15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation

by L. Douglas Keeney

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, • 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Military History, War, American History, Politics

385 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 22, 2011

About the author

L. Douglas Keeney is an author, historian, commentator and speaker with twenty-two books in print from Simon & Schuster, St. Martins/Macmillan, HarperCollins and Lyons Press. Keeney’s passion is to unearth the lost stories in world history and in those stories find the fabric of the people we are today. To that end, Keeney has written about events as seminal as 9/11 and World War II, as entertaining as the fashionable roots of the French Riviera, as revealing as the profiles of such luminaries as Curtis LeMay John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt, and as unusual as those who pioneered international aviation and travel into space. He is an engaging speaker who has entertained hundreds of audiences across the nation.

Keeney’s books have been well reviewed by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Naval Institute Press, slate, The New Yorker and more than one hundred other newspapers and magazines.

He has a master’s degree in Economics, is a pilot and scuba diver and was the cofounder of cable TV’s The Military Channel. He has appeared as a subject matter expert and commentator on Fox TV, CBS, PBS, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, The Learning Channel, and on numerous radio shows.

Reviews

[Nick Black · Rating 2 out of 5]

yet another recent example of good research (we hope; read on) and terrible editing in the Custodians of Armageddon genre (see my Oppenheimania bookshelf). there's a tremendous quantity of recently declassified DoD memoranda/letters in here, and while Keeney's rarely really inspired in his explication, he definitely got there the firstest with the mostest. one comes away with at least 3x a Wikipedia-as-of-2011 level knowledge of the various American Air Force nuclear accidents (no coverage of for instance ATR/Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1) in Idaho Falls, it being an Army operation), and a fine fistful of facts regarding the Distant Early Warning Line including the Texas Towers. Unfortunately, citations are rare throughout (at one point the phrase "a reporter of the time" is actually used, almost causing me to hurl the book across the room. this seems about as historically admissible as calling to the stand that Ghost Which Never Lies, but Only I Can Speak With but i digress), so verifying some of this stuff is a daunting research task I've not yet had the heart to properly begin.

Despite having read From Whirlwind to MITRE (a thorough detailing of the computing behind pre-MIRV, pre-ABT air defense efforts), I was wholly unaware of Texas Tower Four's loss. Discovering as much was like realizing I had a third arm or that salmon were people. If there's something I thought I knew well, it was disasters/fuckups, from Immunological (the Groninger ziekte malaria outbreak following dike burstings wiped out 10% of Groningen in 1826) to Inescapable (heat death of the universe) to those of Interface (the Therac-25 radiation therapy, which you can read about in Fatal Defect) to the Inadvertently Transmutative (the Castle Bravo shot of 1954-03-01 ran away to 15 megatons rather than a planned 6, and those uninterested in a little bomb science can go ahead and skip on. tritium is difficult to confine and, what with its half-life of 12ish years ((H-3,β−)→He-3), unsuitable for longterm storage. how then to get that sweet thermonuclear ignition, what with Lawson's criterion being minimized for D-T burning? and what the hell are we gonna do with all this heavy water, drink it, douche with it, moderate bloody neutrons? the graphite lobby would have knives in our asses! well come riding to the rescue is n-0 + Li-6 = H-3 + well-behaved He-4 or as we learned in elementary school nuclear physics α, and as Rutherford roared at Szilard in the Cavendish α plays no role in these games, Exeunt. yawns of relief escape and overnight a Li-6 enrichment industry springs up, and yes the Export Control on Goods, Technologies, Material and Equipment related to Nuclear and Biological Weapon and their delivery Systems Act of 2004 article 4(1) does indeed still Control "Lithium isotope separation facilities or plants, and equipment therefor", or so I'm told whenever i attempt to buy refurbished lithium amalgam electrolysis cells or packed liquid-liquid columns for their exchange, damn you congress! but anyway, stick a "spark plug" initiator amidst your heavy hydrogen, this one sans neutron tamper, to feed those fast NILFiRs (neutron-induced lithium fission reaction) and pour just enough tritium gas onto the growing (but much more slowly-growing, and this is important) cataclysm ignited by xray-driven ablation of the womblike high-Z holhraum, now become maelstrom, now become a small star. well that's all well and good but big brother Li-7 has his own plans for n-0, and they involve T+α+n and isn't that something and now you've blown up a significant chunk of ocean there, buddy). So finding out we'd had a DEWL station's ass kicked by a hurricane was, to put it mildly, a shock.

