Incredibly prescient for the year in which it was written (1956), as it presages many of the realities of the war scares and crises of the early sixties. It doesn't fully anticipate the Cuban crisis (the book is a few years pre-Castro), but as far as the rest of it, the close calls and near misses are all here.

The book is a bit slow, not really much of "thriller," but it does a great job driving home how often high-level strategy could be blown to hell by simple human foibles (a person doesn't answer a ringing phone, a cop doesn't pull over a car because he wants to finish his coffee, suspicious activity is not reported because a girl doesn't want her dad to find out she was out after curfew). The book relies heavily on coincidence, but that is kind of the point. It really is a wonder that the globe has not seen an accidental detonation all these years, from pure chance.