The end of the American century - Jeffrey Robinson

The day we saw a picture of earth from space the world changed but not, as commentators said at the time, because the human race was able to see itself as one big happy family. Sputnik had been built by a maverick scientist on his kitchen table. The Russians didn't know what they'd got till they saw the panic on the other side of the world. Khrushchev intensified the paranoia by bluffing that he had a whole fleet of these rockets in production, and meanwhile embarked on a programme of investment which would take the bread from the mouths of his people.;The author's unprecedented access to top secret files has enabled him to rewrite the history of the 20th century as it unfolded at the highest levels, enabling the reader to sit at the elbows of Eisenhouwer, Khrushchev, Churchill and Macmillan as they made the telephone calls and wrote the letters and memos which created the confrontation between the superpowers which took them to the brink of a third world war and which then bankrupted the Soviet Union, leading eventually to the end of the Cold War in 1991.;The author also wrote "The Risk Takers", "Minus Millionaires", "Yamani" and "Rainier and Grace".