Points for research.

But where was the editor here? Why does the book consist entirely of space-offset paragraphs, the vast majority of which are followed by a pithy one-line newsreel-esque insipidness? examples from random pages:

"And that was that."
"The assumption was at some point they would."
"They lacked only the bomb."
"In the years to come, even remote would be relative."

Agonizing shit. At least twice, not only do we have a cliche "The first indicator of World War III would be...", but we have II where the III ought be. Compound words have spaces where spaces oughtn't be. Acronyms are used without initial expansion, and acronyms which aren't actually used get expanded now and again. I'd have thought the book self-printed. The less said about this, the better.

Finally, the book isn't really about Curtis LeMay at all -- certainly don't go in expecting amusing vignettes of the acerbic General. It's more like listening to a character from a Primus song, some grizzled old nuclear weaponeer whose mind and teeth have been addled by too many nights playing Choctaw Bingo with a lil' bit of vodka and some of that ol' bathtub tweak:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCa7a8...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUcORz...

ps early on he uses airburst to refer to an exploded but undetonated dropped weapon, and i was for a few seconds like whatwhatwhat how the fuck did i not know about a goddamn random airburst and wouldn't that violate the atmospheric test ban RISC architecture is going to change everything until i calmed down and realized he's a lunatic idiot or at the very least very loose with his terminology.

----
haha curtis lemay was an awesome madman. this promises to ring with joy.

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid history of the US nuclear program during the cold war. From SAC, Missiles, Subs the triad everyone talks about. This book covers the Strategic Air Command. More a history of the command and control aspects mishaps being highlighted. In fact the keystone cops' aspect of controlling a system so complicated and so many moving parts that it is rife for opportunities to go wrong. In fact, part of the reason I believe in many worlds is that I think the nuclear age is so out of control that I think we are a thin sliver of the multiverse with the vast majority of histories littered with nuclear armageddon. Our survival seems so freakish and contrived it is no wonder that speculating on multiverses is so popular I dunno it seems more extreme in the Trump era. We are needles in an existential haystack for sure. From close calls, accidents, brinkmanship, misplacing, and losing nuclear bombs you name it we have more happy endings slapped on near tragedy to make a star trek series. Holy cow.

British Cold War veterans present at atomic bomb tests describe what being near a nuclear blast is like.
https://youtu.be/dLSaFerdWQE

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK book. Could have been much better if not for the author. Or a better editor. Or both.

Keeney has plenty of information here. I had never heard of Texas Towers before.

But, it's poorly written and/or edited, other than the year by year framework. And it has errors that aren't really excusable.

First, the "notes" style of writing wears kind of thin at some point.

Second, what wears REALLY thin is Keeney, about once every five pages, ending a subsection of notes within a chapter by repeating a line or phrase from earlier in that subsection for emphasis (I guess). Once every 20-25 pages? OK. Not this. His editor should have whacked it. Cost it a star from me right there.

Third, the errors, with some undercutting Kenney's credibility, despite all the other evidence.

The Nagasaki bomb, for example, is "Fat Man." He calls it "Fat Boy."

The Alaskan city on the DEW line is Point Barrow, not "Barrows." Baffin Island is not in or part of Greenland. Calls 4-star Tooey Spatz a 2-star. Other errors that just should not have been made.

Again, Kenney's errors, but also missed by editor or copy editor.

