Patrick Porter
Fingers Crossed
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times
By Mohamed ElBaradei
Bloomsbury 340pp £20 order from our bookshop
How the End Begins: The Road to Nuclear World War III
By Ron Rosenbaum
Simon & Schuster 304pp £20 order from our bookshop
In January 1997, President Boris Yeltsin opened his nuclear suitcase. Russian observers had mistaken a Norwegian weather satellite for an incoming missile, and his advisers told him that he had only minutes to launch retaliation. A catastrophic major war and a nuclear winter could have begun – by accident. Like other similar near misses, this epitomises the enduring terrors of nukes. It shows the susceptibility of a deterrence system to human error; the extremely short windows in which leaders must make decisions about the future of the species; and the hair-trigger alert status of these weapons. Such dangers are explored in Mohamed ElBaradei’s forthright The Age of Deception and Ron Rosenbaum’s more textured, idiosyncratic and interesting How the End Begins.
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