John Hughes-Wilson - Eve of Destruction: The inside story of our dangerous nuclear world

First published in the UK by John Blake Publishing

an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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First published in hardback in 2021

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78946-337-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78946-338-5

Audio book ISBN: 978-1-78946-347-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Text copyright John Hughes-Wilson 2021

The right of John Hughes-Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Extracts from the authors earlier work, A Brief History of the Cold War (London,

Robinson, 2006), are reproduced by permission of Little, Brown Book Group.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright-holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the

publishers would be glad to hear from them.

John Blake Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated to Andrew Hayward, whose idea it was. One of the silverbacks of the London publishing scene and a literary agent par excellence.

CONTENTS

This book came as a result of a suggestion by my agent. At first I was none too keen; there seemed to be an awful lot of books on the market covering nuclear accidents and disasters already. However, after forty years in the business, Andy Hayward knows the publishing world like few others, and as I researched around I began to see his point. Further encouragement came from Toby Buchan of John Blake Publishing, who had the foresight to see the commercial potential in my book about the assassination of President John F Kennedy, published back in 2013.

It is true that there are a lot of nuclear books out there, but most of them tend to concentrate on a single issue. There are literally dozens of books about the accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, but very few covering the wider subject of nuclear cock-ups over the years; and even a cursory trawl showed that there have been a lot more accidents than we realise.

The more I delved, the more I found; and the more I found, the more I began to realise how neglected the saga of nuclear mishaps, blunders and sometimes rank incompetence has been over the years. Some of the things I discovered were genuinely shocking and on some occasions frightening. Never mind Kennedy and Cuba: we owe a massive debt to men like Commodore Arkhipov and Colonel Petrov. It can be argued that their common sense and quick thinking on the spot literally saved the world. I had no idea just how close we had really come to Armageddon.

My own interest is based on personal experience, having been an intelligence officer at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) during exercise Able Archer in 1983. Some of the material used in the chapters on Cuba and Able Archer 83 is drawn from my close personal knowledge, suitably updated. I may have slept as an exhausted officer cadet through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but I was well aware in 1983 that something historic and momentous was going on in the SHAPE Operations Room around me. We all were.

From my close personal knowledge, I have used the material in the Cuba and Able Archer chapters of Intelligence Blunders and On Intelligence, suitably updated.

This book is therefore the distillation of a professional interest in the subject, allied with a deep digging into the stories of what really went on with our risky nuclear toys, be they weapons or peaceful power stations. All are potentially very, very dangerous; and we humans do have a worrying record of mistakes.

This book serves as an exposure and a warning.

John Hughes-Wilson

Cyprus, 2021

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

GENERAL OMAR N BRADLEY

Nuclear weapons are terrifying. Opinions about their development and continued existence vary enormously, but they scare the hell out of me a trained nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist.

No one who has not experienced the effects of chemical weapons on the human body, or witnessed a nuclear explosion, can have any real understanding of their deadly impact. Survivors accounts from the two atom bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 are more than frightening. Since then, scientific research has uncovered new horrors and an even more devastating everyday nuclear reality, unknown or ignored by most people as just too unpleasant to think about.

But, however hard it is to contemplate, we should not pretend that a major nuclear event is never going to happen. Nuclear disasters are a genuine reality, and we need to understand their consequences if we are to have any appreciation of the true dangers of nuclear weapons, whether they are detonated by some fanatical terrorist, a rogue state or even by accident of which there have been far too many. While the world has avoided a nuclear war, the number of mishaps, as chronicled in this book, is of grave concern. Nuclear accidents are two a penny.

We really do need to sit up and take notice of the dangers of a nuclear war which is becoming increasingly more likely as the years go by as well as the all-too-frequent civilian nuclear emergencies that have threatened us since the very first nuclear accident, long before the first atom bomb.

While the effects of conventional explosions are well known, even by civilians in this age of terrorist IEDs improvised explosive devices we need to understand that nuclear weapons are different. They are much more than just a very big bang, as would be generated by lots of TNT explosive. Nuclear explosions are emphatically not like big conventional explosions. They are much worse. Nuclear weapons dont just blow you to pieces. They can vaporise, kill, wound and maim in four separate ways and we need to understand just how deadly these threats are.

The first thing that anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of a nuclear detonation would notice is the intense double pulse of light, often described as brighter than a thousand suns, a phrase based on a line from the