Richard A. Muller’s Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines is, against expectations, an engaging and profitable read. It is “against expectations” because scientists who touch on politics usually do so condescendingly, with predictable disparagement of hick vote-grubbers in thrall to their God-bothering constituencies and their pre-Darwinian superstitions. The most persistent abuse is the scientist’s tendency to treat murky political disputes as though they were cut-and-dried questions of scientific fact. When Sarah Palin is badgered about evolution, she isn’t really being asked for a scientific opinion, but a political one. Likewise, scientist-advocates treat global warming as though the dispute were purely scientific, and therefore settled, rather than a nest of tangled economic and political calculations in which the scientific issue is but one strand.

Muller writes with a sobriety and low-key style not generally associated with his home institution — Berkeley, a.k.a. Berzerkley. He demonstrates a markedly non-Berkeley sense of priorities — the first chapters in the book are on terrorism, energy, and nuclear power. Global warming is covered, too, in the last major section of the book. Much of what he writes about these issues and the scientific questions surrounding them is insightful, at times fascinating, though the book is predictably weaker the further is strays from questions of science into questions of policy.

The book opens with a run-through of the 9/11 attacks. Muller’s scientific reserve contributes a deeper chill to the already chilling story. “When Mohamed Atta boarded American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston,” he writes, “the only illegal things he carried were his intentions.” He goes on to explain in some detail how the fuel-air mix weakened the columns supporting the towers and the “sledgehammer” effect produced as the higher floors collapsed onto the lower. He does not take the time to sneer at the Rosie O’Donnell school of metallurgy (so allow me to sneer in his place) but does come to an interesting conclusion — that the terrorists may not have foreseen the collapse of the towers. The engineers who built them didn’t, until it was too late: “It’s unlikely that the terrorists anticipated that this would happen,” Muller writes:

They might have thought the impact of the plane would topple the building, or maybe knock the top off. More likely, they just thought a high skyscraper fire would be horrific. . . . One of the engineers who designed the building watched the fire on TV and suddenly foresaw this new failure mode. But in the chaos of the morning, he was unable to reach the fire crews to tell them to evacuate the lower part of the building. . . . It was not an explosion that caused the World Trade Center buildings to collapse. It was not the airplane impact. It was the fire.

His reading of the risk of terrorist nuclear bombs is counterintuitive, and reassuringly so. He assumes that terrorists would at best be able to put together something like the nuclear bomb tested in North Korea in October of 2006. The nuke-spooks believe that Pyongyang’s atomic bomb was intended to be a 20-kiloton device that in reality yielded only a one-kiloton explosion — a fizzle, by comparison. While this could still be used to deliver a horrific strike against a densely crowded urban center, the blast radius of a one-kiloton bomb is only 450 feet, meaning that a suitcase nuke set off in the middle of New York’s Central Park wouldn’t even destroy the surrounding buildings.

Muller, who has studied the production of nuclear weapons (and who has access to classified information about their design) believes that even a Nork-style nuke is probably beyond the capabilities of al-Qaeda, and that their deploying a big nuke of the Cold War city-killer variety is very unlikely.

On the subject of terrorism, Muller time and again returns to the conclusion that exotic weaponry probably should not be our biggest worry. He touches on the case of Jose Padilla, who wanted to deploy a radiological “dirty bomb” in an American city. Muller cites a Justice Department report that Padilla had instead been directed by his al-Qaeda handlers to blow up apartment buildings using natural gas. “Al-Qaeda appears to understand the limitations of these devices better than do many government leaders, newspapers, and even many scientists,” Muller writes. That is depressing, but not surprising.

The same even-handed assessment of risk characterizes his later discussion of global warming. He notes, wryly, that his colleagues who accuse him of being overly skeptical on the subject of anthropogenic climate change are also, by extension, accusing the sainted IPCC of the same: Even the IPCC panelists concluded that there is some possibility, a small one, that human activity has no impact whatsoever on global warming. Much more likely is the possibility that human activity has some impact on the climate but is not the most important driver.

Muller devotes considerable energy to the questions of what constitutes evidence and how far available evidence can take us.

In fact, much of what the public “knows” about global warming is based on distortion, exaggeration, of cherry picking. . . . I learned as a graduate student that in a presentation or a paper I am expected to present all the evidence — not just the truth but the whole truth, including any facts or analysis that might disagree with my conclusions. The public discussion of global warming rarely meets this standard of full disclosure. I think the reason is simple: when scientists present their case to the public, caution is interpreted not as good science, but as weakness. Among physicists, the opposite is true.

Physics for Future Presidents is based on Muller’s course for non-science majors, and the title sets a provocatively high standard. Would a future U.S. president really benefit from the insights offered in an undergraduate course at Berkeley? I think the answer is Yes. And a few would-be presidents, Al Gore among them, would benefit as well from Prof. Muller’s quiet insistence on honest, thorough, and evidence-based analysis.

– Kevin Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review.