RogerBW's Blog

The USSR launches a limited nuclear strike against the USA. Things get worse.

This is not a technical book. It has a thin scrim of research over what the author clearly regards as psychological realism, but which merely serves to make every character thoroughly unsympathetic. One feels that if Prochnau had been writing about the Peace Corps or some charity for giving kittens to photogenic orphans there'd have been just as much of a bad taste left in the mouth.

The thesis, apart from "nuclear wars are a bad thing" (not perhaps the most contentious of ideas, though it's presented as such here), is that pushing the Soviet system economically would provoke them into launching a nuclear attack rather than allowing themselves to fall apart.

Oh, and that nuclear weaponry uniquely among human endeavours turns anyone who has the slightest connection with it (i.e. everybody in the book) into a messed-up headcase. Yeah, Prochnau's a journalist all right.

The two major narrative threads deal with the surviving command structure (with some question as to just who is in command) and the crew of a B-52, the only one to get away from its base before the missiles hit, en route to Russia. The latter is fractionally more interesting, and therefore comes to an end well before the book does.

The book was the basis for the TV movie By Dawn's Early Light, which is better for several reasons: it's shorter, it's less pretentious, and it includes Rebecca de Mornay.

Long book, short review: don't bother.