The present book is an attempt to contribute to filling this gap, albeit a quite subjective one: I tried to address this issue by referring to different phenomena in subatomic physics studied or predicted over the last decades and to which I contributed personally. Some of the predictions have been confirmed, others are still in the pipeline and quite a few might never be verified or even proven wrong. Still, I hope that even those in the last category might be useful, if not for any other reason than to prevent somebody else from repeating these mistakes. Given the general readership to which this book addresses itself, I attempted to present the effects discussed at a level accessible to the non-specialist.

Legacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States. Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "a distasteful but vital necessity." A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.