Eve of Destruction: The inside story of our dangerous nuclear world

Description

'It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discoverthis atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered' - USPresident Harry S. Truman Truman evidently understood the terrifying power of atomic weaponry, but no onecould have realised its full potential when he ordered the bombings of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki in August 1945. Those military attacks, along with the disasters atthe Fukashima and Chernobyl nuclear reactors, might immediately spring to mind atthe mention of nuclear destruction, but the vast majority of the events recorded inthis book are entirely unknown to most people. This book records the facts - manyof them still shrouded in secrecy - which show a worrying truth: we have teeteredprecariously on the brink of Armageddon far more frequently than the general public realises. Since that first and last atomic war in 1945, there have been a terrifying number ofnuclear accidents and mishaps, from the careless or accidental to the genuinelyintentional and only narrowly averted. Despite the catastrophic nature of anynuclear conflict, we have come to the very borders of such a situation ten timessince the 1960s. Most people know about the Cuba Missile Crisis, and a few aboutOperation Able Archer in 1984, which, if anything, was even more frightening thanCuba, but there have been eight other occasions that might easily have toppledover into outright war. These were potential conflicts; but there have been otheraccidents, such as the reactor meltdown at the nuclear generating plant at ThreeMile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979, or the 'Palomares Incident' in 1966, when aUSAF B-52 bomber crashed after a mid-air collision, dropping four hydrogen bombson Spanish soil . . . Eve of Destruction is a warning from history - recent history. It is a call to sit up andlisten, and to take note of the very real danger of nuclear catastrophe. It is a timely andimportant book because, after all, the future of our planet has to concern us all.

During his twenty-five years in the Intelligence Corps and as a Special Forces operations officer, Colonel John Hughes Wilson saw active service in the Falkland Islands, Cyprus, Arabia, and Northern Ireland, as well as in the dangerous jungles of Whitehall and NATO. One of Britain's leading military historians, he is the author, among other books, of JFK: An American Coup d'Etat (John Blake, 2013) and the Imperial War Museum's A History of the First World War in 100 Objects (2014); his much reprinted book Intelligence Blunders was found at Osama Bin Laden's bedside and has become a CIA textbook. He has also been a frequent broadcaster for BBC television and radio.