Two Minutes to Midnight: 1953 The Year of Living Dangerously

by Roger Hermiston

January, 1953. It is eight years on from the most destructive conflict in human history and the Cold War has entered its most deadly phase. An Iron Curtain has descended across Europe, and hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union have turned hot on the Korean peninsula, as the two powers clash in an intractable and bloody proxy war.

Meanwhile, the pace of the nuclear arms race has become frenetic. The Soviet Union has finally tested its own atom bomb, as has Britain. But in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the United States has detonated its first thermonuclear device, dwarfing the destruction unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War.

For the first time the Doomsday Clock is set at two minutes to midnight, with the chances of a man-made global apocalypse becoming increasingly likely. As the Cold War powers square up in political and military battles around the globe, every city has become a potential battleground and every citizen a target. 1953 is set to be a year of living dangerously.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 2021

About the author

Roger Hermiston was until recently Assistant Editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme. He began his journalistic career on weekly papers in Kent and Yorkshire, before becoming Crime Reporter on the daily Sunderland Echo. He then spent three years as reporter and feature writer on the Yorkshire Post, before joining the BBC in the early 1990s. On Today – among other things – he covered general elections at home, American presidential campaigns, war in Kosovo and civil war in Algeria. He was a member of the team that won a number of Sony Radio Awards for Best Programme. He lives in Suffolk and is a season-ticket holder at Ipswich Town FC.

- excerpted from David Higham Literary, Film and TV Agents

Reviews

[John Dembeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great description of the conflicts and developments in the nuclear age.