The Third World War - Humphrey Hawksley > Reviews (2)

The Third World war is thriller written by BBC news broadcaster Humphrey Hawksley. It is set in the immediate future, with Iraq and the war on terror still very much the current issues of the time.

The book begins dramatically with an attack on the Indian Parliament by muslim terrorists. The Indian Prime Minister Vasant Metha finds himself helping to fight off the attack alongside his daughter Meenashki. A few days later the President of Pakistan is assassinated which serves as the trigger for a series of uprisings by Muslim extremists in East Asia. Meanwhile a US military base in Japan is hit by a North Korean missile and a sample of the smallpox vaccine disappears from a laboratory in Russia.

All these events initially seem unconnected but the American and British intelligence services soon discover chilling links between the attacks although no one it seems is aware that they are simply strategic steps in world wide game of chess designed to bring the world closer to Armageddon.

US President Jim West does everything in his power to avoid any kind of conflict. His advisors have different opinions as to which country is the greater threat; North Korea which has undergone a military coup and posses both nuclear and biological weapons or Pakistan which also posses nuclear weapons and has become a breeding ground for terrorists. One of his advisors want him to pre-emptively strike North Korea whilst the other feels that Pakistan is the greater threat.

India wants to go into Pakistan and remove once and for all Pakistan's nuclear capability but is unable to do so without the backing of the United Nations and specifically the US. China, a strong ally of Pakistan, wants to keep the status quo because by providing Pakistan with weapons and expertise in nuclear technology it is able to keep India focused on the Pakistani problem thus enabling China to become stronger, ready for the day that it will eventually face India and the US.

Japan is tired of living in the shadow of American protection and wishes to assert itself as an independent nuclear power to face the growing threat from both China and North Korea.

As events unfold worldwide with each country setting in motion the steps required to achieve their own goals, Jim West find that being the worlds only Super Power does not mean that the US is able to dictate terms. Instead he finds that one by one, those countries that America has considered as allies in the past have become enemies and the only country that it can depend on is of course Great Britain.

The Salami Tactics being employed prevent any one country from making a pre-emptive strike in order to neutralise their individual threats until the final pieces of the chess game are in place ready for the end-game.

Page by page Humphrey Hawksley details the events leading up to the Third World War. His background as a news broadcaster has enabled him to write a first class thriller. This is the third novel in a series of 'Future History' books that extrapolate from today what the world could so easily look like tomorrow.

References to today's political events seamlessly interwoven with his own narrative make this book a totally believable account of a 'history' that is yet to occur. The conversations and meetings held between the various world leaders are totally believable and the deals and counter-deals made behind the scenes by each President or Prime Minister gives the reader a peculiar understanding of how world leaders are so restricted in what they can do to resolve a problem even if they have the military might to back themselves up. Anyone who is interested in current worldwide political issues will find this book simultaneously interesting, exciting and worrying.

In my book collection I have a number of books that I come back to time and time again and this one has already become part of that special collection.