophe strikes? Two CEOs and White House national security veterans reveal insider views of previous disasters, chilling insights on today's threats to mankind, and a prescription to protects us.

In Greek mythology Cassandra foresaw calamities, but was cursed by the gods to be ignored. Modern-day Cassandras clearly predicted the disasters of Katrina, Fukushima, the Great Recession, the rise of ISIS, and many others. Like her, they were ignored. There are others right now warning of impending disasters, but how do we know which warnings are true?

This is the story of the future of national security, threatening technologies, the US economy, and possibly the fate of civilization.

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Read Chapter Excerpts

Some colleagues thought him compulsive, obsessive, but he had not made it this far by overlooking any information of significance. Weeks, months, and years of work had culminated in this moment, a moment when he would be forced to exercise his authority to the fullest extent.

Chapter 2: The Invasion of Kuwait

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The Cassandras hoped, after decades of halfhearted fixes punctuated by willful neglect, that their warnings to seriously plan for and mitigate the hurricane threat to New Orleans had finally been heeded. Tragically they learned, barely a year later, they were wrong.

Chapter 3: Hurricane Katrina

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Tunisia was a one-off. That was what all the self-proclaimed experts said over little glasses of hot tea and demitasses of thick Arab coffee. Every Arab country is different from the others, after all.

Chapter 4: The Rise of ISIS

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On this day in June 2009, this quiet little man had something big to say, and since then Okamura has regretted not saying it louder. Considering the threat of a significant tsunami in the region, he later reflected, “The truth is, I felt it was high time to speak up."

Chapter 5: Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

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For two years, Markopolos had been trying to get the watchdog agency to do something. Then he would keep on trying for six more years, bombarding the S.E.C. with letters, meetings, mathematical proofs. It didn’t do any good.

Chapter 6: Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme

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Why did he see the disaster at Upper Big Branch coming when the company did not, and why was he ignored? How is it that, even when a calamity is predicted by government officials, the very people who presumably have access to the resources and authority needed to avert it, the tragedy occurs anyway?

Chapter 7: Mine Disaster

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Though the bank was known to have problems, the extent of those problems was much greater than anyone had acknowledged—so great, Whitney realized, that it had the potential to shake the global economy.

Chapter 8: The 2008 Recession

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The U.S. Air Force has also been planning for lethal autonomous drones, writing in its “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009– 2047” that it was only a matter of time before drone aircraft would be making life-and- death decisions on their own using artificial intelligence (AI) software.

Chapter 10: Artificial Intelligence

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Our brightest minds felt the scientific tools at that time were simply not available to create these chimeras. They didn’t think the walk-in’s nightmare Andromeda strains could be real. They weren’t sure if he believed what he was saying, but they didn’t. That was then.

Chapter 11: Pandemic Disease

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He had risked his career but had ultimately been proven right. Now he was at it again. This time he is predicting rapid and massive sea-level rise, and again he is being criticized. If he is right once more, we are in very deep trouble, ....

Chapter 12: Sea-Level Rise

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Hours later it began, a three-day orgy of death and destruction that put one of the world’s megacities on lockdown. Eight thousand miles away, on the campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey, the massacre left an American climate scientist fearing his theory was about to be tested.

Chapter 13: Nuclear Ice Age

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The e-mail he sent could’ve had the subject line “I told you it would happen.” Instead, it was simply “Ukrainian electric grid attacked.” .... As usual, it seemed he was right. Weeks later, U.S. intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security came to the same conclusion.

Chapter 14: The Internet of Everything

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By the 1980s, with extensive test data to supplement what had been recorded over five decades earlier, scientists and engineers were able to calculate what happened that last night of June in 1908, and it terrified them.

Chapter 15: Meteor Strike

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Governments adopted CRISPR as a matter of national security. A new class of elite human would come to dominate the species. This was never the intent of the woman who had created the technology in 2012, but the thought had crossed her mind, and haunted her nightmares.

Chapter 16: Gene Editing

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Excerpts from Richard A. Clarke's Complete Collection.

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