Test Ban Treaty

June 1962

TEST BAN TREATY is the ninth book of the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series.

It is June 1962. A train of events which has been slowly, menacingly coalescing since October 1961 in the confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin is beginning to play out.

OPERATION ANADYR is moving from a reckless idea in one man’s head – Nikita Khrushchev – to a plan wholeheartedly embraced by the entire Soviet war machine.

One reckless idea that is inexorably starting to tear lives to pieces and from its outset, is guaranteed to provide the casus belli of a possible nuclear war.

Historians are often astonished by the thought processes – or the lack of the same – of ‘great men’. The capacity of leaders to believe their own rhetoric in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is legendary. What we learn is that bad things do not always happen because bad people will them; sometimes good, stupid, and naïve men just misread the runes…

Summer heralds a quickening of the path to war and the endgame is much closer than anybody can imagine.

The ticking is getting louder as the clock has reaches four minutes to midnight…

For my readers who prefer to read the Timeline 10/27/62 books in the chronological order of the overall narrative arc TEST BAN TREATY = 9.