How The End Begins

The Road to a Nuclear World War III

Ron Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781849833851
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857202772
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Each chapter of the How the End Beginsdeconstructs the dangers we face. Rosenbaum begins by showing all the ways the post-Cold War order that tried to impose a set of rules of averting a nuclear mistake has fallen apart.

In chapter 2, he describes the journey of one Bruce Blair, once a missile launcher, whose experience inside the nuclear establishment left him alarmed about its vulnerabilities.

Chapter 3 looks at nuclear war from the Russian side, using the architect of that nation's early warning system as a focus.

Chapter 4 looks at how the Bush Administration helped pushed the world closer to a nuclear conflict by rewriting the rules of deterrence.

Chapter 5 describes all the ways the international incidents we have seen - Georgia, the Israeli raid on Syria, the Iranian moves - are evidence that some governments have shown a willingness to move closer to the brink of a conflict involving nuclear weapons.

The rest of the book looks at the broader nuclear issues facing the world in the 21st century: What is deterrence? Who can claim to have it? How many nuclear weapons can we live with? Is zero really possible? In other words: Can we undream the nightmare?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Also by Ron Rosenbaum
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1 We Came So Close
• 2 Major Hering's Forbidden Question
• 3 The Forbidden Question at the Qwest Center
• 4 The Number
• 5 Bruce Blair: The Doomsday Discovery and the Real Danger
• 6 Colonel Yarynich's 100 Nuclear Wars, and the Apocalypse Equation
• 7 The Ashes Are Still Warm: The Second Holocaust, Israel, and the Morality of Nuclear Retaliation
• 8 Iran: The Enigmatic Box and the NIE
• 9 Endgame
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author