Two Minutes to Midnight
eBook - ePub

Two Minutes to Midnight

1953 – The Year of Living Dangerously

  1. 400 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Two Minutes to Midnight

1953 – The Year of Living Dangerously

About this book

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR – 'a dark remembrance of 1953, when nuclear annihilation was only the press of a button away'.

January 1953. Eight years on from the most destructive conflict in human history, the Cold War enters its deadliest phase. An Iron Curtain has descended across Europe, and hostilities have turned hot on the Korean peninsula as the United States and Soviet Union clash in an intractable and bloody proxy war.

Former wartime allies have grown far apart. An ageing Winston Churchill, back in Downing Street, yearns for peace with the Kremlin – but new American President Dwight Eisenhower cautions the West not to drop its guard. Joseph Stalin, implacable as ever, conducts vicious campaigns against imaginary internal enemies.

Meanwhile, the pace of the nuclear arms race has become frenetic. The Soviet Union has finally tested its own atom bomb, as has Britain. But in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the United States has detonated its first thermonuclear device, dwarfing the destruction unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For the first time, the Doomsday Clock is set at two minutes to midnight, with the risk of a man-made global apocalypse increasingly likely. As the Cold War powers square up, every city has become a potential battleground and every citizen a target. 1953 is set to be a year of living dangerously.

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Yes, you can access Two Minutes to Midnight by Roger Hermiston in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & 20th Century History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Contents
  4. Introduction
  5. Prologue
  6. Chapter 1: ‘Two Scorpions in a Bottle’
  7. Chapter 2: ‘A Good Target’
  8. Chapter 3: ‘No Crocodile Tears’
  9. Chapter 4: Mind Blowing
  10. Chapter 5: ‘Least Said, Soonest Mended’
  11. Chapter 6: ‘We Govern by Popular Will’
  12. Chapter 7: The Emergency Government
  13. Chapter 8: Joe 4
  14. Chapter 9: Overthrow
  15. Chapter 10: ‘An Extreme Measure’
  16. Chapter 11: ‘Winston’s Baby’
  17. Postscript
  18. Bibliography
  19. Acknowledgements
  20. Index
  21. Plates
  22. Copyright