I suggest an updated version, with any new info Kenney has, and a stylistic rewrite, and fixing the errors. There's potential here, but it was barely scratched.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that promises more than it delivers and is somewhat misnamed. A more accurate title might have been: "Strategic Air Command's Preparation for the War It Hoped Never to Fight."

It is a pretty easy read considering the subject matter includes nuclear physics, aeronautics, engineering and military jargon. The subject matter is fascinating, focusing on the amazing development of the Strategic Air Command, which was formed out of nothing following World War II to become the most elite and feared armed force in history less than 20 years later. It is particularly interesting because it is supported heavily by recently-declassified documents. It is hard to imagine that this book could have been written even 10 years ago.

There are a couple of problems with the book, though. The writing style is very odd. It's written almost like a thriller novel, with multiple plot lines that progress a page or two at a time before moving on to another plot line. The plot lines - things like nuclear tests, SAC expansion and training, accidents and early warning systems - are often not related to each other, creating a disjointed feeling. The scope of the book is ambitious, covering a number of topics over an extended period of time, but at less than 400 pages in length, it's far too short to cover many of them in any detail. Also, there is not a lot of analysis. It is mostly a collection of anecdotes that explain the books themes. The main point seems to be that SAC was a very detail-oriented, carefully and effectively run organization. The second point seems to be essentially bemusement about the clinical, emotionless nature in which the destruction of the world was planned.

In summary, this book does a great job using declassified documents to discuss the preparations for nuclear war and some of the pitfalls and missteps along the way. But it's not comprehensive or particularly scholarly, and teases the reader with stories that require further investigation to fully understand.

[Trav · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting read that provides a good background to the development of the US nuclear capability generally, and SAC more specifically. The book is let down though by a few simple mistakes made by the author which highlight his lack of attention to detail, and considering that the book is all about the detail, this significantly detracts from the book's appeal.

First off, the book's title is misleading. The book is not about Curt LeMay, it is about SAC. Although Curt LeMay played a vital role in the formation of SAC, the book does delve into that too deeply, looking more to the general development of SAC's capability and procedures. Keeney devotes as much time to LeMay's successor (General Power) as he does to LeMay himself. So it is unclear why he chose the title that he did.

Next issue of the author's attention to detail. On p.31, Keeney refers to "Major General Carl 'Tooey' Spaatz, commanding general of the army air forces". Spaatz was a four-star general at the time. On p.96, Keeney talks about General Nathan Twining as the "air force secretary" when he was the Chief of Staff from the USAF. And on p.309 he refers to Congressman Ike "Shelton" vice "Skelton" in discussing the issue of lost nukes. These are relatively minor errors in the broad scheme of things, but it he can't get the basics and the easy things right, what faith can the reader have that he has got the more intricate details accurate.

The book is an easy read, and provides a one-stop shop for insight into the post-war development of the US nuclear capability. However, I do not agree with the assertion on the cover that this is "one of the most important works on atomic wear ever written"

[Philip Hollenback · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why am I so addicted to reading about the cold war and nuclear weapons? I blame growing up under Reagan.

This book is a real page turner and does a good job of covering the rise of SAC and 15 minute bomber alerts. For most of the second half of the 20th century the US literally had bombers standing by, ready to be off the ground in less than 15 minutes and on the way to destroy life as we know it. The real question to ask is how did we not destroy everything?

