"The Real Thing and Other Tales" is a mosaic of short narrative fiction attempting to refine golden reality from leaden spin. The 28 individual tales pieced into the mosaic move forward in four phases: Fog and Spin, Icy Water and Cold Turkey, Signs and Portents, Epiphanies. These tales probe many of the same ancient dilemmas: free will, corruption, perversion of truth, God and chance, honor and risk, hinges of history. Art and fakery emerge as a major leitmotif. All of these tales live in the context of human history and confront successfully and unsuccessfully in our time the challenges of...

"Trump Card" is the dramatic story of the difficult birth of American nuclear deterrence - a global strategy that has worked for more than a half century. Of the critical lessons of that technological birth the most important is the necessity of maintaining absolute credibility - credibility that many fear has been eroding. As in the Old West, for deterrence to work, the bad guys must not only believe that the sheriff is a very good shot but that he will not hesitate to pull trigger. Bluffing is fatal. Today fourteen US nuclear submarines, the boomers, cruise on rotation somewhere beneath the...