How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III

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Simon and Schuster, Feb 21, 2012 - History - 320 pages
In this startling book, now in paperback, the bestselling author of Explaining Hitler warns that a nuclear World War III is not only the most massive and imminent threat to existence as we know it, but also one of the most ignored.

While Russian aggression grows and North Korean nuclear ambitions increase unabated, tensions continue to escalate between India and Pakistan and in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran remains committed to developing its nuclear program despite international sanctions.

No other writer has assembled the extraordinary array of sources and experiences that Ron Rosenbaum calls on to inform his examination of nuclear war. While working from both historical and contemporary perspectives to explore the people and events that could shape the form of a third world war, he suggests humans have never before been so close to annihilation. In this book, Rosenbaum examines both the paranoia and very real set of possibilities that informs our view of nuclear war and asks whether we can “undream” the nightmare.
 

Contents

We Came So Close
1
Major Herings Forbidden Question
31
The Forbidden Question at the Qwest Center
44
The Number
71
The Doomsday Discovery and
88
Colonel Yarynichs 100 Nuclear Wars and
111
The Second Holocaust
132
The Enigmatic Box and the NIE
166
Endgame
209
Notes
261
Index
287
Acknowledgments
301
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Ron Rosenbaum is the bestselling author of Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars, and The Secret Parts of Fortune, among other books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He writes a column for Slate and lives in New York City.