Review of "The Forty-Minute War," by Janet and Chris Morris

 Review of

The Forty-Minute War, by Janet and Chris Morris, ISBN 0671559869

Three out of five stars

Absurd initial premise and bad ending

 This book begins with an absurd premise, not the event, but the context. A group of committed terrorists manage to acquire a nuclear weapon and a plane. The manage to fly it from Saudi Arabia to Washington D. C. where they detonate it. Distraught over the knowledge that his wife and family have been killed, the American President orders a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. They retaliate and it is all over in 40 minutes. After ordering the strike, the American President takes a gun and kills himself.

 There are two reasons why this premise is absurd, one major and the other minor. The major one is that the intelligence services of the United States were aware of the nuclear weapon and had an elite anti-terrorist team on the ground ready to take out the terrorists. However, the team was given a stand-down order. While this is a bit plausible, the real absurdity is that the logical response would have been to shoot the plane down over the ocean as far away from land as possible. The minor absurdity is that nuclear launch oversight in the United States was so poor in that no one tried to intervene and stop the American nuclear launch. Millions were killed and radioactive fallout was contaminating the entire planet.

 I simply could not get past this initial issue as I read the book. Furthermore, while the nuclear exchange puts it in the category of a political, post-apocalyptic thriller, in the last few pages it is turned into a science fiction story. This transformation makes it look like a book where the authors have to come up with some “magic” in order to complete the story. To me, that was a major turn-off.