PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

Mushroom Cloud

Book I of the First Strike Series

Thomas J Yeggy

$34.95   $31.67

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Parallax Publishing
15 September 2023
Series: First Strike
"Mushroom Cloud, a fact-based historical novel, is the first book of The First Strike Trilogy:

USA and the Soviet Union are building nuclear arms for a face off in a potential nuclear war in the late 1950's and early 1960's.

""This novel is so important for everyone who cares about nuclear disarmament because as philosopher George Santayana wrote ""Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.""

Melissa Burch, Bestselling & Award Winning Author My Journey Through War and Peace

For a decade, Dr. Caleb young, a gifted physicist and chief science officer for the CIA, had shaded National Intelligence Estimates and Rand reports on war gaming. He wanted to thwart the US military's push for a nuclear first strike. Soviet GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky had passed information to Young at more than one Pugwash Peace Conference, revealing how inept Soviet capabilities were. A US preemptive strike would destroy the earth's ozone layer.

Dr. Young, secretly an Einstein schooled pacifist, felt a personal obligation to prevent a globally destructive nuclear war. However, the realities of US nuclear superiority were progressively becoming harder to manage. By mid-1953, the United States had 1,169 deliverable atomic bombs. It could drop them with 160 B-36 heavy bombers and 350 B-47 medium bombers. The Soviet Union had 120 atomic bombs that could only be delivered to the US by a handful of one-way TU-4A experimental bombers through thousands of F-86 Sabres. By 1962, the US had more than 3,000 thermonuclear warheads and 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons. U-2 flights and Corona satellite images were exposing Khrushchev's lies about ""grinding out missiles like sausages."" The US had a 17-1 advantage in deliverable warheads.

The Soviets intercontinental ballistic missiles (only four were verified) took four hours to prepare for launch. US B-52s could easily destroy them from fail- safe points with a pair of 20 megaton bombs. Even more ominously, the Thor and Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missiles could deliver warheads in less than 8 minutes after launch from England, Turkey, or Italy. The US could locate and destroy the Soviets' 150 round- trip bombers before they left Soviet runways. Soviet SSBN subs were noisy and had to surface to fire missiles. They were easy prey for the US Navy. In late October 1962, President John F Kennedy stopped the US military from initiating a first strike. It came to be known as the ""Cuban Missile Crisis."" ""We lost"" Air Force general Curtis Lemay shouted at Kennedy. Military leaders wanted a nuclear war that day while they had a clear first strike advantage.

Now the Department of Justice (DOJ) has many questions, and they believe Dr. Caleb Young has the answers. Nicholas Katzenbach, the DOJ's chief deputy, is ready to prosecute Dr. Young on trumped up espionage charges. And he wants to know about the CIA's involvement in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President Kennedy."

By:  
Imprint:   Parallax Publishing
Volume:   1
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 20mm
Weight:   508g
ISBN:   9798987888407
Series:   First Strike
Pages:   380
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

"Thomas J. Yeggy has undergraduate degrees in English and psychology. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law and practiced law in Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, for many years. He served as the mental health and substance abuse judge for Scott County, Iowa, for more than 25 years. In that position he developed a keen understanding of the difficulties that everyday life presents regardless of social or economic status. As a judge, he authored more than 1,500 opinions, and only one was reversed by the appellate courts. Thomas was also a licensed Series 7 broker at Beyer & Company Investments in Davenport, Iowa, for more than two decades. Yeggy's interest in the development and control of nuclear weapons goes back to images he once saw of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With his keen insight into the nature of mankind and their proclivity to use violence as a problem-solving mechanism, he wondered how we had made it through crisis after crisis without destroying ourselves. In 1992, when Robert McNamara stated that we had made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis with ""just plain dumb luck,"" Yeggy decided to investigate just how lucky we have been. He explains what he found in this First Strike series. We have been very lucky, but it may not continue.He currently resides in Pensacola Beach, Florida, with his wife, Eileen, and spends summers back in Davenport with his grandchildren, Jeff and Ashley Brown. You can usually find Thomas and Eileen at Emesis Park in Davenport on a late summer afternoon running with their granddogs, Otis and Emme."

See Also