US President Harry Truman evidently understood the terrifying power of atomic weaponry, but no one could have realised its full potential when he ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Those military attacks, along with the disasters at the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear reactors, might come to mind at the mention of nuclear destruction, but the majority of the events recorded in this book are entirely unknown to most people. This book records the facts - many of them still shrouded in secrecy - which show a worrying truth: we have teetered precariously on the brink of Armageddon far more frequently than the general public realises.

Since that first and last atomic war in 1945, there have been a terrifying number of nuclear accidents and mishaps, from the careless or accidental to the genuinely intentional and only narrowly averted. Despite the catastrophic nature of any nuclear conflict, we have come to the very borders of such a situation eight times since the 1960s. These were potential conflicts, but there have been other accidents, such as the reactor meltdown at the nuclear generating plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979, or the 'Palomares Incident' in 1966, when a USAF B-52 bomber crashed after a mid-air collision, dropping four hydrogen bombs on Spanish soil . . .

Eve of Destruction is a warning from history - recent history. It is a call to sit up and listen, and to take note of the very real danger of nuclear catastrophe. It is a timely and important book because, after all, the future of our planet has to concern us all.

Leading military historian, John Hughes-Wilson exposes just how close we have come to genuine nuclear disaster, military and civilian, on many occasions.

About the Author
Colonel John Hughes-Wilson is one of Britain's leading military historians, and a well-reviewed author and commentator on a wide range of intelligence and military-history subjects. He was selected to be the author of the Imperial War Museum's A History of the First World War in 100 Objects for the centenary of the start of the Great War in 2014, and the original edition of his Military Intelligence Blunders was found at Osama bin Laden's bedside after his assassination and has become a CIA textbook. Colonel Hughes-Wilson has also been a frequent broadcaster for BBC television and radio. During his twenty-five years in the Intelligence Corps and as a special forces operations officer, he saw active service in the Falkland Islands, Cyprus, Arabia and Northern Ireland, as well as in the dangerous jungles of Whitehall and NATO. The revised edition of his remarkable study of the events in Dallas, Texas, of November 1963, is republished to mark the sixtieth anniversary of JFK's assassination. Colonel Hughes-Wilson's most recent books for John Blake Publishing are Eve of Destruction (2021), a critical study of military and civil nuclear accidents, and a comprehensively revised, expanded and updated edition of Military Intelligence Blunders (2023).


Book Information
ISBN 9781789463378
Author John Hughes-Wilson
Format Hardback
Page Count 400
Imprint John Blake Publishing Ltd
Publisher John Blake Publishing Ltd
Weight(grams) 640g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 154mm * 35mm