Abhijeet Manjunath Manjunath itibaren Sevur, Tamil Nadu, India
After reading "Julie of the Wolves," I got hooked on her books! I'd like to re-read it as an adult.
Excellent book! The cold war is very much still with us. Still, Americans or Russians could send up their missiles and really the only possible responses are massive retaliation and doing nothing. I must say that I understand a little bit better the motivation of Ronald Reagan. He could not believe that if the Russians were to send up their missiles, there is not really much that we can do. That was behind the whole Star Wars thing. He wanted some way to protect us from a Soviet first strike, for which we are essentially defenseless. So I can understand his motivation, even though he didn't seem to understand that the Russians see Star Wars as a way for us to be able to attack them without fear of retaliation – because we would shoot down their retaliatory missiles. We are all very lucky that Gorbachev came to power. He clearly understood the absurdity of the nuclear arms race. It is difficult to imagine that the Soviets had a system totally computerized that would launch a retaliatory attack in the case that their leaders have been killed by a US first strike. All the things that could have gone wrong in the Cold War, but didn't, it's amazing we escaped it without some huge accident, setting off a nuclear war. Another incredible element of this book is how huge the biological and chemical weapons program of the Soviet Union was. There is still a lot to do to reduce the threat of weapons of mass distruction.