Poison gas clouds over Wilmington and Houston. Serial crashes on the New York subway and the Washington Metro. Aircraft plunging to the ground. The president of the United States clueless as to what to do next.

This scenario belongs not to Hollywood but to Richard Clarke, who has served four presidents, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, as national security adviser. In short, his startling new book, Cyber War, argues that the sky is about to fall on our heads.

The debate about this major security threat has developed an unusual intensity in a very short time. Nato agreed to create the awkwardly named Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn five years ago. Despite an enthusiastic reception for the idea, member states proved reluctant to put money on the table. The project was not mothballed but it struggled to advance much beyond the stage of some attractively designed headed notepaper.

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When that photocopier near your desk bursts into flames after a Chinese cyber-warrior hacks into your office network and causes it to short-circuit and overheat, don’t say that Richard Clarke didn’t warn you.

Clarke, who served as a top-level adviser to American presidents named Bush, Clinton and Bush, established himself as a Cassandra of the first rank in the months before the September 11 attacks, announcing that al Qa’eda was planning an operation on American soil. (“Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” he is said to have declared at a White House meeting in July 2001.)

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Richard Clarke's Cyber War may be the most important book about national-security policy in the last several years. It's about a threat that almost everyone has heard of, that almost no one understands, and that the U.S. government hasn't begun to address very seriously.

The threat, as the title suggests, is cyberwar, which Clarke—the White House counterterrorism chief under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—defines as "actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation's computers or networks for the purpose of causing damage or disruption."

The militaries of more than 20 nations, including the United States, Russia, and China, have set up special cyberwarfare units. The consequences of such a war, Clarke and his co-author Robert Knake maintain, could "change the world military balance" and "fundamentally alter political and economic relations."

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Blackouts hit New York, Los Angeles, Washington and more than 100 other American cities. Subways crash. Trains derail. Airplanes fall from the sky.

Gas pipelines explode. Chemical plants release clouds of toxic chlorine. Banks lose all their data. Weather and communication satellites spin out of their orbits. And the Pentagon’s classified networks grind to a halt, blinding the greatest military power in the world.

This might sound like a takeoff on the 2007 Bruce Willis “Die Hard” movie, in which a group of cyberterrorists attempts to stage what it calls a “fire sale”: a systematic shutdown of the nation’s vital communication and utilities infrastructure. According to the former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, however, it’s a scenario that could happen in real life — and it could all go down in 15 minutes.

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Worrying about threats to the electric grid is all the rage these days, with anxious planners troubled by electromagnetic pulse attacks or even solar superflares that could melt down the power net for months or even years, bringing civilization to a halt. But Richard Clarke and Robert Knake warn in "Cyber War" that if such a calamity occurs, the culprit behind it might not be a high-altitude nuclear burst or strange solar weather but a computer hacker in Beijing or Tehran.

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In his new book, Cyber War, Richard Clarke says nations are building up their online armies and weapons largely far from public view, increasing the danger of a deliberate or accidental cyberwar, which in turn could trigger violent conflicts across the globe.

"Cyber war has already begun," Clarke writes. "In anticipation of hostilities, nations are already preparing the battlefield.' They are hacking into each other's networks and infrastructures, laying in trapdoors and logic bombs -- now, in peacetime. This ongoing nature of cyberwar, the blurring of peace and war, adds a dangerous new dimension of instability."

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The antiterrorism czar who foresaw 9/11 discusses Obama's cybersecurity plans and North Korea.

Richard Clarke, the antiterrorism czar under Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, knows something about spotting national security threats in the making: In 2001 he repeatedly warned the Bush administration about the threat of al Qaeda in the months and weeks leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks--and was ignored.

Nine years later his national security concerns have shifted to the cyber realm, as he's laid out in detail in a new book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security And What to Do About It.

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William J Clinton reviews Against All Enemies