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Packed with startling revelations, this inside look at the secret side of the Cold War exposes just how close America came to total annihilation
During the Cold War, a flight crew had 15 minutes to get their nuke-laden plane in the air from the moment Soviet bombers were detected--15 minutes between the earliest warning of an incoming nuclear strike and the first flash of an enemy warhead. This is the chilling true story of the incredibly risky steps our military took to protect us from that scenario, including:
• Over two thousand loaded bombers that crossed American skies. They sometimes crashed and at least nine times resulted in nuclear weapons being accidentally dropped
• A system that would use timers and rockets to launch missiles even after everyone was dead
• Disastrous atmospheric nuclear testing including the horrific runaway bomb--that fooled scientists and put thousands of men in uniform in the center of a cloud of hot fallout
• A plan to use dry lake beds to rebuild and launch a fighting force in the aftermath of nuclear war
Based on formerly classified documents, military records, press accounts, interviews and over 10 years of research, 15 Minutes is one of the most important works on the atom bomb ever written.
- Sales Rank: #246202 in Books
- Brand: St Martins Press
- Published on: 2011-02-01
- Released on: 2011-02-01
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.48" h x 1.30" w x 6.43" l, 1.30 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
From Publishers Weekly
America™s cold war defensive strategy relied on possessing a striking force so powerful that, even after absorbing a devastating Soviet attack, it could deliver a nation-killing blow. This deterrence matured under the aegis of Gen. Curtis LeMay (1906–1990), the brilliant WWII bomber commander. Military historian Keeney (Gun Camera Pacific) reports that when LeMay took over the Strategic Air Command in 1948, he found several understaffed B-29 groups left over from WWII, a few dozen primitive atomic bombs, and no coherent strategy. With access to newly declassified documents, Keeney delivers a jolting year-by-year history of SAC™s transformation into a massive worldwide force primed to launch bombers within 15 minutes of the order. He also reveals alarming numbers of lost nuclear bombs, disastrous atmospheric tests, and nuclear war near-misses. Bitterly opposed to SAC™s diversion to conventional bombing in Vietnam, LeMay retired in 1965, and Keeney™s detailed, often squirm-inducing account ends in an anticlimax in 1968 with SAC dwindling to a minor adjunct to America™s swelling ballistic missile arsenal. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In the 1950s, before land- and submarine-based missiles formed the backbone of American nuclear deterrence, the U.S. relied primarily upon the Strategic Air Command (SAC). When an alert was issued, it was assumed that the crews of our long-range bombers had only 15 minutes to scramble to the runways and takeoff to guarantee the credibility of a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union. Keeney, a military historian and co-founder of cable television’s Military Channel, has utilized great amounts of recently declassified documents to tell a fascinating, often chilling story of the policies, technologies, and men responsible for maintaining our nuclear defense posture in that period. At the center of the narrative is General Curtis LeMay, a brilliant, cigar-chomping innovator who was haunted by the specter of Pearl Harbor and determined that we wouldn’t be caught unprepared again. Keeney avoids excessive technical jargon and recounts in straightforward fashion the successes and sometimes dangerous and devasting failures and miscalculations of men operating on the razor’s edge while coping with the terror of unprecedented consequences for misjudgments. --Jay Freeman
Review
"...brilliantly written, and engrossing."