One of the stories in this book is the saga of Texas Tower 4, a radar tower that we built off the coast of New Jersey and that collapsed in a storm in 1961. I'd never heard of it, but that disaster killed 27 men. It's typical in that many, many men were killed as a side effect of the cold war in things like bomber crashes. Oh, also we lost a bunch of nuclear bombs when planes crashed. Whoops.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very nice broad history of the strategic air command in the days leading up to and throughout the duration of the Cold War. The focus is primarily on bomber forces as that was the primary delivery system of nuclear weapons for the United States. The intercontinental ballistic missiles are only given a very cursory treatment within this history. What the author does particularly well is depict the development in both the number of nuclear weapons the were built and the ever increasing destructive power or lethality of the weapons developed by the Soviet Union and United States to assure mutually assured destruction. One thing that the author does not do very well, and hence my giving this book 2-3 stars, is document his sources. I found it very frustrating to continually read, "a SAC Historian stated....". There were far too few quoted sources which makes this attempt at history read more like a good story in that the reader is unable to further investigate or validate the sources and source material. Overall a good novel that provides the reader a very good depiction of the importance of SAC mission and the number of men, planes, bases and weapons required to assure nuclear deterrence during the period of the cold war. One last highlight is the exacting standards that existed to assure absolutely zero defects occurred by the men who flew the missions or maintained the planes and yet the number of incidents and accidents that occurred involving nuclear weapons.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not bad, but most of the ground it covers it also discusssed in Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control." Despite the subtitle the book doesn't spend a great deal of time on LeMay, which was my primary interest in picking the book up. Finally, the author has a writing style that tends toward the lyrical in some places, and I understand why the concept of nuclear annihilation might lend itself to that, it wears thin. A frequently repeated device is to end a section with an impactful sentence, and then repeat a single word from that sentence on the next line. For example:
"This is an impactful sentence."
"Impactful."

Once you see it you'll notice it everywhere. The author also tends to end chapters reporting the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. arsenals at a given date, and this might have been more usefully renders as a chart, because otherwise it's easy to glance right over the numbers without reckoning with them.

Not bad, but not as good as "Command and Control."

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having been a "Cold War Warrior" and stationed at a base with a nuclear mission in the 1980's I found this book both fascinating and informative. Due to recently declassified government documents I was shocked to discover the sheer number of nuclear weapons we had on stand-by during the height of the Cold War and how close we came to disaster when bombers carrying these weapons crashed, seemingly on a frequent basis. There were parts of our nuclear deterrence program I didn't even know existed, such as the Texas Towers, the Bomb Alarm Display System, and the Emergency Rocket Communications System, to name a few.

No doubt about it, Gen LeMay ran a tight ship making SAC a force to be reckoned with. Well researched and written.

[Grindy Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keeney's history of SAC bomber command, told in staccato style with digressions into the Castle Bravo test and the sinking of an early-warning radar platform in the north Atlantic, is a sobering but sometimes thrilling account of one corner of the Cold War. More sobering than the deadly mega-tonnage discussed is the frequency and willingness of the US government's lying/obfuscation concerning nuclear accidents. Lots and lots of H-bombs have gone missing over the years.

[Pongo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was pretty good, the book is written in little segments that discuss many different subjects related to SAC (radar, air defense, nuclear accidents, etc.). My only real complaint is how the author felt the need to give every single segment some type of dramatic ending. Even if it was a two or three sentence blurb, it had to have some cliffhanger-esque hook at the end. It was vexing right up to the last page. Other than that good book.

[Philip M. Varnagis · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best book on the Cold War. I said it before and I will say it again, it is by Divine intervention only, that we have not destroyed ourselves. The author spares no detail in telling how just a very scary time this was in our history. All unknown to the American public as it was happening. Nuclear weapons were necessary then and are necessary thing today. With sll the accidents that happened with nuclear bombs, how is it we are still here? Somebody is looking out for us.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

15 minutes definitely scratches my Cold War terror itch, but it could use another editing pass. The author focuses on the interconnectedness of Cold War policies, but this results in the early chapters feeling jumbled. The author also likes to end nearly every paragraph with silly, edgy kicker sentences. It’s a good book, but sometimes it was hard not to roll my eyes while reading it.

[Rick Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explosive!

A great read for those wanting to learn the backstory of the most no-nonsensev command in military history. They had no choice but to be the best, the prize for second place was annihilation.

These men worked under unrelenting pressure non-stop. We owe these men a great debt.

