Review: The Third World War: The Untold Story

John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978) was followed up four years later by The Third World War: The Untold Story, updating and elaborating aspects of the original. Where the updates are concerned the most conspicuous is a chapter that, in light of Egypt's turn to the West, the Iranian Revolution, and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, thoroughly rewrites events in the Middle East, the region not falling under Soviet-aligned control before the war, but instead a pro-Western Saudi-Egyptian alliance squeezing the Soviets out, while Turkish-based Iranian exiles topple that country's revolutionary government, stabilizing the region. The book also devotes chapters to elaborating previously slighted portions of the fighting in the European theater, particularly events in Ireland and Scandinavia, while detailing events in the Caribbean and Latin America; and the Far East, where there is a new round of Sino-Vietnamese fighting, North Korea's skirmishing with its neighbors, and after the American victory, the problem of receiving the surrender of the massive Soviet forces in the area. The Untold Story also describes much of what was already known to have happened from the Soviet side, following a motor rifle regiment officer through the early part of the war; matching the nuclear destruction of the prior book's depiction of the nuclear destruction of Birmingham with an equally detailed depiction of Anglo-American retaliation against Minsk; and devoting considerable space to portraying the subsequent rioting-turned-to-revolution against the Soviet leadership in the aftermath.

All in all, it is a mild rewrite in light of a number events that Hackett's team signally failed to guess at, and an exercise in "filling in the corners" of its already dated scenario. Compared with the novelty of the first book, this does not seem very much, and perhaps it is unsurprising that it made less of a splash. Where the first book lasted 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, I searched in vain for anything like comparable notice of the sequel, which seems to be just a footnote by comparison with its predecessor's place in the history of this kind of fiction.