--Portland Book Review
A chilling and unsettling account of accidents, oversights, errors in planning, and other mistakes and misjudgments by the military and its civilian masters...sobering and recommended. (Library Journal)
Keeney, a military historian and co-founder of cable television's Military Channel, has utilized great amounts of recently declassified documents to tell a fascinating, often chilling story of the policies, technologies, and men responsible for maintaining our nuclear defense posture in that period. (Booklist)
With access to newly declassified documents, Keeney delivers a jolting year-by-year history of SAC's transformation into a massive worldwide force primed to launch bombers within 15 minutes of the order. He also reveals alarming numbers of lost nuclear bombs, disastrous atmospheric tests, and nuclear war near-misses. (Publishers Weekly)
15 Minutes is brilliantly written, and engrossing...[It] shows us the world beyond the press releases of American propaganda, into the imperfect, human world of missing nukes, air-mishaps and the oh-so-close, two minutes to midnight of Nuclear Armageddon. It is a must-read for anybody interested in the Cold War, or anyone with an interest in the 20th century. (Portland Book Review)
A history of United States nuclear warfare based heavily on declassified documents. Military Channel cofounder Keeney explains the evolution of U.S. mass-destruction weaponry from 1945 through 1968. The primary perspective is that of the Strategic Air Command, the high-powered organization developed by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay. The author focuses on the first two possessors of nuclear weapons: the United States and the Soviet Union. In that sense, the book is also a history of the Cold War as defined by two superpower nations...The author's information-gathering skills, especially his unearthing and decoding of previously classified documents, make the book worthwhile... (Kirkus Reviews)
In the midst of a new era of nuclear worry (Iran, North Korea, suitcase bombs), the Cold War appears ever more surreal in memory, its vast weaponry (enough nukes to kill all humankind many times over) and Dr. Strangelove vocabulary ("mutually assured destruction" a.k.a. MAD) making it seem like a lunatic's nightmare. And therein lies the virtue of Keeney's marvellous chronological account: it gives the Cold War a real history, a step-by-step sequence of events caused by human decisions. The logic of the Cold War was cold indeed, but irrational it was not. (Macleans.ca)
Based on formerly classified documents, military records, press accounts, interviews and more than 10 years of research, "15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation" is one of the most revealing works about the atom bomb. This period of Cold War danger and madness has been well documented by L. Douglas Keeney, a military historian and researcher and cofounder of The Military Channel....Keeney is an excellent researcher and has uncovered numerous startling and revealing aspects of the period of mankind's most perilous era to date. "15 Minutes" is one of the most revealing works on the atom bomb ever written. (The Herald-Tribune)
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
Making sense of the Cold War chaos.
By Donald Farmer
Keeney's book was a bit perplexing at first but the point he makes well is that there was more chaos during the Cold War than anyone could imagine. So he jumps from wave heights to thermonuclear discoveries to SAC penetration tatics in a way that makes you feel the confusion and chaos, as if you were there. Well, I was there. Like Keeney says we all had Emergency War Plans -- and as a Cold War fighter pilot and tanker pilot I saw many sides of the situation, I can say that we were ready to go. Reading this well and exhaustively researched, well written book I can say that Keeney introduces declassified documents in a way that brings the reality of our Cold War to life in a way I could never before share with my family. I'm buying copies for my in-laws! Hooray!
56 of 60 people found the following review helpful.
The Rise and Fall of the Strategic Air Command
By William Holmes
At first, I found the organization of "15 minutes" to be a little off putting--especially in the early going, the author describes a series of seemingly unrelated events in short, jarring paragraphs, many of which end in a somewhat melodramatic one-word teaser. Keeney does this to set up several different stories at once, which is why you'll wonder why the second paragraph in the chapter on "1945" is about the development of offshore oil and gas drilling in Louisiana in 1907 (it makes sense eventually).
I suspect the book's style owes a lot to Keeney's experience with television documentary (he's a co-founder of The Military Channel), and it actually works fairly well as the book builds momentum. If the book's thesis is that things had to happen at a faster and faster pace to preserve a credible strategic deterrent, the book's short, punchy paragraphs do an efective job of conveying the sense of urgency that must have pervaded SAC for nearly forty years.
"15 Minutes" tells several intertwined stories in parallel, each of which is interesting in its own right: the founding, growth and eventual demise of the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) (which dissolved on June 1, 1992); the development of the hydrogen bomb, the sometimes disastrous outcomes of nuclear "shots" and the surprisingly frequent near-detonation or loss of armed nuclear weapons (including one still missing near Savannah, Georgia); the deployment of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line and associated deep water radar facilities, one of which was destroyed by a rogue wave that killed its crew in January 1961; the ruthless but effective vision of General Curtis LeMay, who created a force so demanding and disciplined that "[n]ot for the thinnest fraction of a second did Washington or Moscow ever doubt that his SAC would do what it said it could do" (p.320); and the descent of SAC into irrelevance as a strategic deterrent, as more and more nuclear weapons were deployed on missiles and SAC assets were "degraded" to drop "iron bombs" on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
All in all, "15 Minues" is a pretty gripping narrative of the Cold War, deterrence, near misses, disasters and unsung heroes. Although there are a few jarring errors in the text, this is only a minor distraction from an otherwise well-told story that does a great service to the men and women who succeeded, against the odds, in keeping the Cold War cold.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Very, very informative book. Written with professional detachment ...
By David Benjamin Williams
Very, very informative book. Written with professional detachment, "15 Minutes" clearly dissects the international and technological context of the Cold War. I discovered how much sacrifice was made by the men in the Air Force, from the sergeants to generals to keep this country safe. Many involved in the nuclear disarming groups no doubt were either unwilling or completely ignorant of the willingness of the Soviet Union to impose their will on the world stage be any means possible, including the use of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. A little dry reading at times, but I could hardly put the book down. Well done and "Bravo Zulu."
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