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing rendition of the history of the Strategic Air Command; it is well researched and well written. The courage and endurance of flight crews and ground crews is a story that all Americans can be justly proud of.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This brief history of Strategic Air Command (SAC) provides a fascinating look at the bomber force which was supposed to wage the next war -- the nuclear war -- or deter our adversaries from starting it.

[Tb · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you thought MAD strategy was insane follow the crumb trail provided in this book that led to it. And forget about the discomfort you might feel that rogue nations might find our missing nuclear weapons.

[linda murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read at Your Own Mental Risk

I found this book very informative and interesting but I found it also frightening. The end assessment pretty much says it all: what is accomplished and is it worth it? You'll have to decide for yourself!

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling story of how close we can come to nuclear mishaps.

[Chelsey Langland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this. If I were editing it I might have excluded the parts about the radar towers, but otherwise no complaints.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takes you into the nuclear world and the defense of our nation.

[Paul Sandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really terrifying,,!

A bit too detailed in parts but the overall thesis of the book is a real wake up call in regards to nuclear weaponry.

[Sharon Zink · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good, informative book about preparation of the US for nuclear war and the way things progressed through the Cold War.

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is an old joke that the best way to ensure traffic safety is to equip each car with a sharp spike in the steering wheel, which would pierce the driver's chest in case of an accident; it will make him drive very carefully indeed. This was also the logic of nuclear deterrence between the two Cold War superpowers: in situations when two Great Powers of centuries past might have come to blows, the United States and the Soviet Union abstained for fear that a war would turn into an exchange of hydrogen bombs, transforming both countries into radioactive wasteland. Such an exchange would serve no purpose: even if the ratio of casualties were 10:1, whatever geopolitical advantage the United States might have gained in, say, 1983 by killing 100 million Soviets, it would be greatly outweighed by the deaths of 10 million Americans and trillions of dollars of economic damage inflicted by Soviet bombs; and vice versa. The point was to convince the other guy that you are insane enough to attack, not to actually attack. Moreover, it was realized as early as 1945 that a numerical advantage in nuclear weapons can dramatically change after the first strike targeting weapons facilities: "In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor." So after the first signs of a Soviet nuclear strike, American strategic bombers and tankers must be in the air within 15 minutes. It took a lot of technical and organizational work to achieve this goal. Once in the air, American bombers would have to evade the effects of American nuclear-tipped air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles shooting down Soviet bombers, and once they had crossed into Soviet airspace, Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft batteries. No one knows what would really have happened in the event of a nuclear war, but pilots trained as if they did: they had to fly to the Soviet Union and destroy it.

When ICBMs came of age, strategic bombers because less important, and the decision interval was reduced still. The Soviet doctrine was "retaliatory-meeting strike": if it were detected that American missiles were on their way to the Soviet Union, Soviet missiles would be launched at American targets and fly in space past their American counterparts instead of waiting for them to explode near their silos. Leonid Brezhnev or Konstantin Chernenko would be given about 10 minutes to make this decision. And what if the radar or the early warning satellites or the computer were buggy, and reported missiles when in fact there were none? The driver would be pierced by the spike through no fault of his own. It didn't come to that in our timeline; what if it did?

In addition to the main narrative, this book also tells several other Cold War stories. One is the fate of Texas Tower 4, an early warning radar station in the Atlantic, which collapsed in a storm, killing 28 men. Another is the Castle Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb, which produced 2 1/2 times the expected yield, irradiating American servicemen, Micronesian islanders and Japanese fishermen. The islanders were not told that the white stuff falling from the sky was dangerous, and were only evacuated 48 hours after the explosion from one island and 72 hours after it from another island. Micronesian women later told an American anthropologist that they gave birth to babies with horrible birth defects.

[Bubba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great recount (by year) of progress toward thermonuclear bomb development as well as overhead bomber coverage during the cold war.

[Steven Kaminski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really compelling book that gets into the creation of SAC...the Strategic Air Command which is responsible for the US response to a potential nuclear strike.

