Never Was Magazine

[Never Was Magazine]

Red Storm Rising

Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising is a classic of the World War 3 genre

Red Storm Rising (1986) is a classic of the World War III genre. Tom Clancy’s second book, coming on the heels of the enormously successful The Hunt for Red October (1984), depicts a NATO-Warsaw Pact war in the mid-1980s fought entirely with conventional weapons. (Although the risk of nuclear escalation is present.)

The book opens with Azerbaijani terrorists destroying the main Soviet oil…

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[Never Was Magazine]

How to Turn the Cold War Hot

Mistakes, miscalculations, American aggression or Soviet desperation. This is how you make World War III happen.

Most World War III fiction wasn’t written as alternate history. During the Cold War, many authors and filmmakers imagined how East and West might end up in a (nuclear) war. Because the two sides never did, these stories have become counterfactual.

A Third World War was seldom portrayed as the outcome of outright American or Soviet aggression. More often, the war happened as a result of…

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