15 Minutes

Packed with startling revelations, this inside look at the secret side of the Cold War exposes just how close America came to total annihilation.

“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.” —Publishers Weekly

One of the most detailed pictures yet of the complex, ultrasecret, ultradeadly world of nuclear war, 15 Minutes shows how the bomb was used both as a tool of diplomacy and as a weapon to maintain a dangerous truce that lasted for almost fifty years. Based on ten years of research and thousands of pages of formerly classified documents, the interrelated world of early warning, nuclear weapons testing, and instant retaliation with devastating lethality are connected in ways not previously documented, and not always with good results. But more than weapons and steel, here are the people of the Cold War—the bomber pilots, the radar navigators, the signal-ferreting ravens, the scientists, radarscope dopes, and the thousands more that were tasked with testing, transporting, and delivering the bombs the scientists made. This is one of the most important works on atom war ever written.

“The power of Keeney’s book lies in his determination to avoid excess emotion and stick to the facts—facts that, God knows, are themselves emotive enough.” —Bloomberg

“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 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.” —Booklist