Love is Strange — James Philip

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the 'swinging sixties' didn't happen. On Saturday 27th October 1962 American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of ‘Timeline 10/27/62'. Love is Strange is Book 2 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62. Love is Strange picks up the story a year and a month after the terrifying events in Operation Anadyr, Book 1 of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series. In a partially devastated world in which people are beginning to discover what actually happened and who their friends really are, chaos and disintegration threaten and old allies drift like sleepwalkers towards new wars. The USA has assumed a new global hegemony and written off its old European allies. Therein lie the seeds of a generational conflict but nobody in Washington wants to hear that kind of news, or recognise that the laurels of victory might in time come to crush the seemingly invincible American eagle. In a Britain ravaged by nuclear war in which the survivors are struggling to come to terms with the cataclysm questions are being asked about the reasons why; and how what remains of the nation will survive in the new world. Out of the catastrophe new leaders are beginning to emerge and there is a growing consensus that one day there will be a reckoning. * * * Why Timeline 10/27/62? Because that date is a very significant date in my life and in the lives of everybody else in the world alive today because on Saturday 27th October 1962 World War III almost started. World War III probably wouldn't have lasted very long because one side would have been swiftly obliterated in the first 24 hours of a cataclysm that would have left vast tracts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabited and uninhabitable for decades to come. Perhaps, a quarter of the world's population would have died in the firestorm or in the starvation and the plagues that would have ensued in the following weeks and months. The ‘Cuban Missiles' War would have been a Man made global catastrophe like no other in human history. In the aftermath, the USA, mourning the dead in half-a-dozen wrecked cities would have been the last major industrial and military power left standing. That world could never, ever be the world we know today. How close did we actually come to the edge of the abyss? Much closer than most people like to contemplate. On Saturday 27th October 1962, north east of Cuba, the commander of Soviet submarine B-59 had to be talked out of firing a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the American destroyer USS Beale. That's how close we came to World War III! In that era Soviet naval doctrine governing the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons onboard a warship at sea required the authorisation of three officers: the captain, the executive officer, and the vessel's political officer. B-59's political officer, Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov signed off on starting World War III but fortunately for us all, the submarine's second-in-command, Captain 2nd Rank Vasili Arkhipov, dissented and Armageddon was narrowly averted. Love is Strange, set a little over a year after the cataclysm, is the first full chapter of the story of what happened after Vasili Arkhipov failed to prevail upon Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky to see reason. Welcome to the Timeline 10/27/62 World. Book 1: Operation Anadyr Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules Book 4: Red Dawn Book 5: The Burning Time Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses (Available 1st January 2016) Book 7: A Line in the Sand (Available 1st May 2016) Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon (Available 27th October 2016) Books in the Timeline 10/27/62 â€" USA Series: Book 1: Aftermath Book 2: California Dreaming Book 3: The Great Society (Available 26th February 2016) Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country (Available 1st J