- After WW II the US really had to figure out how to handle Russia which became the cold war. But it also had to handle who was to control the atomic weapons, where would they be stored, who took care of them. And what ended the war quickly became a huge policy problem.

- The idea of the Strategic Air Command was really just a breezy idea until the nation's senior military & government officials looked at how it was being run & freaked out as Russia became more aggressive. They turned to the one guy who was no bullshit & who got things done: General Curtis Lemay.

- Lemay after WWII had been in command of air forces in Europe (when the war started he was a LT of all things) running operations to answer Russian aggression including the Berlin Airlift which was his idea. Hands down he was the best America had.

- When he took over SAC he found a mess. But quickly got it organized with the help of one advance forward in technology: in air refueling. Lemay stunned his own leaders by training and leading to a point where over 350 bombers could be up in the air in 15 minutes. One of those bombers in a test run actually refueled in air four times flying the same distance as over half way around the world.

- Lemay would go on to nurture the SAC and create for it its own police force, intelligence network, computers & technology for ballistic missile silos.

This book gets into all of the thorny issues around how we deploy nuclear weapons but also is a kind of a history of the cold war as well...

[Bking · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keeney's book could be called "The Cold War Unplugged", almost a 'behind the scenes with Dr. Strangelove'. The book is a compilation of stories, snippets of history and Cold War trivia that alternates between dark comedy and bleak terror. We may know the rough history of the Cold War, but this book fills in many interesting (or horrifying) "I bet you did'nt know" moments. Did you know that a nuclear bomb is almost 'sentient'? That it must know its environment or that it can be fooled? Did you know that a number of nuclear weapons have been 'lost'?
Most of this book is made up of small 'bits' of information. Some may find its narrative to be lacking. But despite the size of the book it is an 'easy read'. And you will learn many answers about why the "Arms Race" seemed so out of controll. One reason we built so many Atomic weapons was that we did'nt think that many would 'get through'. It can be somewhat disconcerting that much of our Nuclear stategy and diplomacy was essentially 'thrown together'. Ignorance mixed with fear, throw in science and politics and interservice rivalry and an actuall existential threat from the Soviets and Red China, and it is rather amazing that things did not end up worse than they did.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review is based on the Kindle edition that I read on my iPad.

This is a very good history of the development of SAC under Gen Curtis Lemay in the late 40s and through the 50s. It is told as a series of vignettes, but they do hold together very well, allowing you to follow the growth and development of SAC and its nuclear capability. I found that one of the most interesting things was how amateurish and “by the seat of your pants” things were during SAC’s early history. But as things grew, and lessons were learned from close calls and near misses, SAC started to develop into a very professional organization whose motto was, “To ere is human, to forgive is not SAC policy.”

My only problem with the Kindle edition is that it did not include the pictures that are in the print edition.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and occasionally terrifying book covering the US nuclear effort from 1946 - 1969. The book is written in anecdotes, usually 2-3 paragraphs each, explaining the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the growth and decline of the US bomber fleet, the high number of lost bombs, the rise and fall of SAC, and the technology behind deterrence. Poignant sections focus on the grossly underestimated explosion and radioactive fallout from the Bravo shot in Bikini atoll; and the poor planning and construction that led to the collapse of Texas Tower 4.

The only failing is that the book is horribly edited. It is riddled with mistakes - flak often incorrectly written as flax, misplaced decimal points in numeric figures, and contradictory details between paragraphs.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book from the Goodreads Firstreads program.

15 Minutes is possibly one of the most important books I have read in a long time. The book chronicles the history of the Cold War, SAC and the atomic bomb from after WWII until the late 1960's. After reading these histories I find it amazing that the human race still exists. From lost (and never found) nuclear bombs to scares with the USSR it seems there are many times that we could have blown the planet to pieces. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and no one decided to make that first strike.

I greatly appreciate the work that the author went through in reading all of these declassified documents and finally letting the public know what really happened in the cold war. I highly recommend this book.